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2: NC and TR

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[Tack]

(or you play on Briggs...)

Woo woo! Representing the Briggs 100!

[Sordid]

My stance about PS2 is mostly the same. I want to love this game and it's given me some great memories, but it's not worth the frustration of constantly being farmed by people you can never beat because they have spent more time on the game. The developers don't give any thoughts to casual players: everything is balanced around veterans having a lot of clueless new players to farm so they can have their fun.

Well yeah. That's how free to play games work. The veteran players are the whales who actually buy lots of stuff in the cash shop and thereby pay for the whole thing, but whales on their own would not make a large enough community to make the game playable. That's where the newbs come in. There's no such thing as free, everyone is selling something to somebody. Youtubers don't upload free videos out of the kindness of their hearts, they do it to get your attention and then they sell your eyeballs to advertisers. Same with free to play games. You think the devs are giving you a free game? No, they're luring you in so that they can turn you into content and sell you to the whales. You pay for a free to play online game with your time, you pay by playing it and being content for other players.

[Egan_BW]

There do, in fact, exist parts of the gaming community that aren't for profit.

[Mattk50]

PS2 is the greediest f2p game i've put more than 20 minutes into. It asks from its players between 10 and 20 hours for a single weapon unlock (it took me 7 hours for 1000 certs during the double xp thing), from a pool of resources (certs) that is also used for incremental performance upgrades on literally everything. From vehicle fire rate to ammo canisters to how many grenades/c4/mines you can hold to how much damage you take before dying, to unlocking the same scopes and same attachments for every single weapon separately, dont get me started on how many separate turrets they want you to get. They even have ways to spend infinite certs like construction and implants for the nobody who has unlocked everyone in ps2. And lets not forget buying energy for implants using certs, not even double xp will maintain your first tier implants with minimum energy usage. And even after all the gameplay neccesarry shit squeezing the player for money, its not even possible to get any cosmetics without paying 5 dollars for a single skin.

I understand they need to make money but there is no question, their extreme greed has lead to much lower playercounts than they would have been getting otherwise.

[Sordid]

There do, in fact, exist parts of the gaming community that aren't for profit.

Yeah, dudes working on their tiny indie games in their spare time. Planetside 2 ain't that.

[Kanil]

I find it weird that people moan about the grind in PS2 when the difference between a level 0 player and a max level one is... not terribly relevant for most engagements. Typically one person's got the drop on the other guy, and by the time the other guy realizes what happened, he's dead, irregardless of how high or low his BR is. I mean there's no denying that 20% more HP isn't helpful, but it's probably not why you're losing, most of the time.

I have a kitted out Lightning with everything unlocked, and an alt with just the AP cannon and a few basic things. Both of them pretty much kill the hell out of anything they shoot in the rear, only the fully upgraded one does it in 7 seconds instead of 8. Sure, if I go face-to-face with another AP Lightning and he isn't fully upgraded, I'll probably win, but facetanking something and just comparing DPS is the worst way to fight to begin with.

[Mattk50]

Sorry for "moaning" about bad design, you've proved me wrong because they at least let new players kill people they shoot at the backs of. Good thing, if they didn't that would be "weird".

Its not that im saying you can't have fun with it if you have more tolerance for greedy games and are just looking to mess about. You don't need to start pretending being able to pull decent max, use decent launchers, snipers, shotguns, smgs, place mines, see people's healthbars or spot mines in a radius automatically isn't a huge advantage not even mentioning the use more than one of any of those things before 20 hours of gameplay.



Then again, people defended golden bullets in other games, so you could be doing worse.

[Kanil]

Sorry for "moaning" about bad design, you've proved me wrong because they at least let new players kill people they shoot at the backs of. Good thing, if they didn't that would be "weird".

So, what, you think you regularly die because the other guy had 80 milliseconds more survival than you? I think the typical margin of victory really isn't that narrow... it definitely matters from time to time, but it's not why you're getting farmed.


Edit: Perhaps I can make my point better this way: The difference between a class with 0 certs invested in it and a class with a 1,000 certs invested in it is much greater than the difference between a class with 1,000 certs invested in it and a class with 100,000 certs invested in it. Grinding out those first 1,000 certs sucks, but doesn't exactly take months.

[Mattk50]

it takes a lot more than 1000 certs to get a class up to "within margin of error" and thats just one infantry class without getting any guns, better launchers, tools, and without any vehicles. Think of it this way, a player with 1k certs into one class may be marginally succeeded by a player with 100k certs in one class if you stretch to disregard implants, but a player with 1k certs will lose every time to a player with 20k certs in enough classes and vehicles to pick the best one to counter whatever he's using, or suit the terrain.

