Planetside 2 Catch-All

TempestBlayze wrote:

Man when are they going to make this game use my GPU. Even with the latest patch my FPS sucks while my video card is hardly being used...

Are you guys editing your UserOptions file? Two things you should do after every patch:
1. Delete the UserOptions file
2. Log back into the gram, adjust your settings then log back out again.

Then go back into the Useroptions and reset your "RenderDistance" to something like 1000. Right now it's resetting to something like 999999 which is essentially infinity. That should help.

i38warhawk wrote:

Great TR open Platoons to join, Imperial Gods, Hell from Above, and TRG (if the members are on). I've had great runs with all three. TR are dumber than doornails, HOLD THE CROWN AT ALL COSTS.

Please don't ever change. The TR's insistence that they take and hold the crown every evening is largely the reason for most of my upgrades.

Every afternoon the NC surrenders most of the map while they hold the Crown and farm the TR. And they just keep coming and coming and coming. It's glorious!

New patch out today. This one is supposed to include a "new" crash fix. Major changes in bold.

Notable Changes:

Players are now mostly invulnerable to damage at Warpgates with the exception of vehicle collision damage against structures. An outstanding issue is while accessing a terminal players are vulnerable.
Sunderers are now available at every vehicle terminal that offers the Flash.
Squad members can deploy on their squad leaders from the Warpgate via the Instant Action menu.
Grief accumulation has been reduced for accidental team damage.
Grief points are no longer accumulated for damaging a fellow member or their vehicle. An outstanding issue is killing that player will result in grief points.

Performance:

Client crash fixes and client performance optimizations

Top Bugs Fixed:

Logging out or zoning while in a MAX should no longer change your class.
Forward spawn point terminals should now display appropriate faction on the minimap
Vehicle kills will give notifications again.
Turrets should no longer stop animating.
Dead characters will no longer be collidable.
Vehicles will no longer randomly invert controls.
Shields will now block tossed projectiles such as grenades and C4.
Fixed an instance where AFK players would be unable to be damaged.
Fixed a case where dying in the UI could leave a character in a bad state.

Weapons:

Reduced bullet drop on all weapons.
Buffed VS weapons to be much stronger at greater range. Projectile speed and Damage were increased on all weapons except sniper rifles.
Projectile speed was increased.
Damage at range was increased.
Reload times on most VS weapons are now faster.
Grenade trajectory is now more predictable.

Vehicles:

Speed required to damage infantry in a vehicle collision increased.
Projectile speed of Halberd increased
Reduced lock-on range of Heavy Assault anti-ground vehicle launchers (500 meters was overkill)
Scythe Default and Rotary nose cannon projectile speed increased
A pass was done on Sunderer and Tank Secondary weapon elevation ranges.
Elevation ranges should be the same between all the MBTs. Previously there were some discrepancies
50cal MG elevation range increased by 15 degrees

Some good fixes, especially for turrets. It was maddening to repair a turret and jump in to defend a point only to have the controls go crazy and have your view obscured by the (stuck) turret model.

Whelp the new update broke the game. BIG SUPRISE.

Magriders can't turn anymore. Yes, you read that right.

Also grenades have a nasty habit of sticking to your hand when you try to throw them.

This is supposed to launch in a month?

Tamren wrote:

Whelp the new update broke the game. BIG SUPRISE.

This is supposed to launch in a month?

Sure. They are doing the 'throw it at the wall and see if it sticks' testing method, very fast and loose. Make change, one test pass (maybe), compile everything together, upload, wait for their thousands of testers to bug report. Makes sense to me, is there any reason not to abuse the beta 'testers'?

/sarcasm off

Ya, that release date seems optimist to me, maybe they are looking at the number of people that ponied up the 40$ and think 'if they are willing to pay for it in this condition, hell, no reason to worry about quality now!'.

LtWarhound wrote:
Tamren wrote:

Whelp the new update broke the game. BIG SUPRISE.

This is supposed to launch in a month?

