PlanetSide 2 Criticisms

Published December 6, 2012

I'm enjoying it overall but I have some specific criticisms:

It's kind of pointless

The territories rarely change much. You can capture one area, okay, but in a few hours it'll probably have been reverted. There's not much incentive to stay and defend a territory. It just seems like musical chairs with base facilities.

A related problem is having three factions and three continents - one faction will dominate a particular continent and exert little effort in the others. Which means you have a choice between ridiculously advantaged or ridiculously disadvantaged. Neither is particularly fun. On Mallory, you can guarantee that the Terran Republic will have 70% of Indar, VS Esamir and NC Amerish.

The exact bases controlled by whom may change a little, but the big picture does not.

It seems like the way to fix this is to either make controlled facilities give bigger personal rewards, i.e. make them more valuable and more diverse, and/or to give slight XP multiplier bonuses to outnumbered factions on a continent by continent basis.

Capturing Facilities Is Too Slow And Too Obscured

Sitting on a control node for 5-10 minutes isn't very fun. It's even less fun when you're only managing to get 3/6 players because nobody else seems to know that they have to be in short range of the node for the base to be captured. The progress bar isn't very obvious.

And while you're doing this, you're not doing much else, which means you're not earning certs until the base ownership flips. Unless you're defending in which case you get none. Oh and if you get killed right before it flips and then spawn out of range, you also get none. It's basically a choice between doing something useful (in game terms) and getting rewarded. Which isn't good.

Which brings me to my next point...

Too Grindy

It seems to take forever to earn certs. You can get about 40-50 an hour if you're doing well, but it can easily drop as low as 20 if you're having a bad time or if you're just in an area where not a lot is happening or have to spend a lot of time travelling. At this rate it takes a long time to unlock any weapons (500-1000 certs).

This will harm your game, Sony. This isn't the TF2 F2P model of making people feel casually rewarded just for taking part and having some fun, this is the tried and failed F2P model of turning your game into work. I don't understand why, after Valve quite blatantly made a simple F2P model work really well, most other developers pursue stupider, more complex and less effective options!

There is variety in the stock weapons, sure, but there are obvious omissions. Anti air? The only vaguely effective anti air weapon I have is a heavy tank's cannon. Which is silly. Yes, I know, MAXes have AA weapons. Unfortunately, they are useless. I have downed more planes with lucky unguided rocket shots than I have with a MAX.

The downtime scheduling is really bad

Please don't take Euro servers down for patching for an hour and a half at 18:00 CET. Don't take the US servers down at the same time then place more importance on getting the US servers up first.

I don't object to them only patching in their regular working hours (they're in Pacific Time), there's nothing wrong with that, but they could time it better and be more sensitive to other timezones. 15:00PT is 0:00AM CET.

Filed under: gaming, planetside

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