asgaard

PlanetSide 2 is pay-to-win, and this is bad.

Wed, 26 Dec 12 23:38:19 +0000

Air vehicles in PS2 are completely broken. They are extremely powerful and made even more deadly by the fact that there are no strongly effective ways to destroy them from the ground. They are effective against infantry and armour. Heavy tanks can be virtually instagibbed by a well aimed rear rocket attack from a fighter.

There are weak counters to air: lock-on AA rockets and flak cannons (the MAX's burster). But lock-on rockets are prohibitively expensive. They cost 1000 certs. In game terms, you tend to gain certs at a rate of about 30-40 an hour [edit: actually, I've just done the arithmetic on my PS Universe stats, and it's exactly 30 an hour]. That's (at least) 25 hours of play to buy *one* item, which is comparatively pretty weak!

The MAX has a single burster by default. It's very effective at getting a fighter down to about 50% hit points before it decides it's time to tootle off and repair. There is absolutely no chance of taking down a competent pilot who engages with most of his vehicle's hit points intact. A second burster will have a good chance of killing a pilot who makes a misjudgement, but again, it's prohibitively expensive.

Of course, you *can* unlock these weapons by grinding. But it doesn't make sense to invest your first 50 hours in the game in only two upgrades for your character, especially at the cost of smaller, varied upgrades to your damage resistance and general killing power. In reality, unless you are willing to put in actual cash into the game, it will be a long time before you are effectively equipped to repel air units.

Ironically, air units by default aren't *overly* dangerous against the ground. It's just once they have their own respective (prohibitively expensive) upgrades that they become ridiculous.

You can argue that this isn't technically pay-to-win because all these things are accessible without putting money into the game, but you are rather missing the point. Whilst it is important in any pay-to-win game that many people do not realise it's pay-to-win, PS2 is rather blatant about it and I doubt everyone is quite so blind.

The free to play model is fundamentally hostile to the player because it greatly overvalues the game's content. I can buy a recent AAA title for £30 and get the whole game. If I were to pay for all of PS2's content, I'd be looking at an order of magnitude greater than that. Plus, it's a strange business model. Intuition suggests that there would be a negative correlation between the people who don't balk at the idea of spending £5 on a virtual item and the people old enough to earn money.

Game devs: Learn from TF2, please.

It'll be interesting to see over the next six months how this compares to Tribes Ascend. One of Ascend's big problems in player retention was the amount of grind to unlock items; a lot of players cottoned on fairly quickly that they were being killed by weapons inaccessible to them, approximated the time investment required to unlock them for themselves, and then thought "forget it". (As someone who put in 400+ hours and was frustrated by other things, it's easy to forget that this was a serious issue for new players, but there was an insightful Reddit topic in /r/gaming where a lot of people chimed in saying they checked it out, but quit soon after because of this).

PS2 seems a lot more grindy than Ascend ever was. What's worrying is that the cert prices were cut during beta as people complained they were ridiculous. What's more worrying is that SoE were quite resistant to doing this at first, which, to me, shows that they don't really get their market. This is exacerbated by the fact that earning certs is something that happens directly from certain actions in the game; actions which do not correspond well to doing something useful for your team. At least Ascend had a layer of obfuscation in its XP distribution so farming XP at the expense of everything else was never really an option.

For what it's worth, Amerish on Mallory is a ghost town already and Esamir's not holding up too well either, indicating that player retention has been poor. PS2 relies upon players to a far greater extent than most games; the players *are* the content. Alienating the free to play crowd is incredibly short-sighted.

PlanetSide 2 Cert Earning and Spending

Sun, 09 Dec 12 22:06:20 +0000

Certs in Planetside 2 are gained by XP, at a rate of 250XP per cert. A kill earns about 100 XP. Capturing a big facility (e.g. Biolab) nets 1000XP/4 certs, which is kind of pathetic when it can take 5-10 minutes of doing nothing but sitting on a control node. Killing infantry is a good, reliable way to earn certs. Capturing points, sadly, is not. I hope they fix this, but until then, focus on combat.

A cert investment is a cert bought to increase the rate you earn XP. These are what you should probably focus on to begin with. It seems the best way is to spread certs out over several classes. This is for two reasons:

PS2 is a very broad game, and being able to switch your class to fit the situation is an asset
The certs get much more expensive at their higher levels, and give a diminishing return

Bear in mind that only one cert per slot can be equipped at once, so don't buy two in the same slot expecting to equip them both together. Check the loadout page if you're confused.

Some vague class related observations

Sniper seems pretty good by default. A slightly more powerful scope is nice, but apart from that, there are more profitable ways to spend early level certs.

Light assault is very capable by default. The jetpack is invaluable, so it's worth focussing a few certs on that. By using the jetpack intelligently, you can escape from combat when injured, you can quickly flank your enemy, or you can place yourself on rooftops and rain bullets down on people who never think to look upwards. When positioning between two foes is unequal, nine times of out ten, the one with the better positioning will win. It is a deciding factor. And the jetpack gives you many, many options for positioning, and therefore slaughtering large numbers of foes.

Medic and Engineer are very similar in that they both offer a support role where their main purpose is to heal or repair stuff, which they do via a beam gun/tool. Despite this, they're also very good at killing, so you can still use them as a generalist combat class while offering support as necessary. In both cases, healing and repair earns XP quite quickly when there's a need for it (i.e. lots of suicidal teammates/tanks), so it's worth buying a few levels of their heal/repair tool upgrades. The engineer can haul in certs by putting down ammo boxes near choke-points, and there are a few certs which make the ammo boxes stay for longer. You can also select your turret, press b, and get a second deployable ammo box (who knows why).

Heavy assault isn't a cert machine. It just isn't. At least for my NC character, the primary weapon HA seems to fire bullets made of foam and has huge recoil. Okay, so it has a 100 bullet magazine, but that's no use when you'll miss half of them and the other half seem to bounce off enemies. Maybe the other guns are better, but the primary is rubbish.

The HA gets a rocket launcher, but few rockets. HA's main purpose is to take down tanks with his rocket launcher, but the launcher does too little damage and carries too few rockets to do so with any reliability. Taking down a tank yields a pitiful amount of XP anyway (100 - same as an infantry kill), especially considering how many infantry you could have killed in the same time. My advice is don't play HA unless you're surrounded by tanks who happen to have their backs to you (they have weak armour from behind). Tanks are generally best left to other tanks.

You can rake in certs with a heavy tank. The heavy tank is a bit underwhelming by default, but it becomes a beast with a few upgrades. It's worth upgrading the performance/speed, because it's bit of a sloth otherwise. The zoom on the cannon is also very useful; if you want to stay alive for prolonged periods you'll want to be engaging at long range if you can (and tank-sniping libs/galaxies is great fun). And your upgraded engineer repair tool is a godsend for emergency repairs. I'd also recommend putting some certs towards making your gunner's life easier. Extra ammo for the both of you is nice, but the downside of living longer is that you'll still spend most of your time trying to stay in range of the nearest ammo tower.

The lightning class tank is a bit less impressive. It's very weak and does not to no damage against armour. It's effective against infantry, but it's also a huge target. Don't put many certs into it to begin with.

PlanetSide 2 Criticisms

Thu, 06 Dec 12 22:55:08 +0000

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.