Planetside 2

[shiznitz]

and nobody deploys sunderers. 

I don't understand this simple tactic.  I know sunderers generally don't last more than 5-10 minutes, but in PS1 AMSes were rolling constantly.  There are lots of great places to park sunderers so that they are safe from anything but a coordinated armor assault. 

[Mrbloodworth]

Merusk's experience is not mine in regards to Sunderers with the AMS ability. But he may be speaking of whatever random group he got into.

[croaker69]

Sometimes in a zerg it can be difficult to find the deployed sunderer in a sea of undeployed ones, especially in a large base like an amp station. Merusk, each deployed sundie creates a circle around it where no others can be deployed and the deployed one is usually well hidden.

[Nija]

Use [ and ] to zoom the minimap back and forth. Look for a big white circle. Usually multiple big circles. Those are deployed AMSes.

Rather than doing that, join an active outfit. The kind that will load up a gal with an infiltrator and drop in enemy territory, put down beacons, and hack out a terminal to launch a few AMSes.

It's basically two different games. Either you're in an outfit that does stuff or you're borderline quitting. No in between.

[Pennilenko]

It's basically two different games. Either you're in an outfit that does stuff or you're borderline quitting. No in between.

This is truth. I've been in a bunch of outfits, I am not currently in one because of time commitment issues, but I still know which platoons to hop into for organized play. It makes a huge difference when you get yourself out of the zerg.

[Merusk]

It's basically two different games. Either you're in an outfit that does stuff or you're borderline quitting. No in between.

This is truth. I've been in a bunch of outfits, I am not currently in one because of time commitment issues, but I still know which platoons to hop into for organized play. It makes a huge difference when you get yourself out of the zerg.

Yeah, it's 100% this.  I was getting into shitty platoon after shitty platoon because I was hitting "instant action" and just hitting insert to join one.  Even bouncing-around to where the "zerg" was and outnumbering was frustrating because they seemed incapable of taking anyplace.  Which was amazingly frustrating when we were outnumbering 2:1 and still losing.

I didn't realize the platoons could be auto-joined until just yesterday. I got in to a random one with TR 3rd Infantry Saturday and that was an amazing outfit, I might check them out.  I joined a spam-invite with [win] and their core seems mature and capable.  Did VR training with them last night and learned some tactics, However since they spam-invite they've got an odd mix of folks who are competent and random fucknuts.

I was disappointed to discover there's some pretty hardcore hacking out there, though.  Ran in to an NC group of BR 1-4s who were able to mow down 2-3 of my platoon before falling AND somehow could see stealthers from 40' away approaching them from behind.  5 of them destroyed a group of 12 of us trying to hold a base.

[shiznitz]

It is true that outfits matter in PS2 if you actually want to take objectives and not just pew-pew.  I think that is a plus for the game, but it certainly means it isn't for everyone.

[Mrbloodworth]

Our primary goal for re-addressing the resource system is to make sure it does a better job making resources drive the combat taking place, make sure they have real strategic value, and generally have more meaning than they have currently.

This is a relatively complicated system - you know, a lotta ins, lotta outs, lotta what-have-you's. I've done my best to try and distill the essence of a 25 page design document down into something more easily digestible, so these are just the broad strokes of the plan we're currently mulling over.

    Resources are reduced to a single currency and acquisition timers are removed.
    Inventory for infantry items is removed - changed to pay on use
    Individual Bases/Facilities supply Resources for local players
    Bases/Facilities have a power level that is drained by providing resources to local players
        There is a passive power regen to offset the cost of small skirmishes and to restore full power when no combat is taking place.
        Full powered bases provide more resources than low powered ones
        The more players being given resources, the faster the power drain
    Addition of Auraxium Crystals/Mines as a power source
        These are resource nodes added in between facilities
        Vehicles fitted with appropriate equipment can load up auraxium at these nodes
        This auraxium can be transported to a base to manually refill it’s power reserves
    When a base is totally out of power, no resources are provided to the friendly troops in the area. This allows the attacker cut off entrenched defenders from using resources if they can keep supply vehicles from breaking their blockade

There's still a lot of other little nuances and details but I think that gives a decent overall picture. It's a pretty significant departure from the current system - do you think this plan would make resources a more interesting component of the game? Does it go too far? Let us know.

https://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/index.php?threads/september-resource-revamp.83018/

Continent Locking (or the "Continental Lattice" in the post-lattice era) is on the horizon and will hopefully enhance the feel and depth of PlanetSide 2's overall metagame significantly. Here's what the basic plan looks like so far:

    Each of our current continents (Indar, Esamir, Amerish) becomes a home continent for an Empire
    Each empire has a single “Home Warpgate” on their home continent that can never be taken from them
    All other warpgates can now change hands like regular territory (details here still being worked out, so let us know if you have ideas)
    By taking control of a warpgate, your empire can now advance along any continental lattice connected to it
    Hossin is given three warpgates, one connected to Indar, one to Esamir, and one to Amerish. There is no home warpgate on Hossin.
    Battle Islands fall between continents on all the links not leading to Hossin

https://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/index.php?threads/november-continent-locking.82996/


Ha look, its Planetside one. Imagine that.

