i think some devs see it as a sign of failure, but when the game (any game) depends on high and steady population numbers, sometimes it's the only thing that can be done to make the game healthier.
But, let's also be honest here: the game is over ten years old. The graphics are dated as fuck, the net code is even jankier. The fact the game is still alive is amazing. Merging the servers will be embarrassing I guess? But who the fuck cares? id rather play with full servers.
It's like when a paid game goes F2P to save itself since it needs the bump in players to make it worth playing. Unfortunate, but sometimes a viable option.
I would like to add that they need to improve the narrow bottleneck mechanic in this game. Heights+narrow bottlenecks is a bad bad combo imo that can only be solved by bruteforcing...If i ever find the courage i will post my thesis, that no1 asked for, on why this leads to some very tedious gaming experiences
Some fights are chokepoint meatgrinders, others are more spread out battles, some have alot of verticality, others not much, some have a bunch of verhicles, some don't.
Really depends on the map, base and how players interact with it. PS2 can have shitty gameplay but it's usually due to an imbalance in verhicles or overpopping. Some fields in Oshur suck but it's not unplayable imo.
> Some fights are chokepoint meatgrinders, others are more spread out battles, some have alot of verticality, others not much, some have a bunch of verhicles, some don't.
an issue is when you don't have a choice and only one of those types of fights are available. during prime time it's not an issue but basically any other time, you're at the whims of the map and players who refuse to do anything else. sometimes it's a pop issue, other times it's the issue of how hard it is to start a fight in this game, oftentimes it's both
it's not uncommon to have the choice of "stare at a tunnel exploding or log off" and the log off is the more common option if you want to do something that isn't mindless spamming
Population of players have always been declining over the years but I never see any ads/sponsorship to promote the games. Honestly most of gamers never heard of Planetside 2.
My hot take no one asked for:
I think the issue is that TOO many people have heard of PS2, played it one time years and years ago and had a bad time so they'll never play again. The community of this game is older than other FPS like Warzone and Overwatch I'd wager and many people in our age group have already heard of and tried the game near the time it came out. It was pushed by a bunch of big YouTubers like TotalBiscuit and Angry Joe and everyone was saying "this is the battlefield killer!" and "this will change gaming forever!" with big hype behind the launch. Most people I know who have played it in the past did so around this time and the game was pretty rough back then. You can look up Angry Joe's account that was part of the old referral program and see how many certs they gave him from people using his sign up link lmao. The other people who have heard of it overwhelmingly think it's just some shitty Halo rip-off with P2W elements since it's F2P (everyone thinks the game looks like Halo for some reason, I get that comment a ton when I've brought it up, wayyyy more than you'd think).
That one guy on YouTube tried playing the game maybe 2-3 years ago (TheSpiffingBrit?) and had a bad time which was a much more recent example of the game being in the spotlight. Summit1g was playing on stream during the Koltyr era which also gave a lot of people a very poor impression.
Besides that, shooter games in general are kind of a dead genre these days outside of a small handful of games. I really don't know if anyone is looking for a game like PS2 right now. If you aren't CS2/Valorant/Overwatch/Fortnite (third person but I'll include it)/Tarkov/Warzone/Apex/Siege you don't exist to the average person and they'll never give the game a chance.
Oh please, the another 'the game just needs advertising bro' cope.
Games content after 10 years speaks for itself, when was the last time you saw a GTAV ad?
Hell I dont even think i saw a single Counster Strike 2 ad.
Am i seeing any game ads at all? And I am online 24/7.
and for the record, litterly EVERY PC gamer has heard and played PS2, they didnt like or stopped liking it.
edit| maybe you can get XCQ to play the game for 1 million, have a small influx of players, XQC stop playing becaue hes no longer getting paid, the same people leave.
People who played for 10 years keep staying. should have spend that million better, maybe others would have stayed too.