Sure. They are doing the 'throw it at the wall and see if it sticks' testing method, very fast and loose. Make change, one test pass (maybe), compile everything together, upload, wait for their thousands of testers to bug report. Makes sense to me, is there any reason not to abuse the beta 'testers'?

/sarcasm off

Ya, that release date seems optimist to me, maybe they are looking at the number of people that ponied up the 40$ and think 'if they are willing to pay for it in this condition, hell, no reason to worry about quality now!'.

Yeah well I suppose that's what beta testers are for... I don't think anyone thinks they are going to have a proper release at that time. More like it will be an open beta which you can spend money on. Wondering if they do a wipe again. I'm curious to see the affect of having sunderers so nearby will mean, should be interesting. Although it will probable make defending small points rather easy. I'll have to drop in when patch finishes.

Got a lot of certs by now, not sure what to get.

I have a checklist of things I want to try out before the beta ends:

- Infantry weapon attachments, including underbarrel accessories. I already have most of them.
- Variant weapons like the burst fire carbine.
- Heavy Assault weapons: MCG, Lasher etc. I probably won't get to these because they made them ridiculously expensive.
- Air combat weapons, AA missiles etc. I have all of the Vanu ones except for the "ground attack" cannon, the PPA.
- Lightning alternate weapons. The HE cannon in particular is supposed to be good. It can one-shot infantry without a direct hit, even though it's mounted on a "light" tank.

And other than that I just want to test out anything else that is faction specific, Reaver, Mossie etc. I've put most of my time into a Vanu so far.

Did we ever pick a faction that GWJ is going to concentrate on? East or West? I would prefer West but lag hasn't been too much of an issue so far. I've heard that most of the "organized" clans are all going TR. But in my experience TR has more than it's share of the idiot and douchebag population.

Because of how the naming works you need an entirely different name for alts. Names are SOE-wide, not server wide. So there can only be one "Joe" in the entire game. That's rather annoying given that I know for a fact I wan't to play all three empires at some point.

Tamren wrote:

I have a checklist of things I want to try out before the beta ends:

- Infantry weapon attachments, including underbarrel accessories. I already have most of them.
- Variant weapons like the burst fire carbine.
- Heavy Assault weapons: MCG, Lasher etc. I probably won't get to these because they made them ridiculously expensive.
- Air combat weapons, AA missiles etc. I have all of the Vanu ones except for the "ground attack" cannon, the PPA.
- Lightning alternate weapons. The HE cannon in particular is supposed to be good. It can one-shot infantry without a direct hit, even though it's mounted on a "light" tank.

And other than that I just want to test out anything else that is faction specific, Reaver, Mossie etc. I've put most of my time into a Vanu so far.

I've tried most the underbarrel stuff. The smoke launcher is surprising useful, I'd imagine with thermal it bad damn powerful. The shotgun attachment is too unreliable. If you hit great, you most likely got a kill, otherwise your dead while it reloads. The underbarrel nade launcher is fantastic and expect a nerf for it when more people start using it. It can one shot people, cost no resources, and if you are engie you have infinite amount of them.

How are the ground missiles for air combat? I was thinking of getting those or anti air rockets (or ground). I'm just not sure how good any of them are.

I can't speak to how the NC and TR aircraft weapons work because I haven't tried them yet. The NC air to ground rockets fire alternately while the Vanu rockets fire in pairs for instance.

The air missiles are tricky to use. Your crosshair is a circle and you need to keep the target near the circle for a couple seconds. Lockon range is fairly short, I'd describe it as the outer edge of effective cannon range. The missiles once fired are fairly slow but pretty agile. The only way to avoid one that I have seen is fire off your entire extended afterburners, pop flares or steer the missile into the ground. The damage is not fantastic, it will take down a mossie in two missiles, a reaver in three. Liberators and galaxies can soak up a lot of them.

For all that they are still quite effective. Since they deal big chunks of damage you will tend to get a lot of delayed kills and crit kill assists even if the target escapes. I like to use them to begin a fight, most people who I lock onto to either straight up do not have flares, or they don't bother dodging. I guess they figure the lockon is coming from someone on the ground. In any case as soon as I fire the missiles I close and switch to cannons. The missiles can also be useful in very tight quarters because with cannons you have to lead your target significantly. This results in tighter turns and it is often impossible to do this and not crash into stuff while chasing.

