Planetside 2 by Daybreak Games
Preventing "dead game"
Ok just as the title suggests, how would you all think the best way would be to prevent planetside from dying out? Should DBG focus more on improving the new player experience, orienting their efforts into helping out newer players? Or simply put all their recources into trying to keep the old and quickly burning our vets, implementing this "meta" that we've all been hearing about for ages? Personally I think the newer player experience should be focused on. Koltyr is a good step; but for most newer players, they might do ok on koltyr, but then completely get "shreked" by numerous BR 100s once they leave it. Pretty sure I would leave a game if all I did was dying left and Right. So my question is, what do you all think? Focus ib Newer players? Or vets?




New player experience all the way!!!
Since SOE dissolved into DBG, there is much going on anymore, where Friday nights ops server smash are now almost gone. the nexus island was nowhere to be completed. 4 continents (except Koltyr) where serveral bases still in need to be revamped to prevent prolonged stalemate between factions. Sure we have new contents such as weapons here and there some changes in weapon balances but that's it. If they really want to keep the game they can add entirely new features ( the way I mean entirely new, I mean features that's not in the game e.g. faction co-ops vs alien bots, space battles...) but of course these all comes down to the cost of making it. Planetside 2 has been running for 3 years now and as a one hell of a kind of MMOFPS game, i think the game has reached a point where the game engine is (out-of- date). Instead of keeping planetside 2 alive, i think keeping the whole Planetside sequel alive by making Planetside 3 with its new better game engine and new game features added where its more suitable to be implemented. I may have gone off topic right here :P
The main thing you need is hype, old or new player experience no point adding new stuff if your not telling people it's there.
It is true that the game is really hard to understand to new players and that it scares them off. But making the game more noob-friendly can destroy the experience for all players. Best way to help new players is to make experienced ones teach them. On cobalt server we have Trident outfit in vanu. We organise lessons and operations for new players. "Boot camps" as we call them. It really helps them learn the basics. I don't know about other servers but I suppose that most of them have outfits like that. However, the devs can't rely purely on that. This helps a certain amount of new players but it's still not enough. I think that we should think of some ways to make the game more understandable for rookies but we shouldn't change any game rules to make it easier. The other thing that would help the game would be optimalization. It's one of the biggest with planetside and I think that most of the resources should be put in that matter. People who have better PC's have a big advantage above other players and letting more people get these 60 fps would balance it out. I know a lot of people who quit the game just because of optimalization problems. Improving new experience is also a good thing. The new construction system will make players busy with the new toy for a while and they can use it to improve the game performance. Also, some new things like infil vehicle hacking would be great (yay, controversy) but I wouldn't focus on that.
I wholeheartedly agree with you. Above all, optimization is what the game needs the most. Firstly, that means they have to improve how the game runs on players' PCs. Secondly, they need to improve server performance. I'm playing on Miller (EU), and hit detection issues are quite common. Also, players popping in right in front of you (sometimes even in medium sized battles) is gamebreaking. Another problem that may or may not be particular to Miller is cheating. I've seen too many hackers already, and judging by the fact that quite a few extremely obvious cases are still around days after they have first been reported, Daybreak doesn't seem to be taking action. Finally, we need a few bug fixes pronto, and some balance adjustments (infantry vs ground/air and vice versa). Once all of these things have been taken care of (and the veteran players are willing to stay), we can talk about revamping the new player experience and adding new content.