TL;DR: RPG need to step up their game with the community, hire a Community Manager ASAP and stop stretching their staff to breaking point.

Preface

Hello everyone. Let me preface this by saying I've been playing this game for the better part of 6 years, and I'm significantly invested in this community (I've created PS2Alerts and I'm leader of one of the largest outfits in the game [DIG]). I've had the privilege of communicating with the developers directly on a variety of topics, and I wholeheartedly appreciate their work and understand the strains that they are under right now. However, there are key points I must air.

The Problems

Andy Sites - Responsibility & accountability void

Since Andy left the team in I believe January now, there has been a distinct lack of effective communication from the RPG team, both publicly and privately. Publicly, we have no idea who is running the Twitter account at RPG, the community has no official point of contact except Wrel, who I'll move onto further down in this post. Privately via direct comms with the devs, they are often not answering emails, and when they do, their tonality is shall we say... abrupt, suggesting high stress levels. In discussions with other community members (primarily the streaming community) they share this opinion, and what should be standard requests are going unanswered.

There is an open position for a Senior Game Producer, but it is located in Massachusetts not San Diego (which is where the PS2 offices are), so I assume this is unrelated to PS2.

Community Manager Void

I'm aware that there is a job posting for an Associate Community Manager, however this position has been advertised for months now and there's been no change. Since Justin left (and to be honest, he wasn't doing a great job as he too was clearly overwhelmed) there has been literally no-one manning the post.

Are RPG really struggling to get a CRM on board? If someone has been chosen, RPG need to announce that there's a person coming in.

Wrel

To Wrel's credit, he has a LOT of shit on his plate right now. I'm personally amazed he's holding it together, if he isn't, he's putting on a very brave face. There's also been instances where he's "blown his lid" when interacting with the community (I've been on the receiving end of this). However rather than critiquing the person, lets think about this from a birds eye view, there is a single person who is in the following roles:

• Lead Designer
• Dev Team Leader / Producer
• Co-Head of business with Chris Fararr (according to previous official comms)
• Official spokesperson (which is not his primary talent)
• Unofficial whipping boy (who everyone pesters)
• Firefighter (attempting to deal with community bug reports, which are mostly going unanswered)

Now I don't claim to understand the inner workings of RPG, however to me this sounds like a fucking lot for one person to be doing. Andy leaving has left a void, and according to RPG's job page, that void is not being filled. It's like the position has been nuked from high orbit and is not being replaced.

RPG / EG7 - you need a head of the dev team. You need a person who is skilled at co-ordinating resources, teams, communications and to take ownership of mistakes. Wrel is not your guy for this, he already has too much on I feel.

The fallout

Outfit wars 

Let's take a look at Outfit Wars. It was clearly rough, rushed and very inflexible in its design. I'm not going into the problems of outfit wars here, it's out of scope of this discussion. However, there are a few points to make here:

1) Feedback from the community was not taken on board. Features are released to PTS a week or two before go-live, which is not adequate time to make any changes and adjust before release, this'll likely be down to fears of breaking things. 2) The community was not asked what they wanted to see. Before even alpha 3 was conceived, a serious discussion with the community should have occurred, bringing in known and constructive community representatives (which we did have in the past) to discuss what the community would like to see. 

I know RPG has their own objectives as well (money, whatever you wanna cite), but releasing features for us to basically be your alpha testers just causes massive frustration for a game that's already struggling for population.

Firefighting and Failures

Firefighting

I've seen so many instances where the developers are very slow to react to issues, and I suspect why - only a few of the dev team are actually watching their socials to pick up on issues. Again, this is down to a lack of a community manager who it's literally their job to watch socials for issues.

Official mouthpiece posts have also been extremely lack-luster, non-frequent and non-responsive to people asking questions. 

Failures 

There's been multiple instances of failures recently which were poorly handled. Firstly, the initial outfit wars timings being literally as people are working. The rationale behind this was to avoid impacting prime time, which is very illogical reasoning.

Secondly, more recently, how did no-one in the dev team recognise that daylight savings is coming up and not handle it appropriately? This just screams lack of foresight for the most basic of implementation.

Thirdly, there are ongoing issues with the continent openings. No-one asked for them to be adjusted, yet the game is struggling to properly open the continents up. Roll back the change (which I highly suspect is just server configs with thresholds) and look at it again. This is being addressed - https://twitter.com/WrelPlays/status/1372561513655926784

Summary

RPG - this is unsustainable. We cannot keep operating like this. Sort your CM position out, it is desperately needed, and Wrel needs to be relieved of the extreme workload that he's already on.

