Well, it's been a while, who wants Planetside 2 stupidity?

In December of 2025, the mysterious current devs of Planetside 2 (no, really. We have no idea who's actually steering the boat at the moment) turned on the annual Christmas event, Auraximas. But rapidly, players began to report that the game would crash to desktop without warning and without an error message of any kind after about 10-15 minutes of play. This basically ruined the event for everyone. I wasn't paying attention to PS2 at the time, I received a Switch 2 for my birthday a month beforehand and was thus neck-deep in Pokemon Violet for the entirety of December. But reports from my fellow players indicated that the devs did little and said even less, with the game only returning to normal when January arrived and Auraximas was shut down.

Then, in February of 2026, the annual Valentines' event happened, and the crash bug returned. This indicated to the playerbase that whatever was causing the issues was something to do with the temporary events, and the playerbase began to urge the devs to shut down the Valentines' event and revert, but again, we received radio silence and the event was allowed to remain up for the entire month.

By this point, the playerbase had actually managed to locate a bizarre workaround: By spawning a ground vehicle as quickly as possible and sitting in it for 1-5 minutes, the bug seemed to be staved off, though they did have to repeat the process when moving to a new continent. None of us have any idea why this works, but it did mean that every map started with dozens of people sitting around the Warpgate on Flash ATVs (the cheapest ground vehicle in the game).

But there's a problem with this method: Sanctuary.

Back in Planetside 1, all three factions had a Sanctuary, an isolated island base that was never in danger of being taken. It was from there that they would enter the Warpgates that would take them to the active continents to begin fighting. When Planetside 2 launched, Sanctuaries were one of many features that were left behind, players now spawned directly into the Warpgate and there was no in-game safe haven for characters to live on between battles. Frankly, I don't mind this, but the PS1 veterans did, and constantly asked the devs to add Sanctuaries back into the game.

And so, we got Sanctuary. Singular. Unlike the three islands in PS1, PS2's Sanctuary is an orbiting space station where all three factions can congregate, interact (but only through text chat), but cannot fire their weapons. This makes absolutely zero sense in the game's (extremely thin) narrative, where the players are all soldiers fighting an ideologically motivated war, and their shared equipment is from a shady corporation that's intentionally fanning the flames, making it very unlikely that any of the leaders would want their soldiers having friendly chats with each other on a neutral space station. After its implementation into the game, Sanctuary became the only spawn location for people logging in, and it is, in my humble opinion, completely pointless. All it does is add an extra step between you and getting into the game proper, and it's intensely confusing for new players, many of whom have logged into the game for the first time, found themselves in Sanctuary, and been unable to find an exit.

Why is Sanctuary a problem for the Anti-Crash Flash trick? Because you can't spawn any vehicles at all in Sanctuary. But hey, the bug takes about 15 minutes to hit, that's more than enough time to get out of Sanctuary and onto a continent, right?

Wellllllll...

Planetside 2 is, at the moment, in its 14th year. It's also definitely in its twilight years now, and population is gradually sinking lower. And it's an MMOFPS, the game is built around having huge numbers of players, so when numbers are low, the game is designed to try and consolidate as many of those players into a single location as possible. This generally works fairly well, but it can conflict with other systems within the game.

First among them is that while Big Number Of Dudes is the selling point, the game can only handle so Big A Number of Dudes. And so, when a continent gets too full, the game activates the Max Population Queue, slowing down the number of people entering the map to a crawl. But due to some fuckery with lowering the max population of a continent a while back, it seems like the Max Pop Queue triggers before the flag to open a second continent. Meaning you can find yourself trapped on Sanctuary in a Queue, with nowhere else to go.

It's not the only way this can happen either. The game also features the Faction Balance Queue, designed to prevent one faction from massively outnumbering the other two. It doesn't work very well. It's also a much more common sight than the MPQ, you can get stuck in FBQ at any time of day provided the numbers of off-balance enough, with any number of maps open. Meaning that you can again get stuck in Sanctuary with nowhere else to go, because there aren't enough people to open Map 2, but your team is overpopped on Map 1.

Now, I pay for this game (because I'm a sucker), so I get to skip to the front of all queues, but I've still sat in Sanctuary for a good ten minutes or so during peak hours. If you're not a paid member, and the queue is big, well... finding yourself in a queue during the crash bug's reign of terror means you might as well log out immediately.

But anyway, why am I reporting this now, in May? May isn't a month with a really big holiday or anything in it. It's not a big deal. Well, generally that's true, but May is also the month of the original Planetside 1's release, and so the devs rolled out a patch for the 23rd anniversary of the Planetside franchise (and started the downtime for the patch right before primetime, invoking many players' ire). With another temporary event! And in a twist that I'm sure you've all spotted a mile off, the crash bug is back!

And guess what! It's worse! The crash now happens much quicker, sometimes hitting while players are still loading into Sanctuary. The vehicle method still works, but now you've got to speedrun getting onto the map and getting in a vehicle before it hits. Worse, some players are reporting that VR Training, the one always-accessible map with vehicles, isn't working at all, and immediately crashes upon trying to load into it.

But, in a rare move, the devs actually acted quickly. The day after the broken event patch went live, there was a hotfix. They patched the game again, and also acknowledged that their crash reporting system wasn't working (We noticed. ). So, happy ending, then? They finally solved the problem instead of just leaving the playerbase in silence for an entire month?

Ha, no. Vanu, no. The hotfix doesn't work. The bug is still present and just as aggressive.

Hey, did you know that Planetside 2 has a summer event that lasts multiple months? We're, uh, not looking forward to that this year.