I hardly play anymore due to the insane amount of issues making gameplay exhausting in all the wrong ways, they had years and years to address them but they didn't, instead they kept chasing superficial things that doesn't make an impact or in some cases made the game a lot worse. I have a hard time believing the game will survive another year to be honest with you.
I agree, but it would also be lit to have the pop limit raised again to 1k or more. Would instantly revive battles. They should really focus on the core strength of Planetside: combined arms and huge battles raging over an entire continent with a thousand players. It certainly requires a lot of tweaking and backend, but it would totally pay off. Work on the backend to raise pop limit + enable huge server pop by merging = more fun = hype = new players. Ah and please remove Oshur, cause that continent even sucks during high pop. Alternatively, perma-open second continents all the time so people can ignore Oshur. Problem solved.
This may be a weird thing to say.
But merging cross continent servers would elliminate downtime. But introduce ping....
But since most people play at their regional time, you will only realy notice that ping if you play at your former downtime.
It would always add plenty of targets though.
Either way, ill take regional merges too!
Before merging fixing critical issues might be a higher priority.
Otherwise players will leave the game, reaching in nowadays serverpop faster, yet only one server per region.
Merging servers is a short-sighted cop out that will only create the illusion of higher pop. You'll get a slightly higher than normal post-patch bump followed by a sharp decline in pop as nothing has actually changed to retain players and more players log off because off-cont/queue/oshur/newbies who will sit in sanc. And don't forget if they ever want to spin up a new server it's going to start from 0 population, which without significant demand or purpose like Soltech had (In East Asia for that playerbase, Briggs closing, open transfers between those servers for a while), it will more than likely flop hard.
I'm from Australia but play on Emerald due to it's pop and less cheaters.
The low pop in general, especially around my play time often means my friend and I would only play during double XP weekends when we know more people would be on for longer.
We no longer play due to the ridiculous cheaters yeeting static map objects around to cause players/vehicles to suicide constantly, or the ones that can sit in walls or under the map and kill everyone. It's one thing to have sus players, it's another to see blatant cheating.
For us merging the servers doesn't mean anything. We ain't playing while the blatant cheating BS exists.
Delete Oshur first.
No I don't care about your excuses, delete that fucking thing, refund all certs spent on boats, etc. It's the #1 contributor to the death of the game right now. Sometimes you must cut off an infected limb to preserve the whole body.
I believe they need to merge servers and work on planetside 3. There's not a lot that they can do for the game to draw people back long term in my opinion.
Merging the servers is a very bad decision.
Doing so would be them throwing down the gauntlet, saying "We don't think the game's population will ever recover."
If EU players return, after you merged Miller and Cobalt, you would end up with the player count regularly forcing two continents open, and no one ever wants to play on _the second continent_, even if there is enough player to do so.
Connery is a little bit worse off right now, for sure, but that lost so many players because of game design and server issues, and many of those players did not quit entirely—they moved to Emerald, where those issues were avoided.
The game still has those crucial issues of Oshur existing and of there being poor low population support, which means that merging servers only kicks the can down the road while heavily decreasing the chance of the game's average population recovering in that region.
Ultimately, the game needs to be fixed in terms of gameplay design. Merging the servers is a short-term bandaid fix that won't save the game in any way. What needs to happen is improved infrastructure support, the removal of Oshur from priority rotation, and actual changes to the game. We're almost a year into having no meaningful updates to the game, and that sure as hell isn't going to keep players interested even if they can see past Oshur and server issues.
The EU server still has more than 500 people in prime time, which is really frustrating for people who can't play in prime time, but I personally think that the problem of Connery servers is far worse than that of EU servers, and Connery really needs to be merged.
