Really love the game, but the F2P model is totally broken in my opinion. Some things are insanely expensive to unlock: It costs up to 7$ to unlock a single weapon for a single class or 1000 cert points (and you gain cert points at a rate of about 15-20 an hour... if you're very lucky. My rate is more along the lines of 10-12)

And being competitive with the default load-out... No. Just No. Some classes can pull it off - the infiltrator or the medic and engineer... other classes not so much. The default Rocket Launcher on the Heavy for example is next to useless on anything than a close ground vehicle... and anything with a lock-on is 7$/1000 cert points.

Same goes for Air vehicles - the air superiority fighters equiped with default auto cannons are next to useless when up against air superiority fighters equipped with rockets (both in the guided an unguided variety).

Gunboats with default weapons are pretty much only fit to carry 3 people from a to b, while a gunboat with a certain load-out can wreak devastation on a massive scale. Again, a very expensive load-out.

If you want to be effective you have to either grind for literally weeks of game time or dish out a ton of cash.

There's also performance to take into account... you kinda need a strong rig to play it. On a PC that runs BF3 on high-ultra I had to turn everything to Low in order to barely get 30 FPS in Planetside2. I don't know if there's any more optimization SoE could have done, the game is massive... but it's still quite a high entry barrier.

VladG:
Really love the game, but the F2P model is totally broken in my opinion. Some things are insanely expensive to unlock: It costs up to 7$ to unlock a single weapon for a single class or 1000 cert points (and you gain cert points at a rate of about 15-20 an hour... if you're very lucky. My rate is more along the lines of 10-12)
[snip]

That the whole point isn't it ;)
It takes weeks to get only 1 weapon. Or just 7 dollars.

But think about what you just said. And lets say it takes 1.5 weeks to get those 1000 points.
Now lets take WoW. New patch, new dungeon, new item tier. How long do you think it will take most people to get even close to those items when not playing in a top guild.

Or just 7 bucks per item you really want.

Its the same type of discussion as "is a 20 hour game long or short".
If you game whole days its short.. if not then long ;)

Wow comparisons aren't valid; you're actually playing and building up new gear, exploring different stories, areas, etc., and constantly making progress and improving your character throughout. In terms of WoW, PS2 is essentially grinding one mob with no new gear for hours on end, just to get one new weapon, instead of going on varied quests and getting bits and pieces of gear with side improvements in professions.
PS2's current model for leveling and "F2P" is broken; the devs have even admitted that the aircraft weapons are somewhat imbalanced, and a lot of things are flat-out upgrades, not "sidegrades", as had been advertised... It's definitely fun to play, even at 5~15FPS on my apparently well out of date computer (only now playing games from past year or two), but the long-term aspects are in need of a serious improvement. Lots of discussions on their official forums, but all in all, they *really* need to speed up the cert gain or decrease the costs of weapons and upgrades. Remember, 1 weapon may be 1000 certs, but you then have upgrades for that weapon requiring hundreds, if not thousands more. Getting a vehicle with the weapons and upgrades you want, or fully upgrading those weapons, can take well over 20~30k certs... For a lot of people, that's over 100 hours of gameplay, just to maximize one vehicle, although you can shave a lot of time off by going only part way as costs rise exponentially.

I'd definitely recommend spending a couple hours to get a feel for this one, and pay close attention to how fast you gain certs vs. how much you want gear; for most people, the current model will seem ridiculously slow... Though I will say that you can make a lot more certs per hour by being in small squads fighting independently of major battles, or by being on the front line of big battles... never sit around handing out ammo; hand out ammo while also marking targets (big, free XP for spamming one key), get kills, repair MAXes as an engineer, etc... Though be wary that it takes 250xp for 1 cert, meaning 2.5 kills, so if you go *purely* based on kills without the (relatively minor) capture bonuses, that means 250 kills per 1000 certs in a game that takes at *least* 10 seconds just to respawn you.

I've tried it and have found it to be quite fun, but the performance gets very bad as soon as I find myself engaged in anything greater than a small skirmish battle. I don't think it has anything to do with graphics, as turning down graphics quality doesn't help. It's probably either CPU or network limited. I've stopped playing it because playing a shooter with a framerate of 10-16 FPS is not fun. I suppose I'll peek in again sometime in the future when the game has been patched and optimized.