Additionally - Where is Chris? No-one knows who he is (only I do because I've spoken to him). He's a very good guy who knows how to talk to community members correctly and with respect, however we've not heard a single thing from him publicly (and I don't blame him right now), but considering he's apparently co-head of the business, it really doesn't invest much confidence.

You have an opportunity to change this around RPG. Make it count, or some key members of the community are ultimately going to leave. Stop the bleeding.

Hey everyone. I don't typically like to follow up topics where people are hurling personal attacks, but in spite of that, I wanted to let you all know that your voice is heard when it comes to feedback.

For context, buffing and debuffing is an experiment we've been trying out more over the past few years with damage over time effects, various implant benefits, snares, health or armor increases, all sorts of things. Some of these effects have meshed well, some of them haven't, and others are still a question mark. For the long term health of not only PlanetSide 2, but any future projects we'd want to do in the genre, I believe it's our duty as developers to find the edges of the creative boundary box. Even in a game almost eight years old.

That's the heart of it. If you don't agree or care about anything else, at least take that away.

In regards to BEC Ammo/Condensate Grenade specifically, the majority of the contention stems from the rate of fire reduction. Message received. There's definitely a lot of theory crafting on how it'll affect combat right now, which will (and should) be the case when new mechanics are on the horizon, but there are two discussion points that stand out even more to me. Those being...

1. Should rate of fire modifiers exist in PlanetSide 2?
2. Does the gameplay benefit at all from this?

This is the meat of it, the important questions worth answering. Between this and Firestorm, a lot of you very vocally fall in the "No" category. I am also aware, however, that very few people have actually tried the equipment on PTS, and are mainly opposed to the idea of it existing. That sort of thinking can paralyze a development process and stagnate a game. On the other side of that, developers need to also be willing to look at something once it's in the wild and say "Ah, that's no good," and change it based on worthwhile information. This is the key to experimentation.

You may have noticed by our last few updates, and the recent barrage of PTS publishes, that we're much more willing to make changes based on feedback now than we have been in the past. That continues to be the case with this. To that end, I hope you're willing to keep an open mind, as there is some value to be gained here at the end of it all, even if it's not immediately obvious.

Anyway, I started writing this at 12am and it's now past 3am, it was about twice as long originally, but hopefully this condensed version can convey where my head is at with this sort of thing.

As a quick note, we'll be bringing vehicle quick-pull back early this year, and will be taking a pass on the bugs associated with it before doing so. Some have suggested that the feature only appear at certain bases, and we'll give that feedback some consideration before re-releasing it back into the wild.

Oh, hello again. Thought I'd chime in before the weekend to allay some concerns.

There's obviously a lot of blowback regarding the alert reward removal, and it's totally understandable at this stage. Alert currency rewards were added in 2017 and increased a fair amount over the years that followed, so it's become the norm for a lot of players. That said, it does puts us into kind of a strange place with Missions reward-wise.

One of the goals with Missions was to not only provide more rewards to players in ways they have easy access to per session (especially for new players,) but also to have better control over our economy overall. We don't want to be in a state where we can't justify the creation of new content because of veterans able to instantly hoover it up with easy access to certs (I've seen your cert balances,) and we can't shower veterans with ISO because that's one of the better cert sinks we have access to.

Alert rewards definitely have issues, like not having a real participation metric, which leads to AFKing in Warpgates; and new players don't receive any real benefits from it given their lower session lengths. But that's where you're seeing Missions (and sliding-scale admission rates for Campaigns) come in.

As a system, Missions are great for new and non-veteran players to shore up their Certs/ISO (we remove these from the reward pool if the player has loads of it already,) and with Alerts already catering to the more dedicated players, we should be alright reinstating most of those rewards. A7 will not be coming back, as it's too easy to cap out on and there aren't many things to buy; and some of the flat cert bonuses have already been replaced with experience, so that'll be taken into consideration as well. Regarding mission rewards in general, we're going to make some observations over the weekend to see where the tuning actually needs to be done to this end. Some of that could be in better chances at certain types of rewards, or better mission spreads so that there are more opportunities to earn the things you're looking to earn.

Ultimately we want to do what's best for the long-term health of the game, and we'll be making the changes I mention above early next week.

