Planetside
Experimental and Defiant MMO-FPS from Sony Online Entertainment
Several days later, the twitching has calmed down to the point where I can put, er, finger to keyboard and recount some of the horrors of war that took place on the previously mentioned Massively Planetside walking tour. As expected, it did indeed turn out to be quite a harrowing ordeal, but interesting, and quite a lot of fun too.
For some reason most likely rooted in deep-seated masochistic tendencies, a large gang of the staffers over at Massively decided not only to have a go at Planetside, but to do so in such a fashion that everyone else on...
Well, this one is peculiar:
Massively: Come frag Massively in Planetside!
In which the various writers and staff of the Massively online magazine thing go on a jolly company outing to Auraxis. I can only assume that this is some kind of disciplinary measure, ("Right! You're all going into Planetside, until *someone* owns up!"), given the wide diversity and breath of games in which the Massively-ers play and write. Some of those folks have only ever played Second Life! Oh the humanity!
The event looks to be partnered with SOE in some fashion, and the hapless Pro-Bloggers look to be getting some...
Bringing you the Planetside news that no-one else can be bothered to, I found this in my inbox just now: Greetings Soldiers of Auraxis! With the goal of maintaining a high level of battle between the three Empires of PlanetSide, the two North American servers, Markov and Emerald, will be merged into one server, Gemini, on May 20, 2008. Starting today, as a part of a select group of past PlanetSide players, you will be able to log in for free until May 21,...
Certainly feels good to be back in the pandemonium of Planetside, and within minutes it was back to business with my long abandoned BR23 Terran Republic Sniper/Support chap. The very first thing that happened upon my arrival in a wall stairwell in the middle of Solsar, where presumably I'd last logged out in exhaustion, was the award of two medals! A nice welcome back, I was suddenly awarded the Two Year Veteran Award, and the Three Year one too, marking my loyal service for all to see on my shoulderpad.
Of course I'm a total fraud in this regard, since...
Just a quickie; seems that SOE have given everyone who ever played Planetside a free month, on the house. They could have done a better job of publicising it mind you, and I only found out about it by pure chance. Finding a serene beauty in dead and dying things as I sometimes do, I like to look in on the Planetside forums from time to time, and today, stumbled across this:
Planetside Forums: All Old Accounts Reactivated!
A quick check on my Station.com accounts page does indeed show that I'm entitled to play Planetside gratis until 20th Jan 2008. I...
Why does everybody suddenly want to hear what I have to say these days?
And by that, I don't mean it in a figurative sense, as in read my blog and consider the ideas sometimes presented here. No, I mean literally, hear my voice. It's always been a constant low-grade irritation for me, probably dating back from my first days in a proper Planetside outfit. Those didn't last long mind you, but often I'd be nagged at to 'get on TS', as if me suddenly being able to hear the vague and general non-specific warnings and orders would in some...
So, there you go. More or less a year after unrolling the Planetside: Reserves program, SOE have now discontinued free access to the game for all Reserve station accounts, bringing the year-long free trial of the obscure MMO-FPS to an end. To be honest, I'm rather surprised, figuring it was going to be like the Anarchy Online one - effectively free for ever, but contractually obliged to declare it in year-long blocks for some reason. Seems I was wrong, and for you, Reservist, the war is over.
Current Reserves accounts are now locked, although can apparently still be unlocked and upgraded...
Some days later than advertised, the Advanced Combat Engineering toys are finally here in Planetside. I was particularly enthusiastic about these, as to be honest, I'm not terribly good at pointing guns at people and pulling the trigger in a manner that results in someone other than me getting shot to death. Mine-laying on the other hand...now you're talking!
I'm also quite conscientious about keeping our teams vehicles and base turrets in a good state of repair, although mostly this has been a rather dogged exercise, mostly with the aim of stopping the base using up all it's NTU trying...
Good news, everyone! The top boffins in the Planetside equivalent of Q's Workshop have been hard at work coming up with new, innovative, and hopefully very comical, ways for Combat Engineers to blow up other people, and the fruits of these labours are soon to be unleashed:
OGRank: Planetside: Deployables are coming!