I get the feeling you just forgot how many certs it takes to get a class to relative parity, its not just 20% armor resist, its fucktons more. Just for the medic you need 700 certs before your medic tool revives people at a proper health, otherwise you need to wait for them to stand up then stare at them with the medgun. then you need another 700 certs for your two c4 blocks, and don't tell me no c4 or one c4 is enough, then you have your shield gen/regen field. Then revive grenades and grenade bandolier is a huge advantage for another 1200 certs. And the funny bit? The medic is probably the easiest class to cert. Sure, if you want to talk about how newbies guns still do damage i will admit if you forget every tool, utility, weapon, mine/c4 in the game, sure, 20% resist is still significant but i would understand not thinking its super important. But then we're not talking about planetside 2, a combined arms game where you have tools to spot people through walls, traps to kill people, auto turrets to shoot them, revives to keep momentum, you know what i mean.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Its funny you think i get farmed as if you're some super competitive l33t player as you sit there justifying linear advantages for hundreds of hours of grind.

[Ozyton]

The TTK in this game is extremely short, so 8ms can make a difference, but lag/clientside hit detection is an even bigger factor.

As far as Pay to Win goes PS2 has done a decent job at avoiding it, but then they rolled out implants which kinda skewed things. Most things in the game are only obtainable with in-game currency and very few things (cosmetics) only from real cash. The only real ways to outpace people with money are with cert boosts and buying guns quicker, but those things are all obtainable with in-game certs. While this does mean that a player with cash is going to have an advantage it's not an advantage that can't be overcome with good gameplay/skill and/or time. This does mean that newbies are going to be at a huge disadvantage, and prevents the player base from expanding all that much, which kinda defeats the purpose of having the payment to entry be free.

I honestly feel that the game would have played vastly differently if it had a retail price for entry instead of the free to play model. They could spend a bit less time worrying about how to monetize the game and focus on meaningful content. They could have even changed how weapons work a lot more if people didn't individually spent money on them. Of course, that's all "would haves," and in a day and age where free to play is the go-to pay model I don't see anyone attempting a game at this scale the way PS2 tried.

Also, I feel that the focus on developing for PS4 was a big mistake. They spent a lot of time (and presumably money) on something that nobody ended up playing and just hindered development for the main game (and probably continues to do so if they're still updating it on PS4).

[Urist McScoopbeard]

Shattered Galaxy is one of my oldest gaming memories that I consider 'modern', discounting things from like N64 and whatnot.  I played pretty deeply into end of life, well after Nexon pretended it never existed.  I need to look into this remake...

Holy shit, I believe I remember Shattered Galaxy. Wow. My childhood.

[miauw62]

My stance about PS2 is mostly the same. I want to love this game and it's given me some great memories, but it's not worth the frustration of constantly being farmed by people you can never beat because they have spent more time on the game. The developers don't give any thoughts to casual players: everything is balanced around veterans having a lot of clueless new players to farm so they can have their fun.

Well yeah. That's how free to play games work. The veteran players are the whales who actually buy lots of stuff in the cash shop and thereby pay for the whole thing, but whales on their own would not make a large enough community to make the game playable. That's where the newbs come in. There's no such thing as free, everyone is selling something to somebody. Youtubers don't upload free videos out of the kindness of their hearts, they do it to get your attention and then they sell your eyeballs to advertisers. Same with free to play games. You think the devs are giving you a free game? No, they're luring you in so that they can turn you into content and sell you to the whales. You pay for a free to play online game with your time, you pay by playing it and being content for other players.

how the fuck is this relevant? the game is so badly designed its just absolutely not fun. some weird economic rambling isn't going to change that.

[Reudh]

I'm inclined to agree with Miauw. I've never seen any high BR player not using specific weapons with soft point ammo and forward grips, ie. straight upgrades.

[Rolan7]

I mean, the game can be frustrating at times, but due to the learning curve for certain things rather than equipment.  I've watched my heavily-certed brother play long enough to see, the time-to-kill really isn't noticeably different.

As a relative newbie, pretty bad at competitive FPS and mostly eschewing vehicles, I was still averaging 2 kills per death on my off days.  And a lot of those kills were 70+ BR, even a few 100.  Like Ozy said, latency matters a lot more than equipment.

And honestly... tactics and hard-earned mastery of the mechanics are by far most important except for meatgrinder bottlenecks.  I guess maybe they ought to be "everything", but "most" isn't bad.  Sure was a lot more interesting than any other arena FPS I've played, even if the gunplay is like Counterstrike at close ranges.

It's certainly fun for a lot of people, myself included   I just don't like competitive FPSes and need the space.  It's the only one I reinstall from time to time.

[miauw62]

Meatgrinder bottlenecks are 90% of fights. Unless you only ever want to fight on mostly irrelevant 1-point bases and give up all your progress the moment anyone notices what you're doing.

And it sure as hell feels like a competitive FPS if the entire community just calls you a pleb for criticising the game at all. And yes, maybe it's just that I couldn't get any kills. The game is still shit, because there's really zero incentive to keep playing if you're not instantly a 90% hsr god. Want to find a squad to play with? You've got the choice between uncommunicative pub squads and outfits that require you to commit to playing regularly.

Everything in the game just seems explicitly made to be completely inpenetrable and unfun, up to the SMG infiltrator bullshit, because infantry combat wasn't onesided enough yet.

As a casual FPS, PS2 fails most of all because there's no way to have fun if you can't shoot well.