Planetside 2 Catch-All

Step 1) Spend 5 Points in the AMS Cert for the Sunderer
Step 2) Drive a Sunderer up to any battle and deploy it.
Step 3) Profit!! As you rack in the free XP for people using your Sunderer.

OK, super tempted by this.

Is the $39.99 early buy-in worth it for this F2P game?

Tkyl wrote:

Step 1) Spend 5 Points in the AMS Cert for the Sunderer
Step 2) Drive a Sunderer up to any battle and deploy it.
Step 3) Profit!! As you rack in the free XP for people using your Sunderer.

I used to do this with the galaxy but now I have to shift it over

El-Producto wrote:

OK, super tempted by this.

Is the $39.99 early buy-in worth it for this F2P game?

I did it and I was already in the beta.

I's pretty crazy how much a change like no Galaxy spawns can make. The ground battle are pretty awesome now. I've been in multiple fight where 10+ tanks are rolling into an enemy base with 3 sunderers. It's quite awesome.

So... about this whole "Planetside 2 Beta" thing. If one were to get an electronic mail suggesting that they were invited to said thing, is there anything that person would really need to know to facilitate the gathering of Goodjers and the shooting of space-mannes?

El-Producto wrote:

OK, super tempted by this.

Is the $39.99 early buy-in worth it for this F2P game?

If you're trying to get in to see if you like it, just monitor their twitter account. They give keys away to people who ask for them at times. It's sporadic, but they're still giving away keys.

Sniping with a x12 scope is like firing artillery. Trajectory? Check. Curve of Auraxis? Check.

I would spend 100 certs on a stronger secondary weapon for my sniper. This gun is not great for kills, but damn, does it have a cool suppressor.

Strangeblades wrote:

Sniping with a x12 scope is like firing artillery. Trajectory? Check. Curve of Auraxis? Check.

damn you been playing non stop since the restart? That's like 30 certs!

ranalin wrote:
Strangeblades wrote:

Sniping with a x12 scope is like firing artillery. Trajectory? Check. Curve of Auraxis? Check.

damn you been playing non stop since the restart? That's like 30 certs! :P

I took a medical leave of absence from my place of employment for mental reasons (psst, I'm coo-coo for Coco Puffs and for Planetside 2!)

I've got plenty o' time. I've earned so 55 or so certs so far. Working on my next 40 to get my grip for my sniper rifle, i.e., anti-personnel portable cannon.

so whats the use for a suppressor in this game? our shots dont show up on maps and there's so much fire it's not like your pop pop makes a difference

ranalin wrote:

so whats the use for a suppressor in this game? our shots dont show up on maps and there's so much fire it's not like your pop pop makes a difference

Shots show up on the map?

Strangeblades wrote:
ranalin wrote:

so whats the use for a suppressor in this game? our shots dont show up on maps and there's so much fire it's not like your pop pop makes a difference

Shots show up on the map?

on other games that have suppressors they're used to prevent your location showing up on players maps. That's NOT the case in PS2

I use a silencer on my pistol when I am soloing capping missions. The x12 scope is almost impossible to use except at the longest of ranges.

Has anyone had experience of using the sniper rifle as an extreme close range shotgun? Like putting the barrel up against an enemy and firing?

The sniper class needs some kind of better close range weapon. I know the class is about sneaking in, hacking and capping, especially when soloing, but he/she has got to get a better gun when indoors. Usually, when soloing, encountered enemies have full health and maxed shields, which makes it too tough for the pistol.

Well the suppressor I assume lowers or removes your tracer fire. Tracer fire is the easiest way to track a sniper after all. I thought the 12x scope was basically useless so I'm not getting it again. Although that was with the Vanu and their slow lasers, might be more useable now.

The NC sniper rifle is probable useless at close range but the Vanu one wasn't so bad. It was great for wrecking things, and if someone was close enough you could just blast away and maybe get lucky enough to kill'em. Nearly killed a MAX like that once. Mostly cause I couldn't miss and I unloaded a whole clip before I died.

Also I know you can get a shotgun for the infiltrator but I'm pretty sure that replaces your sniper rifle. No class has two main guns unless you count the rocket launcher or max.

master0 wrote:

Well the suppressor I assume lowers or removes your tracer fire. Tracer fire is the easiest way to track a sniper after all. I thought the 12x scope was basically useless so I'm not getting it again. Although that was with the Vanu and their slow lasers, might be more useable now.