The air to ground rockets are very different. They are dumb fire and have a very gradual arc to them. The rockets, at least the Vanu ones don't deal tremendous damage without a direct hit. Against infantry you kind of have to saturate an area to hit them. Against vehicles you need direct hits, rear armour for best results. Unless the target is an atv splash doesn't do anything to vehicles. Vanu photon rockets fire in 7-pair salvos. I think Reaver rockets are different because they alternate and do more damage individually. You can also use the rockets in air combat, against a small target like a reaver you have to get REALLY close and lead the target generously. Bigger targets like liberators and galaxies are very vulnerable to rockets because they don't have the speed to avoid them.

One big problem with the rockets is that they kick up a LOT of dust and smoke. The first time you hit a ground target the smoke will immediately obscure it, so you have to guess it's position. I guess this is what the thermal sights are for.

Both weapons are really hit or miss. You have to be in the right situation to get a kill with them. Missiles kills are hard to pin down because they take a lot of time, in that time the target can just hit afterburners and fly over friendly territory and all the flak thereof. Unless you are targeting infantry rockets rarely do enough damage in a single salvo to take out a target and you will often be forced to flee after attacking once. In my experience you can't expect the missiles to do all the work, and always aim for smoking or damaged targets with rockets.

Hm interesting. You wouldn't have happen to try the heavy infantry lock on anti air or ground rocket launcher have you? That was another option for me. Right now leaning towards the ground rockets as I'm not much of a dog fighter to begin with. From what I understand you can have rockets and your main gun equipped at the same time, correct?

I have not tried either infantry rocket so I can't comment on those.

Rockets and missiles are a secondary weapon. The default aircraft comes with with a primary cannon and a secondary afterburner fuel tank which give you a huge 80% boost. (don't forget to equip them!). These tanks are replaced when you add missiles or rockets.

Boise runs a tight ship with the HFA guys, look for the Imperial Gods, and Total Recoil for other great TR experiences. I've fallen in with the DOG/92nd lately and spend most nights in their TeamSpeak server. Not always a huge group, but getting work done with 10-12 (or less) guys is really fun.

I had an interesting night tonight. I was trying my DAMNEDEST to kill Tamren when I saw him flying a stupid Scythe around West Highlands/Indar Comm. Then the Vanu took Indar Excavation, some guys set up turrets in the spawn room and the Vanu literally could not use the base as a spawn. So we waited a bit for the zerg to move on and recapped the point.

After that I got in a fight at the bio lab and waited for the server to go down. Only thing is, the server didn't go down. I for some reason, was able to stay on with my squad at the lab for a very long time. During that time I encountered a strange bug where the game made my PC think the windows key was being depressed. This resulted in my going back to the desktop if I pressed d, e , space or any other window key+ command. So I jumped in a Prowler and manned a very effective Fury grenade turret and proceeded to go on a 25 kill streak.

The bug is that it continued until I restarted my PC.

Heh. I was buzzing around that area all night. Got quite a few mossie kills. When did you see me? I remember taking the tower, then later attacking a liberator there and escaping the flak by flying across the ground.

We were defending Indar Comm, you should come play with my TR group if you're on that late. I can't play VS, I hate Dual Photon Pods.

Actually there is an ongoing debate among my group about switching to Vanu. The Magrider is a game changer. I just don't see how they can balance it with the other tanks.

Holy crap.

Hooooooooooly crap.

I fought in a war today. A real, honest to goodness war. I haven't played something that big since Normandy and Red Square in the original Medal of Honor and Call of Duty series.

Since I had no idea what I was doing, I played Engineer. I healed armor as much as I could, but managed to do some good turret work. I was hooked in with some of the "Hell from Above" guys and having excellent platoon(?)-level leadership was the key.

Wow. This is gonna be fun.