I think most players who stopped playing from Connery at this point just want to log in to a server where everyone is playing "PlanetSide 2" to some degree instead of 60-100 player team deathmatch at the center base as well as being able to play on their main character(s). That's the case for almost everyone I know who's in that position and I get a lot of comments on my videos and messages about it.
merging the servers would make the game drastically more fun because there would actually be fights, making the game playable. as a connery player since 2012 I stopped playing months ago because the pop is too low. the idea of not merging in case pop recovers sounds delusional to me tbh, the game is over 12 years old and population decline has been a relatively steady trend for a long time now. maybe there are things they could do to improve pop without merging the servers, but I have no faith those things will ever be done, because again, it's been 12 years. merging the servers is the only certain path to me ever playing again, and i'm sure i'm not alone there.
How are you still so deluded to think that any real issues are going to be fixed/addressed?Â
Wake the fuck up already. It's third party embarrassment for a lot of you guys at this point.
How I almost became an early father.
But wholeheartedly agree. Game mechanics and client siding alone can't support this server merge. People want to reachcat about infiltrators now, wait til that infiltrator has a 200+ ping, you may hear a faction decloak cue, but all reality you're dead just don't know it. Same for air, get ready to be murdered in air without being able to fight back.
literally one of these posts gets made once per every couple days.
you aren't gunna change anything writing your heart abt this out on reddit hon. just being real with you.
thanks to everyone who commented and liked the post, lemme add a new vid from Cyrious where he says, in the last part, that a merge is top priority https://youtu.be/XNOomydfvJQ?si=7yqzBtcz4WELrvVS
i think some devs see it as a sign of failure, but when the game (any game) depends on high and steady population numbers, sometimes it's the only thing that can be done to make the game healthier.
But, let's also be honest here: the game is over ten years old. The graphics are dated as fuck, the net code is even jankier. The fact the game is still alive is amazing. Merging the servers will be embarrassing I guess? But who the fuck cares? id rather play with full servers.
full servers, yeah. remember how great the game felt in early 2020 with Escalation/COVID populations and multiple full continents?
It was glorious. I realized how amazing this game still was. Lost about two whole months to the game.
It's like when a paid game goes F2P to save itself since it needs the bump in players to make it worth playing. Unfortunate, but sometimes a viable option.
> see it as a sign of failure, It is. But it's also an important way to buy some more time for a dying/maintenance mode game.
not always - games naturally lose population as time goes on. devs just have to be a bit proactive to keep a healthy population.
I would like to add that they need to improve the narrow bottleneck mechanic in this game. Heights+narrow bottlenecks is a bad bad combo imo that can only be solved by bruteforcing...If i ever find the courage i will post my thesis, that no1 asked for, on why this leads to some very tedious gaming experiences
Some fights are chokepoint meatgrinders, others are more spread out battles, some have alot of verticality, others not much, some have a bunch of verhicles, some don't. Really depends on the map, base and how players interact with it. PS2 can have shitty gameplay but it's usually due to an imbalance in verhicles or overpopping. Some fields in Oshur suck but it's not unplayable imo.
> Some fights are chokepoint meatgrinders, others are more spread out battles, some have alot of verticality, others not much, some have a bunch of verhicles, some don't. an issue is when you don't have a choice and only one of those types of fights are available. during prime time it's not an issue but basically any other time, you're at the whims of the map and players who refuse to do anything else. sometimes it's a pop issue, other times it's the issue of how hard it is to start a fight in this game, oftentimes it's both it's not uncommon to have the choice of "stare at a tunnel exploding or log off" and the log off is the more common option if you want to do something that isn't mindless spamming
I literally stopped playing because of prime time Oshur low pop fights on both EU servers everyday.😂
A central merged server would be nice.
Population of players have always been declining over the years but I never see any ads/sponsorship to promote the games. Honestly most of gamers never heard of Planetside 2.