The new toys come in the form of two new certifications, which presumably will tack on the end of the existing Combat Engineering Certification:
Engineering (3) -> Combat Engineering (2) -> Fortification Engineering (3)
Engineering (3) -> Combat Engineering (2) -> Assault Engineering (3)
Looks like you'll be able to buy both Assault...
Purely by chance, I ended up taking part in one of Planetside's "Rabbit Ball" events last night. They've been doing these for a while now, in an attempt to spice up and vary the day-to-day base-capture board-game of the usual session in there.
I'd been pottering about on the smaller peripheral fights, going where-ever the 'Instant Action' sends me, as I tend to do, and mostly found myself bouncing between various small incursions into friendly (NC in my case) continents with perhaps less than ten highly mobile recon/assault troops on each side. I tend to do best in the bigger...
Still quite enjoying Planetside, having settled back into my regular reservist character on Werner NC. It's the one featured in the Medal Case link to the right, and having gained a fair degree of competence with the Rocklet Rifle, I'm determined to get a medal for actually killing things myself. All my present medals are mostly from the Support Category, gained indirectly - by helping other soldiers kill stuff in some manner, reflecting the somewhat lazy and back-footed play style I normally enjoy.
For me, it's not really about charging out there, guns blazing and racking up hundreds of +1 to...
Old news now, of course, in this whirling helter-skelter of Information Superhighways and what not:
Slashdot: eBay Virtual World Delisting Skips Second Life
All quite complicated, and still on-going I think, but the basic gist of it is that the megalithic online car-boot sale that is eBay, has decided that it wants nothing more to do with the mind-wrenching conceptual hijinks that is Online Virtual Asset Ownership, and have decided to just pull the lot. Including imaginary stuff from Ultima Online, which is actually allowed to be traded in this manner, and yet not including imaginary stuff from Second Life...
Seems that it's not just a case of the lights being on but no-one being home:
OGRank: Planetside: what is coming in the near future
A small heads-up, and "we're not dead!" shout out from the Planetside Development team, detailing some of the upcoming development work we, the ever-dwindling members of the three Auraxian armies can expect some patch day soon. It's a good list, particularly from my perspective, since my, frankly abysmal, FPS Skillz often tend to drive me toward the tactical planning and forethought of Combat Engineering for my kills, so any new toys there will probably be be...
On a whim, and reminded by my 'Highpoint of 2006' post, I popped into Planetside last night, for a bit of a look about, see how the old dog is getting on. Going with lowest population team as usual saw me on my Vanu Sovereignty Light Infantry/Repair guy, and as usual after a long period of not-playing, I sucked mightily, and for the next couple of hours got quite convincingly humiliated left right and centre.
For their part, the remaining players still dukeing it out on Werner must have been, in some tiny way, thrilled to have an opponent that...
Well, I'm finally caught up on my RSS from the few seasonal weeks off I took, and it does seem quite a bleak kind of season, particularly the 'round-up' type posts, with most of us still playing games from 2005 and further back, not impressed with any new titles released in 2006, and not especially looking forward to anything scheduled for 2007. Lean times, and the Year of The Expansion indeed.
The Podnositcator's holiday special, including interviews with a great many other MMO podcasters, seems to sum this mood up quite well, and can be found here:
Virgin Worlds Podcast #45
(Episode #46,...
Sure enough, Planetside saw the previously mentioned Halloween rules applied to one of the Battle Islands last night, and I did indeed get to have a go. A curious experience, to say the least.
The only equipment allowed in play consisted of the following: Infiltration Suit, Med Kit, REK, Nano Dispenser. The only vehicles were Wraith, ANT and AMS. This made the Knife and running people over, the only forms of attack. Each of the three bases on the island was set to one team, and if another ‘captures’ it, it instantly reverts back to the pre-assigned team automatically, making a...
I really don’t get Halloween. To me, in the UK, it’s always seemed a rather lacklustre and unremarkable affair, primarily manifested by the necessity to hide, in one’s own home, so that the roving gangs of 13-17 year old juvenile delinquent thugs think that you’re out, and move on to demand money with menaces…err…'Trick or Treat' elsewhere. At least at Christmas they have to sing a bit first. Humbug indeed!