VladG:

There's also performance to take into account... you kinda need a strong rig to play it. On a PC that runs BF3 on high-ultra I had to turn everything to Low in order to barely get 30 FPS in Planetside2. I don't know if there's any more optimization SoE could have done, the game is massive... but it's still quite a high entry barrier.

What? I just have a single 580 card and I run everything but shadows on high with, I dunno, 50-60fps. How is it you can play BF3 on those settings but not this? This game's probably a bit more CPU intensive...

OT:

The one thing you need to know about this game is that you should like seeing purple hexagons.

You'll be seeing a lot of those.

Vanu for Victory. Purple is truth. Twilight Sparkle.

At first, I hated it. I seriously did. I was ready to scream to the four winds of the internet to people to not play it, I was jealous of people who did enjoy it, then I forced myself into watching the main site's tutorials and try to understand how it all works, by the end of that day, I already captured like 4 to 5 bases and I was playing for 4 hours straight.

This is a game that you need to understand in order to start having fun, if you, like me, dive into it headfirst, you'll be in for a big surprise and you'll die a lot.

Give it a few minutes, even a few hours to understand it, or watch the tutorials (highly recommended), for the price of free, this may be one of the very best games I've ever played this whole year (The Secret World comes first).

Tiamat666:
I've tried it and have found it to be quite fun, but the performance gets very bad as soon as I find myself engaged in anything greater than a small skirmish battle. I don't think it has anything to do with graphics, as turning down graphics quality doesn't help. It's probably either CPU or network limited. I've stopped playing it because playing a shooter with a framerate of 10-16 FPS is not fun. I suppose I'll peek in again sometime in the future when the game has been patched and optimized.

Glad to know I'm not the only one that had mega problems. I'm not exactly using a gaming work horse, but it's still a decent rig. For me, this game is barely playable with more than 5 hostels on screen.

Though that was on the beta, hopefully they fix it up. I really loved it otherwise.

+1 for optimization. My GPU is a few places below the recommended one in benchmark charts, but miles above the minimum. And Everything else is above recommended specs. And yet, in large battles I get... wait for it... 3fps. Turning all settings to the absolute minimum didn't help one bit either.

I've been playing this for a few days now, and I can say that it is really fun. The massive battles you get into are very exciting, though assaulting a base can be frustrating for the time it takes.

The original article mentions travel time, and it can be somewhat of a bother, but a Flash (quad bike) is cheap and its respawn timer is fairly low (and can be even lower if you invest some certs). I never have problems getting to fights quickly, between Flashes, re-deployment options and Sunderers (the mobile spawing points).

One thing I strongly recommend is joining an outfit (the equivalent of guilds). Having people to play with makes all the difference in PS2, playing solo gets really boring really fast. If you can, join an outfit that has access to voice coms. The game has them built in, but I've only seen one guy using them (and he was just looping Gangam Style over and over again).

I don't really have an opinion on the "is it expensive or not" argument. I'm a cheapskate, so I don't see myself ever paying for anything in this game that I can get for just playing, even if it takes me weeks to get the certs I need. In the meantime, I'll be shooting people and crashing planes into mountains that I swear weren't there a minute ago.

Neglected to mention the biggest flaw in the game- server stacking. When one continent has an overwhelming advantage in population for one side, it's pointless to even try and fight them. This results in almost everyone on the other sides simply abandoning the battle and going to a different continent where they actually have a small chance of making a difference, making things even MORE one-sided. You probably saw in the video how one of the maps was almost COMPLETELY red? Yeah, that's not because the red so awesome and brilliant and genius, it's because they stacked a ridiculously high percentage of their population onto that continent so everyone else just gave up and let them have it.

That's my big issue with PS2, sometimes it's VERY hard to feel like you're actually DOING anything worthwhile and not just going through a pointless, boring and frustrating cycle of "spawn-die-respawn-die-respawn-die".

I like the game so far, I played the game for about an hour, and sure I died....a lot.... but after I got a hold of some of the controls I started to rack up the points. Though I am still confused on the landing for the aerial vehicles.

Such a shame that I don't have a PC. Hey, can anyone point me to where I can get software to run PC games on a Mac?

Toastngravy:
Yeah I don't care.
Planetside 1 was fantastic. This is garbage.
There's absolutely no point, no point what so ever, to progress in the game when you can just pay money to win. And that's the sad truth, it's pay to win and it truly is. Cash shop should not give you an actual gameplay advantage. It can boost exp so you can naturally get things faster, maybe cosmetic stuff. But the moment you just let them buy anything they'd need the game be comes void. Why is that a hard rule to understand?