I like the magrider a lot. It has a lot going for it.

- It floats, so you can do things like strafe diagonally backwards and turn 180 degrees at the same time. And since it doesn't touch the ground you don't feel every. single. bump in the ground jostling around your camera when you want to shoot.
- One of the vehicle perks actually allows the tank to float higher off the ground. This is the magrider version of "better suspension". Amusingly using this means that lightning tanks can drive under you without stopping.
- It doesn't have a turret but you can swing the whole tank around pretty fast. Since you can also strafe getting flanked in a 1v1 tank battle is rare and if you can attack you will always have front armour towards the enemy. The shape of the tank means that the rear armour surface is very small compared to other tanks.
- The main gun is lined up perfectly with the spine of the tank and the gunner's camera, so no parallax weirdness when you try to aim. It also has NO RECOIL which makes follow up shots trivial.
- Instead of a shield or siege mode the magrider gets an afterburner. This thing is hilarious, turns your whole tank into a rocket for a second or so. In that time you can get super speed, ram stuff like a freight train, hill climb like a spider or even jump over obstacles that are supposedly impassible to tanks. Though trying to do that last one tends to get you stuck. Problem is the system is hella expensive, everyone gets it for free but it doesn't even recharge unless you spend about 200 certs. It also occupies a tank perk so you can't run it and things like IR smoke at the same time.
- The VS specific tank secondary weapons are very powerful. The laser in particular has pinpoint accuracy and enough firepower to take on a vanguard by itself.

For all that the tank does have a few issues.
- The tank is fairly fragile to make up for it's other advantages. The main gun is also not especially powerful.
- You run over people ALL THE TIME. Vanguards and Prowlers drive in a predictable fashion, they can turn or move forward or back. Magriders can slide and turn all over the place and it takes a long time to develop "road sense" around them. I ended up binding a key for proximity voice chat so I could yell at people to get away from my tank.
- The main gun is mounted rather low so terrain obstructions can block your shots and it's much harder to go hull-down in a magrider.

i38warhawk wrote:

We were defending Indar Comm, you should come play with my TR group if you're on that late. I can't play VS, I hate Dual Photon Pods.

Actually there is an ongoing debate among my group about switching to Vanu. The Magrider is a game changer. I just don't see how they can balance it with the other tanks.

Oh what server I'm TR and been looking for some friends to play with. Also I love most tanks but for some reason the Magrider never clicked for me. It was great for going over mountains and getting around. It just felt like it feel apart in fights. Been a while though since I'm playing TR.

Thebe I think, the west server. Lag isn't much of an issue. Looking for friends is great, but you don't need friends to be a great squad. The IG guys are no nonsense, Total Recoil is a good mix, and the DOG/92nd group I've been playing with is more joking then serious.

i38warhawk wrote:

Thebe I think, the west server. Lag isn't much of an issue. Looking for friends is great, but you don't need friends to be a great squad. The IG guys are no nonsense, Total Recoil is a good mix, and the DOG/92nd group I've been playing with is more joking then serious.

Ah I'm on east, or well. On another note I accidentally bought the heavy weapon homing ground rocket. I wanted the anti air but I confused the two. That being said the homing rocket is basically superior to the default one. It has same amount of ammo, does same amount of damage, shoots way straighter, and has homing. Not even a contest really. Went will an armor column that was pushing to the NC warp gate. This gave me a really rich target environment with ammo boxes every where. Probable wrecked a dozen tank or so, and am halfway to getting the other rocket launcher. Lot of fun, and my heavy definity feels more useful.

Still dealing with a few bugs, but it seems better over all. Not to mention a few tweaks they made to the interface and spawning are real nice.

I suspect but can't confirm that the homing rockets have a smaller blast in regards to infantry targets. That's the only tradeoff I can imagine because if the rockets were straight up better in every way that would be somewhat imbalanced.

EDIT: Well there was a new hotfix. It brought CRAZY improvements to my framerate. I can actually manage 60 frames sitting around the warpgate! In some situations it goes up to 120! When you open the FPS indicator it shows CPU or GPU beside the number. I'm not sure what this means but it might be which one is doing the most work at that moment. Certainly my fps is better when it says GPU.