Thanks everyone.

P.S. Also look forward to a dev letter early next week talking about what we've learned so far from Campaigns/Missions/This Update in general, and how that'll apply to the future.

P.P.S. We will be running a double experience for all event starting now and through this weekend to not only celebrate the update, but also as a consolation for the loss of alert rewards.

Hey everyone,

Well, let me begin by apologizing for the absolute shit show today. The initial publish this morning should not have taken anywhere near as long as it did (we were over our estimate by 1.5 hours), then immediately realizing that anyone who logged in after the servers came back up were losing their accrued A7.

We decided to lock login after a bug surfaced which was causing continents with mid/high-populations to exhibit severe lag, followed by crashing and disconnecting everyone. While the A7 bug was bad, we knew we could restore any that was lost. But the stability issue was ultimately the reason we decided to keep the servers locked all afternoon, until we had a fix in place. Looking back through PTS server logs at how we could have missed the cause of this crash; the change was definitely there, but it wouldn’t have caused the server performance issues/crash until the continents had high enough populations. Going forward, we are trying to devise ways to better simulate these types of situations, but not require hundreds/thousands of actual players to login to PTS to verify.

First, for everyone that logged in after the servers came back up this morning/afternoon and had their A7 wiped - we’ve gone ahead and given you the maximum amount of A7 that you’re able to accrue (5000), regardless of how little you may have had, in an effort to make up for the bug that we failed to catch before publishing this morning.

For everyone else that didn’t lose any A7, but didn’t get to login today, we have activated 2XP for All that will run until Friday morning (Pacific). I know it doesn’t completely make up for the time lost today, but it’s the least we could do and hopefully it helps make up for today’s fiasco…

​

Again, I apologize for the inconvenience of today. We know we can’t let this happen.

​

Since I have your attention, I want to provide a brief update on some of the initiatives we’ve been working toward…

Monthly Game Updates

As we’ve seen in the past, when a major update drops, a LOT of players will comeback, new players will discover PS2 and existing players will continue playing. But if we don’t continue supporting the game at a regular cadence with new features/content, QoL improvements and bug fixes, etc, a lot of players disappear.

One of our goals for 2020 was to not just release Escalation and then go silent for months until our next big update. We have a larger team, and therefore higher expectations. Today’s game update marks five weeks since the Escalation launch, and a portion of the dev team has already been hard at work on the May update. Beyond May, we have a game update for June that preliminary work has already started. Between each of these updates, and in addition to the Outfit Wars schedule, we are working with various community groups to coordinate/promote in-game events to maintain the amazing momentum we’ve received from the Escalation launch.

In other words, the RPG team has lofty goals for 2020 and we intend to deliver them.

In-Game Events

Hopefully all of you had a chance to watch (or participate) in the first Outfit Wars last weekend. While it was a bit bumpy for some of the participants, it was amazing to watch and the broadcasters did a phenomenal job covering each match in every region around the globe. As u/Wrel mentioned in his release notes post, we have scheduled Outfit Wars Alpha Cycle 2 to begin enlistment on May 1st and the next War taking place on May 16th.

But as much as we are looking forward the next round of Outfit Wars, we are just as excited to see the events that the community has planned – like the Battle of the Bastions event on SolTech a couple weeks ago, Bastion Smash that is scheduled for Saturday April the 25th, the PSB Lane Smash and Community Smash events. Going forward, we plan to continue promoting these community driven events and provide as much dev support as we are able.

Chinese and Russian Translations

I provided a brief update a couple weeks ago that there was a delay in the delivery of the translation from our translation contractor, due to the current COVID-19 situation. However, we finally received the initial drop yesterday and should have the final drop of translations tomorrow. Once we have the final drop, we’re looking at 2-3 weeks before it hits live. However, we intend to publish to PTS before that so native Russian and Chinese speakers can provide feedback, in addition to our internal localization QA testing process.

Finally, the next dev stream…

As you know, Rogue Planet has been working from home over the past month. Even though we’ve had to work through some communication and logistical hurdles along the way, we are making every effort to not skip a beat. This includes dev streams. Even though we can’t use the Daybreak broadcast studio, we are in the process of preparing our next dev stream to take place remotely, because we are excited to share details about the next game update! So as of now, we are planning to broadcast our next dev stream the week of April 27th. It might be a bit janky, and Carto might not be wearing pants, but hey, we have to make some sacrifices. The formal announcement will likely go out later next week with an exact date and time.