Granted it's SOE and I've stopped trusting any choice they make by this point..

I still don't see why is that a problem.

You are not paying money to win, you are paying money to get other stuff (which is a lot of money). That doesn't make you instantly lose the game, does it?
As far as I know, there are no insta-kill uber powered weapons, and if they are, a competent group should be able to counter them.

Come on, you even play the game?

So is it possible to win matches somehow in this game? I haven't seen anything that says it is and that makes me wonder what the point of capturing bases is if they don't add up to anything.

This game is vastly improved by being part of an outfit, since it's simply not cut out for solo play. You might be a really capable individual, but you'll be outnumbered and outgunned by the other side every time unless you're moving with an organized group.

I've never quite understood the complaint, either with PS1 or with PS2, regarding the battles not 'adding up to anything'. You're earning XP and you're unlocking more weapons, and ostensibly you're having fun actually playing the game. You can stay and fight for as long as you want in any given location, or if you're tired of that particular locale, go attack somewhere else. But no, just because you held a given position eight hours ago doesn't mean you're going to hold it when you get back, just like capturing flags or bases in other games doesn't mean they won't reset at some point.

I'd think Planetside 2 would really benefit from the explosion of XP-based shooters over the last decade since Planetside 1 debuted in 2003, and given how busy the servers are, I think Sony really has a hit on their hands with this one.

romanator0:
So is it possible to win matches somehow in this game? I haven't seen anything that says it is and that makes me wonder what the point of capturing bases is if they don't add up to anything.

Your faction gains advantages for every base held. I think there is also a bonus for taking an entire continent.

Shakura Jolithion:
Wow comparisons aren't valid; you're actually playing and building up new gear, exploring different stories, areas, etc., and constantly making progress and improving your character throughout. In terms of WoW, PS2 is essentially grinding one mob with no new gear for hours on end, just to get one new weapon, instead of going on varied quests and getting bits and pieces of gear with side improvements in professions.

This outlook makes no sense. While the system is certainly flawed, you are in fact "Actually playing" when you play the game to earn certs. You are fully engaged in the game and can make a contribution to the battle no matter what you're outfitted in. I have yet to see a loadout that is completely unbeatable by a person using a default loadout, at least on the ground level. In WoW, grinding new content is far more of a grind. You not only play the new content over and over and over, but there is no variation or change between iterations of your run. Most of the time, you make no new progress at all while waiting for that rare drop. And seriously, you call playing an FPS "grinding one mob"? Isn't the point of an MMOFPS shooting other players in a massively multiplayer environment? If anything, PS2 is more varied. Playing with other players, making friends, fighting in battles that never play out the same way twice, exploring the rather beautiful scenery. If you play it as a lone wolf, you're not going to have fun. The thing is, if you want to go completely solo you're playing the wrong game.

They REALLY do need to make it easier to distinguish between friend and foe.

I've held my fire a few times only to realize I just passed the enemy by, and I've gotten blasted to hell MANY times by my own team in tanks. ...>:\ You do NOT shoot the medic that's on YOUR team. jeez...

LordMithril:

VladG:
Really love the game, but the F2P model is totally broken in my opinion. Some things are insanely expensive to unlock: It costs up to 7$ to unlock a single weapon for a single class or 1000 cert points (and you gain cert points at a rate of about 15-20 an hour... if you're very lucky. My rate is more along the lines of 10-12)
[snip]

That the whole point isn't it ;)
It takes weeks to get only 1 weapon. Or just 7 dollars.

There's no "just" in paying 7$ for a SINGLE piece of equipment for a SINGLE class. It's like paying that much to unlock a single champion ability in League of Legends.

But think about what you just said. And lets say it takes 1.5 weeks to get those 1000 points.
Now lets take WoW. New patch, new dungeon, new item tier. How long do you think it will take most people to get even close to those items when not playing in a top guild.

And WoW is a completely inadequate comparison. What does PvE item gain have to do with a 100% PvP game?? In WoW you are NOT competing with players who have 2-3 times better gear than you to finish the SAME raid.

