That was AWSOME! Just shared on twitter - https://twitter.com/AndySites/status/1237810668633382912
The publish was scheduled to start at 9am Pacific. So yes, we are on-track.
"Facility capture FX have been optimized."
Is that the biolab capture animation that causes a 50% frame rate loss when looking at it ? Mainly on AMD cards.
yes, this and other capture optimizations
You hear people say, "I eat, breathe and sleep
I can say with 100% certainty, that Wrel actually eats, breathes and sleeps Planetside. The amount of thought and effort he puts into every single thing he does for Planetside 2 each day (nights and weekends included) is well above and beyond expectations that any reasonable person would have.
... Highest Ranking recently active Outfit member
Whats recently active? The same 180 days that define inactivity?
Yes - that’s the lowest bar. If an Outfit Leader is denoted for inactivity, the next highest ranking officer with the most tenure in the Outfit gets auto-promoted, so long as they are still active.
The tutorial is ... not good, about 4 years out of date, and very hacked together, but just disabling it without having anything to replace it?
Especially now that you expect quite a few new players?
Look, I am not in your position, nor trying to tell you how to do you job, but this choice seems so very strange.
It’s largely about returning players as well - those we don’t want to tutorial-block to jump back in with new characters.
But yes, it’s a temporary measure and we’ll be working on something new to replace it.
No points for last minute resecures is just going to encourage more offensive zerging and no QRF gameplay.
This has been considered, and we're willing to change it in the future depending on how the meta shakes out. What we need to gauge during this initial pass is how strongly players are willing to maintain territory their outfit owns. The fastest way for large outfits to earn resources won't be to zerg down a lattice, but to split up their forces to cover the most ground. Whether or not they'll know how or be willing to do this remains to be seen.
Some controls we have access to are not only the tick rates and capture values, but we can also enable "defensive captures" which allow outfits who resecure a base to put their name on it. This would help enable that QRF gameplay you're talking about, and would undoubtedly create more faction infighting, as some outfits would wait until bases have almost been captured before swooping in for a resecure, but it could be exciting, too.
Goal wise, if we can create fights at bases you don't normally see around the map, and movement is more fluid ...
Read moreThe Tutorial has been disabled
So, do you plan to work on that soon?
Good job RPG team with this, cannot wait to see how it's going to play on Live.
We have a lot of ideas for how to rework the tutorial and general NPE, particularly now with Sanctuary providing a space in-game for content and functionality outside of the main game. It'll likely be more of a full rework than an update on the current tutorial, though, so something potentially for one of our next major updates after Escalation launches.
We have a handful of articles going out tomorrow that have more detailed information on the different components of the update. Until then though, Outfit Wars scoring works as follows:
- Facilities and Large Outposts are now worth 15 points on capture, and 6 points per tick.
- Small Outposts and Construction bases are now worth 5 points on capture, and 2 points per tick.
Like outfit resources, outfits who own the base get ticks every 5 minutes, whereas you only need to participate in a base capture in order to get the capture points for it.
Scoring in general will definitely need clearer messaging, and points tuning will undoubtedly take place after this beta season is over. Player behavior is guide a lot of those decisions.
Regarding your other questions...
Does the extra starting an alert and ending on count towards the points too?
Yes.
If another outfit scores enough to join OW, can I leave my outfit and just join them instead?
You can, yes. Though realize that there are ...
Read moreUPDATE @ 3:45PM (Pacific) - All North American and Asia servers are unlocked. The EU server maintenance is still in progress, but we believe it should be wrapping up soon and we will unlock immediately.
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UPDATE @ 1:25PM (Pacific) - We encountered the same issues with our CDN (Content Delivery Network) provider that caused us to postpone our PTS playtest last week. As a result, the Escalation update cannot be downloaded. We've submitted tickets to their ops team to resolve ASAP. For now, we are waiting for an ETA from them for the issue to be resolved. Will update once we have more details.