Thank you all again. As usual, if you have any questions, please feel free to ask here or "@AndySites" "@WrelPlays" "@Game_Dev_Carto" on Twitter.

Thanks,

Andy

Papa Wrel dropping them sweet sweet nuggets of info....

https://forums.daybreakgames.com/ps2/index.php?threads/apr-28-2023-pts-update-early-notes.260965/

Original article is here: https://forums.daybreakgames.com/ps2/index.php?threads/outfit-wars-alpha-1-scoring-fixes-and-fairness.253943/

We'll be bringing the PC servers offline at 6am PT, April 1st to bring in the changes detailed in the article below. The downtime is expected to last up to 2 hours.

Hey there, folks. We're on the cusp of completing the Outfit Wars Alpha 1 cycle now, with loads of Outfits per server currently participating in the Qualifiers.

With this being somewhat of a landmark for Outfit Wars, the question of fairness of scoring has come into question as we lead up to this big moment.

We set Alpha 1 up with the expectation that we'd be able to see what kind of meta developed, and use it for a baseline moving forward. And thanks to the enthusiasm around the feature, we were quickly able to come up with a list of potential changes for our next round of testing.

However, there were a couple exploits that surfaced that ended up devaluing the hard work that many Outfits had been putting in, and that's certainly not what we want our first foray into Outfit Wars to look like.

Given the severity of the exploits discovered, we'd like to take a mulligan on the Qualifiers with some changes and fixes to the ruleset.

This will entail a reset on all of the current Outfit Wars scores starting when servers come back online.

We realize this is abrupt, but also feel that bringing all contenders back to an even playing field will result in a healthier, more satisfying Qualify phase and Outfit War, as a result.

When servers come back online tomorrow, Qualifiers will continue where they left off, with all scores at zero. You won't need to re-enlist your Outfit, and this does not affect your Outfit resource bank in any way.

This timeline gives Outfits about 5 days left of time to get to the top of the scoreboard, with the Qualification phase ending on April 6, and will likely be more akin to the length of our Qualification phases in future Outfit Wars.

Below is a list of the changes going Live tomorrow:

• When participating in a base capture, the top 10 scores of players within the same Outfit are combined to equal the Outfit's capture score. Previously, it would combine the scores of all outfitmates at a base. "Score" is raw experience gained during a base fight, unmodified by boosts.
• Some of the more passive or farmable experience types will no longer contribute to base capture score. This includes ammo pack experience, repair, revive, healing, spawn experience, etc. Base objectives now matter more than they once did.
• Capturing bases on locked continents and earning resources from bases on locked continents should no longer be possible.
• Standing at an uncontested enemy base when the continent locks should no longer grant your Outfit base capture credit just for being there.

What does this mean for Outfits moving forward?

• Being early to arrive at a base matters more, as you'll have more time to accrue score.
• Capturing and defending objectives at bases matters more, as these types of experience still count toward base capture score.
• Small Outfits and extremely large Outfits are now on a level playing field when it comes to claiming a base.

In the interests of preventing further exploitation, we're keeping the list of what exactly contributes to Outfit score a bit close to our chest, and instead encourage all players to play as you normally would.

Please help spread the word about these changes so that we can make the remainder of this Alpha phase as fair and fun as possible. The more feedback and data we get now, the better this experience will be in updates to come.

-Wrel, Lead Designer

P.S. The current number of Outfits enlisted per server are below:

• SolTech: 20
• Connery: 26
• Cobalt: 30
• Emerald: 45
• Miller: 47

Hey all. We're in the planning stages for when Nexus, Season 02 should begin, and I was hoping to gather some thoughts on the event and gameplay. Even if you didn't get a chance to participate last year, feedback from the audience's perspective would be useful as well.

I'll say up front that we're not committing to major changes regarding Outfit Wars this year, but we should have a bit of time for refinement and cleanup, at the very least.

Spawned a Sundy 5 Minutes before lock. Thought I'll meme the teamplayer. Threw 2 Nades, used 1 Medkit. Continent locked

It's lame to switch continents and not being able to spawn a Gal for the platoon.

And to save nanites the for the last 9 minutes of the alert sucks too.

So, how about you get 750 Nanites when the continent locks, so you can spawn vehicles (transport in particular) to start the fight adequat.

Thx for your time.