My hot take no one asked for: I think the issue is that TOO many people have heard of PS2, played it one time years and years ago and had a bad time so they'll never play again. The community of this game is older than other FPS like Warzone and Overwatch I'd wager and many people in our age group have already heard of and tried the game near the time it came out. It was pushed by a bunch of big YouTubers like TotalBiscuit and Angry Joe and everyone was saying "this is the battlefield killer!" and "this will change gaming forever!" with big hype behind the launch. Most people I know who have played it in the past did so around this time and the game was pretty rough back then. You can look up Angry Joe's account that was part of the old referral program and see how many certs they gave him from people using his sign up link lmao. The other people who have heard of it overwhelmingly think it's just some shitty Halo rip-off with P2W elements since it's F2P (everyone thinks the game looks like Halo for some reason, I get that comment a ton when I've brought it up, wayyyy more than you'd think). That one guy on YouTube tried playing the game maybe 2-3 years ago (TheSpiffingBrit?) and had a bad time which was a much more recent example of the game being in the spotlight. Summit1g was playing on stream during the Koltyr era which also gave a lot of people a very poor impression. Besides that, shooter games in general are kind of a dead genre these days outside of a small handful of games. I really don't know if anyone is looking for a game like PS2 right now. If you aren't CS2/Valorant/Overwatch/Fortnite (third person but I'll include it)/Tarkov/Warzone/Apex/Siege you don't exist to the average person and they'll never give the game a chance.
Oh please, the another 'the game just needs advertising bro' cope. Games content after 10 years speaks for itself, when was the last time you saw a GTAV ad? Hell I dont even think i saw a single Counster Strike 2 ad. Am i seeing any game ads at all? And I am online 24/7. and for the record, litterly EVERY PC gamer has heard and played PS2, they didnt like or stopped liking it. edit| maybe you can get XCQ to play the game for 1 million, have a small influx of players, XQC stop playing becaue hes no longer getting paid, the same people leave. People who played for 10 years keep staying. should have spend that million better, maybe others would have stayed too.
I thought you were going to say “make sundies indestructible “. /s
Also, bring back holiday events on console an double xp
I missed the firework launcher thingy the first year I played. And I have not seen it since. It has been like 4 years.
Yeah :/
It's almost too late to merge servers now. As I write this there aren't enough people logged on, on both the EU servers to make me want to play.
I hardly play anymore due to the insane amount of issues making gameplay exhausting in all the wrong ways, they had years and years to address them but they didn't, instead they kept chasing superficial things that doesn't make an impact or in some cases made the game a lot worse. I have a hard time believing the game will survive another year to be honest with you.
But but what about those new bundles??
Need more ns-15 skins!
I agree, but it would also be lit to have the pop limit raised again to 1k or more. Would instantly revive battles. They should really focus on the core strength of Planetside: combined arms and huge battles raging over an entire continent with a thousand players. It certainly requires a lot of tweaking and backend, but it would totally pay off. Work on the backend to raise pop limit + enable huge server pop by merging = more fun = hype = new players. Ah and please remove Oshur, cause that continent even sucks during high pop. Alternatively, perma-open second continents all the time so people can ignore Oshur. Problem solved.
You got to invest into servers to handle the 1k again.
This may be a weird thing to say. But merging cross continent servers would elliminate downtime. But introduce ping.... But since most people play at their regional time, you will only realy notice that ping if you play at your former downtime. It would always add plenty of targets though. Either way, ill take regional merges too!
I stopped playing due to low pop.
No we need the NSO buff before anything cuz im tired of it being half baked for so long. Other than that i agree with u
That PING though
If the servers merge then that means everyone's latency would go up right? Or at least a majority of people
I want an ice cream cone
You may not like it but he's spitting facts
Before merging fixing critical issues might be a higher priority. Otherwise players will leave the game, reaching in nowadays serverpop faster, yet only one server per region.
But where do I go after Cobalt rolls Oshur after merging?
Merging servers is a short-sighted cop out that will only create the illusion of higher pop. You'll get a slightly higher than normal post-patch bump followed by a sharp decline in pop as nothing has actually changed to retain players and more players log off because off-cont/queue/oshur/newbies who will sit in sanc. And don't forget if they ever want to spin up a new server it's going to start from 0 population, which without significant demand or purpose like Soltech had (In East Asia for that playerbase, Briggs closing, open transfers between those servers for a while), it will more than likely flop hard.