Game is as buggy as ever though. Lots of loading weirdness where terrain will appear half-loaded with missing textures. You know how when you make a 3-d shape in computer graphics you use triangle panels? Squares are made of two triangles stacked. When only half of the textures load you end up with this jaggy triangular mess. Tech plants seem to be very bad about this. Half of the time I go up on a balcony and there are no railings and half the floor is invisible.

I made TR character on the west server name Khaliman. I switched over from Vanu because my guy was stuck on Esamir and I hate that continent. Well my TR dude managed to get over to Indar and joined with the IG. They seem pretty organized. One thing they do that other outfits don't is gather up pubbies and herd them like cats. It actually works pretty well, assuming everyone has voice enabled.

I despise the Prowler. That turret is garbage! I can see it being workable if I dump a lot of certs into it. But I still like my magrider more because that tank at least worked out of the box.

I was about to go into combat with them when the game crashed with error G29 which is apparantly "cannot authenticate with login server". You would think that would occur when I logged in, not while I was playing. Never run into that particular bug before but it could have to do with my switching characters without rebooting PS2.

EDITEDIT: Well I picked up the Scythe PPA. It's basically the scythe's air to ground strafing weapon as opposed to the hailstorm which is for dogfighting. It fires plasma balls in strings of 20 and it seems to do a lot of damage, it's hard to tell. 20 shots into a prowler made the tank start to smoke so it seems pretty damaging. I tried to hit a Liberator with it and it failed completetly, the gun isn't especially accurate and the projectiles are very slow. The game doesn't have projectile inheritance like Tribes does so if you are chasing an aircraft they can almost but not quite outrun the plasma shots.

My testing was cut short though. This latest patch is probably the least stable of the lot. I'm starting to get bad crashes. Normally when PS2 crashes it's very neat and tidy, the game freezes then puts me back on my desktop while it fires off a crash report to the developers. But twice now the game has completely locked up. In the second case I had to reboot the whole computer because everything except the audio from platoon voice chat was totally frozen.

Archangel wrote:

Holy crap.

Hooooooooooly crap.

I fought in a war today. A real, honest to goodness war. I haven't played something that big since Normandy and Red Square in the original Medal of Honor and Call of Duty series.

Since I had no idea what I was doing, I played Engineer. I healed armor as much as I could, but managed to do some good turret work. I was hooked in with some of the "Hell from Above" guys and having excellent platoon(?)-level leadership was the key.

Wow. This is gonna be fun.

Love that this was buried among all the posts about the beta and patch results.

Basically this is all I'm asking for from the game. But I'm kinda afraid to jump right in now since things still don't seem stable and because I'm connecting from overseas and not sure what's the ping and beta test server timings are going to be like.

There are a lot of Aussie and Japanese players on the West server, and aside from complaining about the downtime hours I haven't seen too many complaints about lag. Don't know what it would be like from Singapore.

Bear wrote:

Are you guys editing your UserOptions file? Two things you should do after every patch:
1. Delete the UserOptions file
2. Log back into the gram, adjust your settings then log back out again.

Then go back into the Useroptions and reset your "RenderDistance" to something like 1000. Right now it's resetting to something like 999999 which is essentially infinity. That should help.

Have you heard any reports of people being banned for editing their UserOptions file? A buddy of mine heard that editing the file can improve performance, but that editing was a bannable offense (which, admittedly sounds odd, since it is, after all, a USER Options file.

Not that I have heard of wolfstar. The main forum even had a tweak guide thread for a while, though I can't find it anymore.

There are only two options in the ini that are not in the in game menu. One is render distance which is usually set to 10000 which I assume is 10 kilometers. 10 kilometers is longer than the continents are wide! Editing this doesn't affect gameplay because infantry and vehicles only show up at set distances. Vehicles show at 1000 meters, infantry somewhat closer. The other option is RenderFlora which turns off the grass giving you a better framerate.