[Merusk]

That was my exact thought.  And that sucked in PS1.  While it did consolidate fighting, it also meant you were locked-out of fights more often because the continent pop limit was hit.

In other news I blew way more on Station Cash than I should have and now have a renewed love of MAXes.  If only more fuckers ran as engineers and meds instead of Heavies and Lights.

[01101010]

I am not sure how I feel about this.

[Mrbloodworth]

And that sucked in PS1. 

I Disagree with that. But also consider, they have alerts in PS2 to move people around.

[croaker69]

Ha look, its Planetside one. Imagine that.

Which is exactly what I've been waiting for! 

[Mrbloodworth]

I am not sure how I feel about this.

They are also talking about the ANT.

[shiznitz]

The bottom line is that everyone (except the devs) knew that PS1 got a lot of the basics right.  This game has been out too long and not enough people on these forums care for me to list the current differences, but if someone ever played PS1 and had fun it is highly likely you will have fun in PS2.

[Merusk]

And that sucked in PS1. 

I Disagree with that. But also consider, they have alerts in PS2 to move people around.

Clearly I played a different PS1 than you or I'm misremembering something here.  From what I remember, you were locked-out of at least one continent at all times, possibly 2 if your faction sucked ass the day before. 

90% of fighting happened on Hossin unless one of the zergs had actually managed to capture it and was pushing on your home continent.  When fighting was happening on Hossin you had to wait your turn because of population locks. Everyone avoided the caves, because the caves fucking sucked.

I was also playing before Battle Frames were around, though, shortly after the "Battle Islands" were introduced vs. the one world.  I think I played one or two weeks during the reserves program some years after BFs were introduced.

Giving alerts to move people around doesn't work if there's no place to move them.

[croaker69]

And that sucked in PS1. 

I Disagree with that. But also consider, they have alerts in PS2 to move people around.

Clearly I played a different PS1 than you or I'm misremembering something here.  From what I remember, you were locked-out of at least one continent at all times, possibly 2 if your faction sucked ass the day before. 

90% of fighting happened on Hossin unless one of the zergs had actually managed to capture it and was pushing on your home continent.  When fighting was happening on Hossin you had to wait your turn because of population locks. Everyone avoided the caves, because the caves fucking sucked.

I was also playing before Battle Frames were around, though, shortly after the "Battle Islands" were introduced vs. the one world.  I think I played one or two weeks during the reserves program some years after BFs were introduced.

Giving alerts to move people around doesn't work if there's no place to move them.

Ah ok. I played later on after that had been revamped.

[Mrbloodworth]

And that sucked in PS1.

I Disagree with that. But also consider, they have alerts in PS2 to move people around.

Clearly I played a different PS1 than you or I'm misremembering something here.  From what I remember, you were locked-out of at least one continent at all times, possibly 2 if your faction sucked ass the day before.  

90% of fighting happened on Hossin unless one of the zergs had actually managed to capture it and was pushing on your home continent.  When fighting was happening on Hossin you had to wait your turn because of population locks. Everyone avoided the caves, because the caves fucking sucked.

I was also playing before Battle Frames were around, though, shortly after the "Battle Islands" were introduced vs. the one world.  I think I played one or two weeks during the reserves program some years after BFs were introduced.

Giving alerts to move people around doesn't work if there's no place to move them.

You must have. Because continental locks only stopped drop pods and broadcast warping, you could break the content open again using movement thought the warp gates and gaining a foothold would nullify it, which was extreamly fun. You could also drain a base to flip it, causing a non-standard foothold, say in the middle of the map. I found the combat to happen on all contents regularly, as the system caused all contents to be utilized and concentrated users. You may be confusing population locks with Continental locks. In effect, its a map rotation system controlled by players.

The purpose of continental locking is denial of capturing territory and select benefits. Its part of the "win" in a never ending war. An achievable goal, however temporary. As well as being an empire level choice as to where to hit another empire.