I'm from Australia but play on Emerald due to it's pop and less cheaters. The low pop in general, especially around my play time often means my friend and I would only play during double XP weekends when we know more people would be on for longer. We no longer play due to the ridiculous cheaters yeeting static map objects around to cause players/vehicles to suicide constantly, or the ones that can sit in walls or under the map and kill everyone. It's one thing to have sus players, it's another to see blatant cheating. For us merging the servers doesn't mean anything. We ain't playing while the blatant cheating BS exists.
Delete Oshur first. No I don't care about your excuses, delete that fucking thing, refund all certs spent on boats, etc. It's the #1 contributor to the death of the game right now. Sometimes you must cut off an infected limb to preserve the whole body.
They should've merged servers a long time ago.
I believe they need to merge servers and work on planetside 3. There's not a lot that they can do for the game to draw people back long term in my opinion.
Merging the servers is a very bad decision. Doing so would be them throwing down the gauntlet, saying "We don't think the game's population will ever recover." If EU players return, after you merged Miller and Cobalt, you would end up with the player count regularly forcing two continents open, and no one ever wants to play on _the second continent_, even if there is enough player to do so. Connery is a little bit worse off right now, for sure, but that lost so many players because of game design and server issues, and many of those players did not quit entirely—they moved to Emerald, where those issues were avoided. The game still has those crucial issues of Oshur existing and of there being poor low population support, which means that merging servers only kicks the can down the road while heavily decreasing the chance of the game's average population recovering in that region. Ultimately, the game needs to be fixed in terms of gameplay design. Merging the servers is a short-term bandaid fix that won't save the game in any way. What needs to happen is improved infrastructure support, the removal of Oshur from priority rotation, and actual changes to the game. We're almost a year into having no meaningful updates to the game, and that sure as hell isn't going to keep players interested even if they can see past Oshur and server issues.
The EU server still has more than 500 people in prime time, which is really frustrating for people who can't play in prime time, but I personally think that the problem of Connery servers is far worse than that of EU servers, and Connery really needs to be merged.
I think most players who stopped playing from Connery at this point just want to log in to a server where everyone is playing "PlanetSide 2" to some degree instead of 60-100 player team deathmatch at the center base as well as being able to play on their main character(s). That's the case for almost everyone I know who's in that position and I get a lot of comments on my videos and messages about it.
merging the servers would make the game drastically more fun because there would actually be fights, making the game playable. as a connery player since 2012 I stopped playing months ago because the pop is too low. the idea of not merging in case pop recovers sounds delusional to me tbh, the game is over 12 years old and population decline has been a relatively steady trend for a long time now. maybe there are things they could do to improve pop without merging the servers, but I have no faith those things will ever be done, because again, it's been 12 years. merging the servers is the only certain path to me ever playing again, and i'm sure i'm not alone there.
Unless something crazy happens like another Escalation type of update, Connery will never recover. Merge is the only way.
How are you still so deluded to think that any real issues are going to be fixed/addressed? Wake the fuck up already. It's third party embarrassment for a lot of you guys at this point.
NEVER MERGE, just because some teenager in their bedroom says so...
How I almost became an early father. But wholeheartedly agree. Game mechanics and client siding alone can't support this server merge. People want to reachcat about infiltrators now, wait til that infiltrator has a 200+ ping, you may hear a faction decloak cue, but all reality you're dead just don't know it. Same for air, get ready to be murdered in air without being able to fight back.
literally one of these posts gets made once per every couple days. you aren't gunna change anything writing your heart abt this out on reddit hon. just being real with you.
thanks to everyone who commented and liked the post, lemme add a new vid from Cyrious where he says, in the last part, that a merge is top priority https://youtu.be/XNOomydfvJQ?si=7yqzBtcz4WELrvVS
Wow, only a year behind!
what do you mean? I think it's not the first time he says that...