I suppose you could edit your FOV beyond the in-game limit of 74. But 74 vertical degrees translates to a horizontal FOV of 102 degrees. It's currently considered a bug by players that the FOV of vehicles and turrets is currently locked and somewhat claustrophobic at the moment.

i38warhawk wrote:

There are a lot of Aussie and Japanese players on the West server, and aside from complaining about the downtime hours I haven't seen too many complaints about lag. Don't know what it would be like from Singapore.

Since they got rid of the player lag teleporting bug I haven't seen much effects from lag on the game. The only time it is even obvious to see is when you run over someone with a tank. I often hit people who are CLEARLY nowhere near my tank, especially when they run across my path. I guess the position I see is somewhat lagging behind what the server considers their actual position.

Just got the anti air homing rockets, and they are pretty nice. It takes two shots to take out a fighter, but it at least scare away anyone. Decent range and those missiles turn like crazy. Now I really need loadouts to be unlocked because swapping the gear out is really annoying.

Also had a funny situation. We were fighting over one of those indoor points and were pushed out of the building away from it. Well by we I mean everyone but me. Somehow every NC trying to cap the point (5-6) missed the lone TR hiding. I was literally right next to them all. So I threw down a pair of c4 and pulled the trigger. Great fun.

TR was rocking today, we took everything. We took the crown, and pushed both sides to there warp gates. Much fun.

Funny you should mention that. NC soldiers wear grey blue and yellow. When you combine that with the blueish gray lighting you have inside most buildings (especially at night) you basically have perfect urban camo. They blend in with building interiors very well.

Vanu are mostly purple and too dark to blend with anything. The TR have the opposite problem, the red colour stands out too much.

wolfstar76 wrote:
Bear wrote:

Are you guys editing your UserOptions file? Two things you should do after every patch:
1. Delete the UserOptions file
2. Log back into the gram, adjust your settings then log back out again.

Then go back into the Useroptions and reset your "RenderDistance" to something like 1000. Right now it's resetting to something like 999999 which is essentially infinity. That should help.

Have you heard any reports of people being banned for editing their UserOptions file? A buddy of mine heard that editing the file can improve performance, but that editing was a bannable offense (which, admittedly sounds odd, since it is, after all, a USER Options file.

Not at this point. Deleting the UserOptions file and adjusting the RenderDistance is actually recommended in their tweak guide they posted on their forums.

When the game goes live they have said that some of those options will be non-adjustable. Doing so will be be a big no no. What they don't want is people playing with the graphics to gain a competitive advantage.

The only "advantage" I can see from tweaking graphics is turning off grass because it makes it easier to spot mines. Other than that turning graphics lower doesn't do much for you. Render distance should be a slider in the options menu, but it only affects terrain, not vehicles and people. I can see having a higher FOV being an advantage, but it already goes to 102 degrees horizontal, which is about as wide as you can get without fisheye.

One really stupid thing about the current graphics is that for people with low settings infiltrators under cloak are FULLY invisible which is incredibly irritating. Cloaking used to be a transparency effect in the original game. The faster you moved the more you would show up as a white "haze". But now they use some kind of fancy blurring which just isn't supported on low settings. For those people they might as well not exist, to everyone else the blurring shows up all the time which makes the cloaking of questionable usefulness even at night.

I think Infiltrators should be able to become fully invisible.

So that secondary VS tank weapon..is it very beam-like?

I loved the AA HA rocket when I got it during the crazy cert rate period, look forward to getting it and the ground version.

RolandofGilead wrote:

I think Infiltrators should be able to become fully invisible.

So that secondary VS tank weapon..is it very beam-like?

I loved the AA HA rocket when I got it during the crazy cert rate period, look forward to getting it and the ground version.

I wouldn't mind if they made the infiltrators a bit more like tf2 spies. Back stabs would be fun, and standing still to be invisible without losing energy would be great. Right now they are rather useless for anything but sniping. Sabotage is basically with the new overload system. Capping points really only works if the defense is gone, and hacking stuff is a minor inconvenience most the time.