In MMO-land however, it’s a much grander affair, and curiously, usually seems more meticulously and lavishly observed than anything Dec 25th has to offer. I can only imagine that this is...
Here are some folks who aren’t happy:
Slashdot: Battlefield 2142 to Bundle Spyware?
And a more detailed and empassioned call to arms here:
Heartless Gamer: Voting With Your Wallet
Now technically, all this kerfuffle is somewhat outside my jurisdiction. The upcoming Battlefield: 2142 isn’t really an MMO as such – more a LAN-Game, but this current drive by EA to cram the thing with so many adverts that it’s very flesh starts to warp and twist, and then still have the guts to charge the punters full retail box-price for it, does seem very familiar somehow.
I’ve been here before:
Van Hemlock: The Day of Reckoning
Van...
I’m not quite sure what’s gotten into Planetside lately – you get nothing for over a year, and then all of a sudden, two events come along a week:
Planetside Players: Event Calendar (Via OGRank)
Two more events, and the implication that Tuesdays and Thursdays are ‘Event Nights’ now, all of which seemed to be meeting a somewhat mixed reaction. The Home Defence event will see one randomly selected empire artificially placed on the back foot, having to hold their two home maps, while the other two empires try to capture one each within the set time span - a GM-accellerated Zero-basing,...
Population in Planetside is in something of a precarious state these days. Each map allows a maximum of 133 players from each team on it, then locks the rest out, making 400 in total, give or take a few.
Once upon a time, when it was new and interesting, and the majority of players hadn’t been so comprehensively owned that their spirits, and patience, had given up completely, it was a more thriving place. The empire-lock was higher, around 166 per team, making map fights of 500 players a common thing, and sometimes on as many as four maps at once.
Time...
Another successful outing in Planetside last night, with my ‘Florence Nightingale’ character, detailed previously. Some quite hectic fighting on Ceryshen – the awkward icy ravine-based one, and one of the stagnant three-way fights that seem to be quite typical of late.
It’s understandable of course – if 70-90% of all enemy troops are having a private fight between themselves someplace elsewhere, it does rather leave your own team with little to do but sit on their hands in Sanctuary, splinter off in to dozens of small squads and start hacking empty and unattended enemy bases, or just mount up and pile...
Fancying something a little bit different, I rolled up a new soldier in Planetside last night. That’s one of the good points of being a Reservist – ‘alting’ becomes quite trivial to do, as ramping a completely new character up to BR4 takes minutes in the VR Training area, and BR5 and BR6 come swiftly thereafter, and also you don’t have the responsibility of a BR25 CR5 character sat in the next character slot down, that you’ve worked hard to achieve, and really ought to be using.
I picked NC, as they seem to consistently have the lowest population on my...
In a pleasingly symmetrical experience to that of my last post, I also spent a mind-ravaging amount of time visiting towers in Planetside as well recently. The two games work well together, I’m finding, and most nights I’ll put in an hour or two of ultra-harsh ballistic mayhem before grabbing a bite to eat, and then relaxing with a good virtual plywood-based tinkering project. I’m not sure if this makes me more of a rounded human being, per se, but certainly a more balanced kind of obsessive online escapist at any rate.
Two towers in particular occupied much of my most...
I’m still playing Planetside at the moment, which manages to retain a great deal of appeal for me as a kind of ‘drop-in’ MMO, of sorts, and gave it a good run around the block last night. However, not being a ‘regular’ there anymore, in that I don’t spend fifteen hours a week in there, I find my sessions are quite different these days.
Loyalty was perhaps the first thing to go, and thanks to their relaxing of the rules regarding how many empires you can have characters on, on any given server, from only two, to all three, I’ve become...
Decided to take the night off of Second Life the other night, and go for a bit of a wander. I’m still quite surprised how much of a draw the ‘Metaverse’, as they keep liking to call it, has on me actually. Getting on for seven years into The Grind, in various different guises, I sometimes wonder if SL wasn’t the sort of thing I’d been looking for all along.
It stems from not really having the temperament for long sustained repetition activity I guess – I’ve never really been able to knuckle down and actually grind mobs for any...