Anyway, in this incarnation there are a number of systems that can move populations around, part of that is the new resource system, the other are alerts ( That react and trigger to population density ), and hopefully the Mission system. Not to mention, the population caps are so much larger now, but that does not stop pop caps to be reached, every time I boot this up again, at least one continent is full.

Will you always be able to play on any continent? No. Is that a bad thing. Nope. Its a war game, not a battle game. You go where the front is, or make a new one.

[Merusk]

They changed it then.  You could run around on other continents and cause problems, but you couldn't cap anything without an adjacent continent warpgate being under your faction's control.  Certainly not in the middle of nowhere on a continent.  It was full-on continent locking.  It was more like the current "you need an adjacent area before advancing" schematic.

I know I'm not confusing pop and cont locks.
*  Pop lock was "There's x TR on, you have to wait until someone logs off so it's fair." (Ignoring the jackasses who'd hide AFK in a corner of a base for certs, contributing nothing)
*  Cont. lock was, "You don't have any ability to capture this, because your faction doesn't own adjacent facilities."   IIRC You could cap towers behind enemy lines to cause problems, and wreck vehicle/ aircraft spawns (Because not all bases could spawn them) but not facilities.

[Mrbloodworth]

You always had to have a lattice link, even in what I describe. There was always at least 3 possibly more with caves. Draining came VIA BFR's ability to drain silos, and also the old school way of killing every powered item over and over. You drain a base, it goes neutral, then you hack it. Of course if anyone noticed...

[Merusk]

Caves were the sticking point.  I'm not kidding when I say NOBODY did them. They were absolutely terrible, so it was Hossin or nothing for a foothold. (Which it still would be if caves didn't exist, according to that map, since there's only 2 links to a continent from another) You're never pushing a faction totally off their continent, because the 3rd will sweep in behind while you're occupied.

When I did the reserves thing I recall hearing that's why they linked BFRs to them at some point. Because then you *had* to to caves, no matter how terrible.

I'm not saying "OMG CHANGE SUCKS."  I"m just trying to explain why my first reaction wasn't, "YEAH, PS1 metagame!."  Different experience from a different time in the game.

[Kageru]

I must try to get back into it. My main complaint was that the lack of strategic mechanisms meant it was just a wastefully huge deathmatch map. Looks like they are fixing that. The game's performance still isn't great on my system though, and I often seem to get stutters when it loads in new models. Which generally happens when those models are shooting at me.

[Mrbloodworth]

The last update did wonders for a friend of mine who had unplayable performance. May be good for you too.YMMV Also, smeed said they have people rewriting important parts to use multicore systems better.

[Jimbo]

How can it go from awesome, with decent fps, then suck ass, or worst yet, I'm kicking ass and chewing bubble gum and I get a crash to desk top! GRRRRRRR! Still loads of fun. How are they going to have this playable on the PS4? Or different servers?

[shiznitz]

My NC outfit now has unofficial TR nights.  I have to say that swapping empires really reinvigorates the fun.  If you feel like you are in a rut, convince some friends to join you for a night or two as a different empire.  It is still fun even though you are starting from scratch cert-wise. 

[climbjtree]

Especially when you go from shit weapons to awesome weapons.

[shiznitz]

Especially when you go from shit weapons to awesome weapons.

When I play TR it feels "easier" somehow.  But you know what? My K/D between my 12,000 cert NC (BR 38) and my 400 cert TR (BR 10) are virtually the same.  One could argue that proves something about the learning curve for TR vs NC, but I am playing with TR weapons that most closely resemble my NC kits - Striker being the exception of course.

My TR does have higher xp/minute though, but I think that is mostly due to less unproductive solo time.

[Mrbloodworth]

I believe its because TR weapons are rather standard WW2 era stuff we have used in every shooter ever.

On another note:

http://www.planetside-universe.com/news-development-focusing-on-optimization-3060.htm

https://twitter.com/j_smedley/status/369862354327986177

https://twitter.com/j_smedley/status/369864332923777026

Smed has also posted a bit on Reddit:

I think this is basically him saying "we're focusing hard on PS4 optimizations, so no new content for a while. But you'll get the benefit of these too... so I'll just call it PC optimizations to make it sound like we're working for you guys"

not correct - this has zero to do with the PS4 version. That's a separate team. This is about the PC version's unacceptable performance. It's getting worse and we need to fix this immediately.

EDIT: I guess we have no twitter display.

[Nija]

Yeah I bet they showed Smed PS2 running on a PS4 at ~10 fps.

It really runs like dogshit on AMD machines, and it's effectively a single core application at the moment.

Not good news for the PS4.

Good news for us players, since we should all benefit from the optimizations.