Its the same type of discussion as "is a 20 hour game long or short".
If you game whole days its short.. if not then long ;)

No... It's not even similar. The game's only enjoyment IS NOT it's unlock system. Once you unlock everything (as absurd as that is at the current rates.. you'd have to spend hundreds if not thousands of $ and game-hours) you still have a game to play. Arguably a BETTER game since now you have access to the ENTIRE game, not just pieces of it. You won't die over and over in a situation because you still need to grind 30 hours to get the weapon that would give you the ability to deal with said situation for one thing...

My problem with Planetside2 is that it's dangerously close to Pay-To-Win. I'd say it has already crossed the line since the best weapons are NOT sidegrades for the most part, and they are very expensive.

Easton Dark:

VladG:

There's also performance to take into account... you kinda need a strong rig to play it. On a PC that runs BF3 on high-ultra I had to turn everything to Low in order to barely get 30 FPS in Planetside2. I don't know if there's any more optimization SoE could have done, the game is massive... but it's still quite a high entry barrier.

What? I just have a single 580 card and I run everything but shadows on high with, I dunno, 50-60fps. How is it you can play BF3 on those settings but not this? This game's probably a bit more CPU intensive...

.

What? The game runs fine on an expensive, high-end card? Noway!

As for the answer to that question: Op-ti-meh-zay-shun! Kinda the point I was trying to bring across with the BF3 comparison.

erttheking:
Such a shame that I don't have a PC. Hey, can anyone point me to where I can get software to run PC games on a Mac?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boot_Camp_(software)

Install boot camp, install windows, play games.

your mileage may vary though based on what kinda mac you have and the individual games

OT: I am enjoying the game now that I have given it a few hours chance, it starts out a bit harder to compete as a free player but once you get into it, start to upgrade your abilities it is a lot of fun

And the fun only increases as you join an outfit and get into the teamwork aspect

VladG:

What? The game runs fine on an expensive, high-end card? Noway!

As for the answer to that question: Op-ti-meh-zay-shun! Kinda the point I was trying to bring across with the BF3 comparison.

My baby's expensive and high end? *pets* Compliments are good for its coat.

And uh... optimization. Did Battlefield 3 run as good as it does now at launch?

I'm going to have to weight in on the pay2win side here. Although you CAN unlock stuff with certs rather than money, that doesn't make it not pay2win. The whole "you're just trading money instead of time" argument is a strawman and a pretty poor one at that.

What it comes down to is that, if you earn 1000 certs and buy an utterly necessary weapon (and there are several of these unless you plan to significantly limit your playstyle), somebody who spent money bought the weapon and spent the 1000 certs on upgrading it (or whatever). So their weapon, passives, health etc. are better than yours. Chances are, with the nice toys, they're probably earning certs faster than you too.

Unless you pay, you simply cannot keep up. That's what it comes down to. It's about as pay2win as it gets and, personally, I'm already seeing falloff in player numbers as the initial spike realises how much they're going to have to spend and/or how little they're going to enjoy the game without paying.

There's a darned good reason that PS1 ran the reserves program. In PS2, unless you pay (and pay regularly - it's only out for a couple of weeks and they've already released several new weapons and upgrades), a f2p player is basically an even more gimped reserve... and the reserves were gimped enough as it was.

/crystalball - I forsee server merges...

On another note, the lack of meta-game is a killer, rendering most actions pretty much pointless. In PS1, the lattice system (which could certainly have been improved) ensured that grabbing and holding bases was meaningful and, by acting strategically you could "own" continents by the simple expedient of taking all the bases and defending the one base that the enemy could attack. It's not exactly a win, but owning all the conts and sanc-locking your enemy was what every faction aspired to.

With the new system, it's actually advantageous to let your enemy have bases, because you can cap them back for a ton of XP and certs. And with nonlockable warpgates on every continent, the entire game is basically an endlessly ongoing game of whack-a-mole with very little to strive towards.

I'll play it. But as it stands, I've got FAR less investment than I had in PS1, so I'll play it less and I certainly won't pay any significant amount into it.

Nocturnus:
Stuff about not pay2win.

Hey there... just a few comments on the unlocks.

If you play a heavy trooper, you get a default, dumb-fire rocket launcher (with rocket drop) to kill vehicles. Except the rockets are so slow that the only people you're going to kill are stationary, camping morons. And probably not even them, because it takes like 5 rockets (over 30 seconds) to get the kill. But you're not going to get ANYBODY that's half awake unless you surprise him with half a squad. And since tanks are cheap and plentiful (and can now be driven by a single dude), there's absolutely no reason to bother. Pull a tank yourself, or quit wasting time and go somewhere else. On the other hand, if you BUY the lock-on rocket launcher, you can make that tank's day miserable with just two dudes and it becomes a lot more doable.