We’re a few weeks in to the Planetside: Reserves thing now, and it does look to have been something of a success. Both anecdotally, and from my own experience, numbers seem to be significantly up, with two continent locks a frequent sight now, and substantial fighting on a third – something not seen since shortly after initial release over two years ago. However, it is worth noting that originally Planetside had five servers, instead of today’s three, and that the number of players required to lock a continent used to be somewhere around 500, rather than today’s 400. Still, the...
Seems the Planetside: Reserves FAQ has just been updated:
Planetside.com: FAQ
It's today! Still no idea where you ned to go to get hold of everything - more as I find out. It really is the sort of thing any MMO gamer ought to see for themselves at least once though, and now is your chance. Look out for rudimentary newbie guides and battle report features here next week!
Some more details about the upcoming Planetside freebie deal:
OGRank: Planetside Free for 12 Months - Part 2
So there – it’s not ‘Fodderside’ it’s the ‘Planetside Reserves’. The deal still looks pretty good to be honest, although the BR seems to have come down since my last post about how high it was.
BR6 should provide about 11 cert points, if they’ve not changed it any since I was there last. Some example 11 point cert builds:
Medium Assault – 2 (required for HA below)
Heavy Assault – 4
Reinfocred Exosuit – 3
Anti-Air Max - 2
A good solid base assault grunt, carrying the heaviest infantry...
Here's the real problem with Planetside (from the PS Forums):
How long have you been playing Planetside?
88 Vote(s) - Since Beta (34%)
80 Vote(s) - Since Launch, May 2003 (31%)
48 Vote(s) - Started between August-December 2003, (Core Combat - October 2003) (19%)
19 Vote(s) - Started between January-June 2004 (7%)
9 Vote(s) - Started between July-December 2004, (Aftershock - October 2004) (3%)
12 Vote(s) - Started between January-June 2005 (5%)
0 Vote(s) - Started between July-December 2005 (0%)
2 Vote(s) - Just started January 2006 (1%)
Total Votes: 258
A vicious circle of self-constricting Pareto's Principle then, as the longer it is since beta, the harsher it is for...
Planetside is bought to you this week by: The Switchblade!
According to the General Forum, which is always a good place to find out which weapon iss currently overpowered, this Core Combat deployable hoverbike turrety thing seems to have accidentally been given as much armour as a medium battle tank, but only costs one cert, travels at 80kph and can be deployed for wholesale infantry slaughter. Vroom vroom!
"Saigon, shit. I'm still only in Saigon. Every time I think I'm going to wake up back in the jungle. When I was home after my first tour, it was worse. I'd wake up and there'd be nothing... I hardly said a word to my wife until I said yes to a divorce. When I was here I wanted to be there. When I was there, all I could think of was getting back into the jungle. I've been here a week now. Waiting for a mission, getting softer. Every minute I stay in this room I get...
From the latest Planetside update notes:
"Combat Engineer Window: We added a Combat Engineer window for viewing deployables. You can toggle the C.E. window by pressing Alt-E by default (remappable in the global keymap list of the Options page). This window shows how many mines, boomers, motion sensors, and spitfire turrets the player has deployed, along with the deploy limits."
Theres also some nonsense about 'Rabbit Ball' tweaks too, their latest atempt to make War interesting. I've always thought that the basic game, you know, the attacking and defending of fortified bases in a combined arms setting, was heap...
I’ve been thinking some more about the whole in-game advertising thing, and think there might be a second way to deal with it. Certainly boycotting games with adverts in will force the advertisers to give up and walk away, but will also have the unfortunate side effect of leaving a dead shattered carcass of a game behind, with not enough players to warrant its continued existence.
That would be a shame, because before some high-flying media psychologist even noticed us, we were, on the whole, fairly happy with the games we’d chosen. The fact that in this case, it’s Planetside is...
I don't want to say 'I told you so!' or anything, but:
Van Hemlock: The Acceptance of Defeat
Well, it seems that day is finally here, or at least right around the corner.
EQ2 Forums: Screenshot of Planetside In-Game Advert
Planetside Forums: Disembling In-Progress
Massive Incorporated: Don't Hate Us Because We're Profitable
I know, I know, this all happened a while ago, but so much Stoopid happened while I was away that it's difficult to catch up. I really didn't want to let this one go though, because it's not often I get proven right. I mean playing for free, but enduring adverts is one thing;...