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UPDATE @ 11:15AM (Pacific) - As you might know, Daybreak TechOps team is performing a multi-game (PS2, EQ and H1Z1) server hardware move in our EU data center to a new data center about 10 mins away. They expected a 12 hour downtime, but it has been extended due to technical issues. They are now expecting to be c...
Read moreThat's bizarre. This is new to us - thank you for the heads up.
Will you be able to choose these new languages from the EU client aswell? I have a chinese friend who lives in germany and who would love to play the game in chinese
You will be able to select any language from any client.
Not Russian or Chinese speaking, but how do you handle moving forward as more things are added and more content needs to be translated?
This is specifically the text translations that are in progress right now (HUD, weapons, descriptions, etc). This does not include voice-packs, etc.
They are basic strategies, but the engagement credit goes to the PS2 community who have been incredible at getting the word out - sharing, posting, RT'ing, etc. Can't thank you guys enough for your all your support of everything we're doing right now!
It's been a few weeks since we announced our decision to proceed with full Russian and Chinese translations for PS2, so I wanted to give a quick update on the process.
As of this morning, the company we contracted to do the initial translations should have everything back to us by the end of the month (March). Once we've received the drop, there is still a few weeks for integration and bug fixing. At this rate, barring any surprises, we should be on-track for a mid/late-April release of the new translations. However, I'll post an update later this month, once we've had a chance to integrate and get a better estimate on the work needed.
If you have any questions, feel free to ask.
Thanks,
Andy
The Daybreak TechOps team just notified us that they are investigating a login issue that impacting all games right now. The same thing happened Saturday night and they are trying to determine the root cause, so it doesn't keep happening again.
Indeed this is caused by a bugged implant. We have this tasked out currently, though a fix probably won't make it in for the Escalation update.
Thank you for the in depth reply. I absolutely agree that the core problem is orphaned squads and not necessarily having autojoin checked by default.
It's just that escalation will bring in a lot of new players and I feel like the implementation of automatically disbanding orphaned squads will not make it in with the update. Sorry I should have been more clear about this, but when I suggest to have autojoin toggled off be default, it's only as a temporary measure as long as orphaned squads are still prevalent. I personally agree that once orphaned squads are dealt with, it should absolutely be checked by default. I disagree though that currently it is doing more good than harm as a greater proportion of mentor squads are orphaned which means the probability of being placed in an orphaned squad is higher. Though to be fair this is anecdotal evidence, and if you have actual data on the proportions and how they change over time then I would change my position on the topic.
Perhaps a compromise is to have it unchecked be default at least until orphaned squads are auto disbanded and then have it re-enabled.
Again, thank you for the response Wrel I really do appreciate it a lot. I go out of my way to help new players so I hope you can understand why I am so adamant on this topic.
Though to be fair this is anecdotal evidence, and if you have actual data on the proportions and how they change over time then I would change my position on the topic.
This is what it comes down to. This feature resulted in an uptick in average playtimes of new players at launch, and given the renewed interest of veterans to get new players into their squads and start showing them the ropes, it continues to make sense for us to leave this on for now. This problem is totally something we should resolve in the near term though, and I can make sure we look into the feasibility of getting it done with the next content update.
Read moreThis x1000, I'm actually very surprised this has received the silent treatment from the devs since it's such a major barrier to improving the NPE with such an easy fix. /u/wrel /u/a_sites everyone agrees this hurts the NPE, please consider having it unchecked by default.
everyone agrees this hurts the NPE, please consider having it unchecked by default
Prior to this "everyone agreed" that it would be helpful to have it on. And indeed, it has been more helpful than hurtful. However, the problem with orphaned squads is very real, and we will need to take steps to solve for that.
The current filter is that, new players that log into a game are placed into Mentor squads first, unless none can be found, in which case they're placed in a normal squad. With veterans being willing to help new players with Escalation, it's important that we have a way to get those new players into squads right out the gate.
One of the steps we should take in the future, is that if the mentor leaves the squad, we immediately disband it and place players into a new one. This way squads will stay filled with leaders who are intentionally creating these squads, instead of getting the orphaned, inherited squads you're seeing now.
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