Don't even think of taking on air vehicles with ground based AA. The devs have already said that all ground based AA is only a "deterrent" to air vehicles. Anybody that's not retarded and is making strafing runs at decent speed has nothing to fear from ground based AA (most of which falls into the BUY bracket because of price). The devs say that to kill air you must play air. Fine for real life, stupid in a game. But, oh wait... the A2A rockets are ALSO in the BUY category. Funny thing, that.

Certs are power. Assuming relatively equal skill levels, the dude with the most certs will generally win the fight. If you BUY cert boosters or pay a subscription you get more certs and you get them faster. Nice, huh?

I know they have to incentivise paying, but what they're really doing is de-incentivising anybody that won't or can't pay. That's going to lead to low pops, poor fights, server merges, life-support for a few years, then closed down.

What it's NOT going to lead to is pulling in the BF/COD crowd, so many of the changes they made t(which annoy the PS1 vets) are not going to be useful and will simply result in reducing the hardcore PS1 people that are left.

erttheking:
Such a shame that I don't have a PC. Hey, can anyone point me to where I can get software to run PC games on a Mac?

There is a mac version planned at some point in the future. At what point is another matter though.

Personlly I do find the gameplay fun, its just that I'm playing on a laptop with doesn't meet the recommended requirements. The result is that it gets unplayable in the larger battles. As such all I can really do is wonder around the empty parts of the map and attack lone bases.

So unless they optimise things for us low spec players I don't think I can play for much longer.

I tried to love this game, I really do. But it's just so completely unbalanced and Pay2Win...

The game is just filled with high-level players in their gunships and heavy tanks farming new players. And you know what? You can't deal with them, ever, because they have the best weapons available and you've got shit.

The heavy gets a dumb-fire missile launcher that needs 6 direct hits to kill a light tank. Oh, and did you know one of the factions has hovering Heavy tanks that can strafe, evading these missiles with no effort whatsoever?

Liberators are gunships that hover 800m up in the air and kill everything that moves. With thermal or IR vision upgrade, nothing is safe for them. AA-turets you find in bases? Completely useless. You'll get killed in 3 seconds if a Liberator shoots at you, and you need 3-4 magazines to kill him if you have 100% accuracy.

And don't even try doing these things as a new player. You'll get mauled in seconds. Stock vehicles suck completely. You'll lose every tank battle because you need to place 7-8 hits on the enemy, and he kills you in 3.
You can't pilot the aircraft, because all you get are shitty stock machineguns that are very inaccurate and deal nearly no damage. And any higher lvl player, or a pay2winner can just effortlessly shoot you down with guided or unguided rockets.

This is what the game is about: Battlerank 30-40 players in Magriders or Liberators standing around your spawnpoint farming infantry for 100 certifications (the ingame currency) / hour.
If you're not willing to fork in several dollars/euro's for all the fancy equipment, your sole purpose in this game is to act as easy points for those who do.

Worst. MMO. Ever.

TheBelgianGuy:

Worst. MMO. Ever.

I don't know about "ever," but I played the first one in 2003 for 3-4 years. I couldn't stand PS 2 beta for more than 3-4 weeks. I was so excited when I found about the sequel, and then so disappointed that it was nothing like the original. Even if I were still a young 20 something with little responsibility and lots of free time I wouldn't bother.

Can you believe that in their EverQuest glory days SoE was like the #2 Game Publisher in the US? They've fallen from grace for a reason, they cannot deliver and they cannot be trusted to do the right thing; they need to just go under and be gone already.

Played the beta of this and enjoyed it a bit, even though I'm not much of an FPS person. I'm interested to see where it goes, though. After a bit of optimization to make it run a little faster than a turtle in a pool of Jell-o, and some balancing and tweaks, it could turn out to be a heck of a fun experience.

I'm not sure if SoE is that smart, though. By the time they get around to doing all of this, the game will probably be dead because the supply of new players will dry up after the word gets out that the player is mostly useless without shelling out money.

xDarc:

TheBelgianGuy:

Worst. MMO. Ever.

I don't know about "ever,"

Granted, I haven't played every MMO to ever come out so that's hardly a fair thing to say from my part :p

I just really wish it was a better game, because the concept is amazing.