During the last month or two, I’d been focusing my online obsession on Planetside. My interests come and go, and I tend to flit from title to title, dabbling in all of them, and not really getting that far in any of them, but Planetside, with its drop-in style of play and almost negligible career progression is slightly unusual in my experience, in that it’s the first, and only online game that I’ve actually won!
By ‘won’, I mean ’have gained enough Experience Points to reach the maximum level’, Battle Rank 23. Don’t get me wrong; I am not bragging here,...
It's that time again:
Planetside Stratics: Dev Q&A
When you see as much ill-informed and shamelessly biased messageboard soapboxing as I do, you really start to appreciate hearing what the people who actually matter have to say, so these are always quite interesting. This time around, the focus seems to be on balancing the Air Cavalry units, and not before time, if you ask me.
Planetside is largely based around the ideal of combined arms action, at least in theory anyway - infantry, transport, armour, aircraft, and yes, even the big stupid robots, all working in a co-ordinated capacity to get things done....
Planetside is two years old! Fancy that. I remember hearing about the premise behind it way back in the day and telling myself I'd NEVER go near it - a game where all there is to do, is PvP? That's mad! That can't possibly work!
Shows how much I know; while certainly no World of Warcraft, SirBruce has it's current numbers at a steady 50-60 thousand subscribers, (and in theory, everyone with an Axis Pass), and largely it seems unaffected by any other online game. It's easy to see why - it occupies a strange genre-vacuum somewhere between Counter Strike and...
I got a medal!
I've no idea how long I've been playing Planetside now...it seems like decades, but my personal record in the 'Merit Commendation' stakes is pretty poor so far. To date, my only one has been the 'Has Still Not Given Up After A Year' Distingushed Cross, which is hardly a glittering accolade of leet pwnage skillz.
It's not that I don't put the effort in, it's just that I'm nowhere nearly as cold and calculating about kills as everyone else. I'll invariably charge into the fray, take the incoming Super-Soldier down to 10% health, and get killed. Then the...
Nothing witty today - I'm recoverning from a 4 A.M. finish in Planetside. It was one of those infamous 'Just One More Go' moments that video game enthusiasts the world over will recognise with trepidation. In my case it was 'I'll stay until we've taken this base' - a process that can take from fifteen minutes to, as I discovered last night, five hours! And we still hadn't secured the adjoining Tower.
Numbers on Werner server are low enough at that time of night that there is only ONE fight going on, so everyone is faced with a choice of a...
Another rough weekend in Planetside, culumnating in the absolute destruction of any vestiges of self-esteem I may have had by the end of last week. It's a simple logical process to follow:
I play Planetside.
I get 'pwned' repeatedly at Planetside.
I lose any self-respect I may have had.
I hate myself.
I hate Planetside.
I punish myself by making myself play Planetside.
GOTO 10
It's extremely damaging, and very unhealthy, but I can't seem to break the cycle, and hence I'm still there, putting myself through it, night after night. It's a personal psychosis, but I can't help wondering if it's just me, or whether anyone else...
Good greif:
Planetside Forum Nerds
So about 13,000 players in an online game killed about 1.4 million people over the space of 30 days, even if that 1.4 million was made up of the former 13,000, many times. So on average, during that month, each player killed 1000 enemies. It seems pretty staggering when you take a step back.
Just for context, around 6 million British Servicemen took part in World War II, and over the five years of the European conflict, 1939-45, 3.3 million German troops died in battle. (Source: Infoplease)
No witty quip...Real war is not something to be made light of,...
So a quick recap of The Blogless Days, just in case anyone is wondering what I’d been up to in the intervening months.
Canceled Planetside; reason cited this time:
“Big Robots, Bombers and Artillery make the game very unenjoyable for Infantry”
Which I thought was a fair and objective assessment, despite me usually being the first grunt to get hit by the bomb/megadeath plasma shell/big robot foot. However, this recent patchnote made me perk up a bit, and I may be back there some month soon. It still remains one of the more unique and awe-inspiring online experiences currently on offer,...