I mean, months and months and months ago I was complaining about them adding new fucking shotguns every 3 weeks, but you couldn't ever see enemies further away than 20m in big fights. Maybe they're finally realizing that.

[Mrbloodworth]

Road map updates:

PlanetSide 2 has always embraced the idea that the core game content is totally player driven, so the mission system just takes that idea a little further.

Mission Types
Squad: Missions for squads add to group cohesion and direction and help a squad stay together. Players in the squad are motivated to follow the objective and the squad leader has control over where that objective is.

   

• Location Mission – SL places mission anywhere on the map instructing squad members to go to that location.
• Escort Mission – SL places mission on a friendly player or vehicle, and the mission follows that player around until killed or destroyed.
• Default Mission – SL defers squad mission to the automated system used for solo missions. This also happens under certain conditions, like an escort mission where the target is killed and a certain amount of time elapses, or when a location mission has no squad members around it for a time.

Solo: Missions created for solo players to guide them to the next objective and help create and balance fights.

    These missions are automatically created and assigned based on current map criteria, population balance, and player proximity. As a general rule these missions will strongly encourage population balancing and will likely give opposing missions to factions. For example, some players on TR might get a mission to attack a VS outpost, while an appropriate number of VS players get a mission to defend that outpost. It is the primary purpose of these missions to create fun and reasonably balanced fights for players, or to reinforce fights that need more balancing.
   

• Players cannot choose these missions, but using Instant Action will assign a different mission and deploy the player to that location.
• When a mission is completed a new mission will be created for the player.
• Players given a mission that is more than a single lattice-link from their current location will be given a message allowing them to immediately deploy via drop pod to that objective.
• Squad leaders can opt-in their entire squad to these missions, and this is automatic under uncommon situations.

Support Requests: Missions created by squad leaders that are assistance-requests that feed into the automated mission creation system.

   

• These can only be placed when certain criteria is met to prevent trolling and to ensure the integrity of the mission.
• These are only created by squad leaders.
• These are used in conjunction with the automated solo mission to guide players to appropriate content.
• For example, solo players in aircraft or squads in aircraft who use default mission selection may be offered an Air Superiority mission if another squad leader is being overwhelmed with aircraft and requests assistance. In this way both squads and solo players can be better directed to content they desire. In this case the content was air-to-air combat.

Mission Properties
Players can have at most one mission active. They have a HUD icon that directs them to the mission area. The mission center and area is indicated on the map and minimap. Players receive notifications when their mission changes. The mission UI is currently used in the Tutorial to introduce new players and teach them to follow that mission waypoint

Mission Rewards
For all missions there are XP rewards for being in the mission area and doing certain activities within the mission area. For example, squad members in their squad mission area will receive an XP bonus. Solo players who fight in the area directed by the solo mission will also receive XP bonuses. These are intended to motivate players to follow the mission and stay with their squads.

Quick Action Menu Update
This refers to the menu that comes up if you hold down the spot key on a friendly. (Also known as the command wheel, or commo rose). This will be updated to better support mission creation particularly for squad leaders, but all players should find improvements.

   

• General bugfixes to this feature to make it more usable, such as Y-inversion support, and helping avoid the issue of players left-clicking to select and inadvertently shooting or killing a teammate.
• Allowing a default selection so it is quicker to open the menu and select the most common tasks, such as requesting/offering ammo/transport/repairs/healing, or assigning the target as a squad mission.
• Retooling to support Squad Missions, selecting locations for missions, support requests, and opting the squad into automated missions.

[Trippy]

Squad missions

[Mrbloodworth]

Squad missions

Want to elaborate?

[Trippy]

Having the Squad mission set itself automatically in certain situations to solo missions is just If you can turn that off I'd be okay with it. A good SL already has too much stuff to do -- having to constantly fight with the mission assignment mechanism just makes their job even harder.

[Mrbloodworth]

Squad leader has to opt in as I read it, thought the second pat is a bit confusing.

[shiznitz]

This is just free exp for most outfit squads.  It is a nice touch for solo players.  They could also expand this so that the missions call for armor or air support.

[Jimbo]

Operation Make Gaming Faster is part something is up on the test server. Bonus is you get 100,000 cert points to spec out a character and go fight on Indar. It seems smoother and faster for me.

Plus a better way to test out a build of a character or vehicle spec too. I found out the NC auto shotgun is awesome and the NC heavy fast shooting LMG spec'ed out is freaking deadly in close quarters. NC weapons are still meh on long to medium ranges...well besides the sniper rifles. Only bad thing is that if it isn't prime time, not a lot of people on, wish more would join, we had a really crazy three way fight on one of the bio labs.