The NC sniper rifle is probable useless at close range but the Vanu one wasn't so bad. It was great for wrecking things, and if someone was close enough you could just blast away and maybe get lucky enough to kill'em. Nearly killed a MAX like that once. Mostly cause I couldn't miss and I unloaded a whole clip before I died.

Also I know you can get a shotgun for the infiltrator but I'm pretty sure that replaces your sniper rifle. No class has two main guns unless you count the rocket launcher or max.

If suppressor removes tracer fire then what does the muzzle break do?

weird combinations...

Up close I use the NC rifle as a no scope first shot and i've been 50/50 on if i hit or not. If i do hit then the pistol just needs to hit once to take them down. If not i do my best to place head shots. I'm not sure if it matters with other weapons, but i try anyway. I think getting a red dot would also help whith the no scope shots. But of course that's just another set of certs...

What kind of PC specs do you guys have and what FPS do you get out of them?

CPU: i-2500k (OC to 4.4Ghz) GPU: ATI 6950

Ranges from high 80 to as low as 25 in one biodome fight. My frames went down after the last patch, but I was seeing average of 60. I noticed my CPU usage dropped bunch too, from around 75% to 40%.

i25000 3.3 and 2gb 560ti

Since the last patch i've been pretty steady around 60 fps.

6 core Phenom 3.2 and radeon hd 5800 series. Never had to touch any the settings yet, but since it's in beta I'm not trying to run it at max settings. Only slow down I had has been lag and that one patch which they already fixed.
I'll be on probable tonight if anyone's interested, right after the xcom demo.

I joined NC on Himalia. Please help! I have no idea what I'm doing! Character name Tamren.

EDIT: Played about an hour, sure is a BETA beta. Crashed 5 times including when I quit. Got a weird bug after that last one, every time I tried to doubleclick an icon on my desktop it brought up the Shortcut tab of the properties menu for it instead of opening the program.

The game runs like molasses even on lowest settings and my mouse is super floaty. So I bumped the rendering quality down by 25% and it worked better.

New patch notes:

Spawn Camping

Towers and certain large facilities have had big increase in the prevalence of spawn camping since the last patch. When a base is about to flip you'll see players spawn engineers and camp the tubes with turrets. To combat this we will be implementing pain fields (areas where enemy players take damage over time as long as they're standing in them) in certain spawn rooms.

Rockets and tank shells occasionally do no damage

Currently there is a bug where if you fire immediately after reloading the projectile will not do damage. This is most obvious when firing rocket launcher and tank shells. You can avoid this by waiting a moment after reloading before firing, but it will be resolved with this week's beta update. [Currently scheduled for Wednesday night/Thursday morning]

Population balancing

We've noticed the issues associated with population imbalances in the game. There are two primary things we're doing to address these issues in the near future:

1 - This week we'll be increasing the XP and Resource bonuses for under populated empires, as well as the threshold for when those bonuses are received.
2 - Next week we will be implementing zone and world level empire population caps. These will prevent a single over-populated empire from locking the other empires out of the zone / server.

We will continue to monitor the issues associated with population balance and reassess as more continents become available for play.

Default lack of anti-air

With the recent character wipe we've noticed players having a lot of trouble dealing with aircraft (especially liberators) from the ground. This week we'll be making Burster MAX weapons more readily available to new characters (this may just be a 1 Auraxium unlock for now, or it may just show up automatically on your character, we're still figuring it out), and eventually we'll be adding more anti-air weaponry for Engineers.

Platoon and squad issues

Platoons and squad leaders have expressed several communication and coordination related issues, largely having to do with being able to see all platoon members on the map, being able to see platoon and squad vehicles on the map. We're working on fixing these issues as quickly as possible and you should start seeing improvements this week, with a lot more coming next week.

My guns suck now! Boo! Hiss!

We've seen a lot of threads about various weapon balance changes and the feeling that "_____ faction's weapons have been nerfed, I can't hit anything now". Looking through our data we can see that overall weapon accuracy has gone down a few percentage points in the last week, but not significantly and not for any one faction more than any other. Here is some aggregate accuracy data for each of the main infantry weapons gathered since the most recent patch vs pre-patch:

Pre-patch accuracy:

NC Assault Rifle: 34.0542%
TR Assault Rifle: 33.0161%
VS Assault Rifle: 33.2806%

NC Carbine: 33.3055%
TR Carbine: 32.4743%
VS Carbine: 33.6675%

NC LMG: 28.3856%
TR LMG: 27.7163%
VS LMG: 27.8617%

Post-patch accuracy:

NC Assault Rifle: 29.9629%
TR Assault Rifle: 29.2134%
VS Assault Rifle: 29.4579%

NC Carbine: 30.6946%
TR Carbine: 29.4575%
VS Carbine: 29.8943%

NC LMG: 24.0507%
TR LMG: 24.6082%
VS LMG: 24.8786%

This shows a drop across the board of about 3-4.5% accuracy on each weapon with the addition of the new recoil mechanics. This is pretty much as expected and isn't impacting any particular empire more than the others. The average difference in accuracy across each empire are as follows:

NC: -3.7614%
TR: -3.8115%
VS: -3.9724%

NOTE: This loss in accuracy hurts the NC the most, since they're generally speaking the most punch per bullet, but the effects should be mostly negligible.

As always, thanks for continuing to beta test, your feedback and bug reports are definitely helping us to make this game great. Until next time!

How do I unlock stuff? I figured out how Certs work but Certs don't seem to control access to things like rockets for the liberator.

The game runs a lot better once I nerfed graphic quality to 75%. But the game still has this annoying hitch where it will randomly shoot to 100% CPU and freeze for a couple seconds. About 2% of the time this crashes the game. Does this happen to anyone else or could it be caused by my hardware?

Tamren wrote:

How do I unlock stuff? I figured out how Certs work but Certs don't seem to control access to things like rockets for the liberator.

Hit "ESC" and then click on the shopping cart icon. In here, you can spend Station Cash (Money) or Auraxium (In Game Resource) to unlock different weapons for infantry and vehicles.

[color=blue]The OP has been updated with beginner tutorials. I strongly recommend that all new player watch them. They contain a lot of important info and nice tips.[/color]

Also, please update your character info in the google spreadsheet.

Tamren wrote:

The game runs a lot better once I nerfed graphic quality to 75%. But the game still has this annoying hitch where it will randomly shoot to 100% CPU and freeze for a couple seconds. About 2% of the time this crashes the game. Does this happen to anyone else or could it be caused by my hardware?

It's not just you. I get this a fair bit as well.

I'm really not liking the LMG. I can't seem to win any fights with it at anything other than point blank. I got the reflex sight which helps a LOT because the iron sights are so restrictive. But at range I cant seem to get any hits.

I noticed they added iron sights to the rocket launcher but they are terrible. Rings sights are useless, what is needed is volley sights like a grenade launcher. That would help you judge the arc without covering up what you are trying to shoot at.

In other news though I got my first air to air kill in a reaver. Saw a tank camping under a cliff so I landed on top and started dropping rockets on it. A scythe came by and started chasing it as it ran away, but I arced a long shot and hit the tank from behind stealing it's kill. Then I got back into my reaver and somehow got above it and caught it with a burst of chaingun rounds.

PS still freezes randomly, makes flying very very hard. It doesn't happen to all of you guys right? It must be buggy software. Other than the hiccups and the crashes the game runs stable at 50% ram and 70% CPU. It's just those weird spikes that cause trouble.

So I'm playing on Leda as TR(joined to play with some of the shacknews guys), and got attached to a full platoon with some pretty cool people. The leadership isn't great, but with that force moving somewhat coordinated it's easy to just steam roll across a map. Good use of platoon and squad chat too. I think in the last couple nights I've got about 45 Certs.

I used 32 certs to buy a INVR scope for my light assault. The gun went from decent to OMG, it's a mini sniper. The INVR is almost complete wallhack for 32 certs, way overpowered. The enemies are such a bright red and it has a 2x magnification. I was hitting Vanu at around 300 meters with a burst fire and killing almost everything I aimed at. Unless I got jumped by a group of 3 plus I would win every gun fight. Plus you can scope in a quickly get an idea of where the armor is, allowing you to avoid it. So much fun. If any of you guys are playing late night, 11pm (CDT) to server shut off you should join me.

i38warhawk wrote:

So I'm playing on Leda as TR(joined to play with some of the shacknews guys), and got attached to a full platoon with some pretty cool people. The leadership isn't great, but with that force moving somewhat coordinated it's easy to just steam roll across a map. Good use of platoon and squad chat too. I think in the last couple nights I've got about 45 Certs.

You guys also had us outnumbered on that server, about 2:1.

I was talking with Tkyl and I think that maybe we would attach ourselves to another outfit. I know we will get a bunch of people playing this game, but never enough to have a sizable outfit to be efective. Besides, I doubt any of us will want to, or have the time to manage it and give commands. I only enjoy it on a single squad base.

So, Tkyl is in an VS outfit on Leda that may be a good one to attach to. How has it been so far?