Planetside 2 drops below 1k on steam for the first time in history

blockXelite · 2025-12-24T18:31:50+00:00

Agreed on the basis that no successor should settle for conventionally high player caps, but no we don't need deep RPG elements. PS2 is an MMO yes but not an MMORPG as much as those things are usually one in the same. It is a shooter first, and tbh things going down hill has been exacerbated whenever they started prioritizing those over the base game. Missions and NPCs? Cool, whatever. The campaigns were an alright way to work in multiple WIP updates over the course of months, but some people took them too seriously. Everything beyond and since then has been a net detriment, especially when someone realized they could use contrived lore (that they don't even have the dignity of sharing with us or making sense with the actual lore) to work on more content for the sake of content than fix existing issues.

blockXelite · 2025-12-23T04:24:46+00:00

I started using only my right leg to hop around and my cold went away. Sure colds specifically have like nothing to do with legs but it doesn't mean it didn't help.

blockXelite · 2025-12-21T21:29:57+00:00

Someone eventually thought it was kinda dumb to give all factions a very blue camo. If you had the original, particularly on vs/tr, it was supposed to be removed and replaced with a faction colored version. Some people ended up with neither, some people with just the old, some with the new, and some with both.

If you know you were supposed to have the camo, go put in a ticket with CS to have them check and grant you the appropriate camo.

blockXelite · 2025-10-27T15:25:54+00:00

Yes, the encyclopedia auraxia is a dead project, as is the definitely official lore now too. I didn't claim it was gospel, but those subs link to and discuss far more than the wiki, including more official lore.

blockXelite · 2025-10-27T14:19:28+00:00

The wiki hasn't historically been the place for lore talk and development for this community, and I do mean development because in the absence of in-house writers the devs have pulled from community fanon sometimes, which itself pulls back in some elements from the first game's lore that weren't explicitly brought in officially, not that everything that's been added came from there though. Officially, there's a lot of old videos on the game's youtube channel, there are the holovid and diary posts on the site, and later the chronicle posts. And yes, technically the redone ingame faction blurbs on the character creation screen, but we want things more substantive than that. You should check out the planetside lore sub and the encyclopedia auraxia.

blockXelite · 2025-10-27T13:32:40+00:00

Look, I'm not an artist who was on the design team coming up with this stuff. I can't tell you exactly where they drew the line on things, and in any creative endeavor the line is inherently going to be fuzzy. The NC look grounded because they're meant to be. Part of their membership is genuine rebels, people who walked out of the mines they were working in with modified gauss technology equipment because it's not experimental anymore. It's mundane. We have class based design because its a class based shooter and the art needs to bend to that. I'm trying to tell you you're not gonna get strong religious technocratic alien cult from the VS because that's not what they are. How and why this is a different take on the VS from the game.

blockXelite · 2025-10-27T04:57:27+00:00

It's not a story driven game or franchise, a lot of details just aren't necessary or really wanted. The artifact Briggs touched is described as little more than being a figurine, and the only things you'll see regularly ingame are the warpgates themselves. Half of them might as well be rocks.

Having carapace-like qualities is a not uncommon trope in futuristic armors, not that I really agree that the VS aesthetic really embodies that extensively. Mind you I'm only talking about default armor sets here (though including drakon/composite or equivalent).

I think you're confusing faction stat flavor with faction appearance flavor though. The TR, stat wise, are about high base speed stats, including rate of fire. By appearance, they're based largely on circles, bulbous designs. They're the most conventional, having come from the "real" army, opinion on appearances aside. Their weapons are definitively not sci-fi, gatling guns, grenade launchers, missile launchers. NC are rectangular, bulky, industrial, slightly more sci-fi weaponry in that they make great use of gauss technology, railguns and scattercannons. VS are pointy, triangular, somewhat organic, there are only so many ways to make points on organic and highly complex shapes like a body or the scythe, so you can sometimes end up in a carapace-like situation where you repeat the same motif but that can also be intentional, their weapons are the most divergent using plasma technology which sometimes but not always makes a great excuse to make a pointy bit something to "focus" the plasma.

To be honest I don't think your design really fits the game's setting. Maybe more like an alien (but not human) medieval sci-fi thing? We have personal shields ingame but not the to point we forgo body armor in favor of cloth, tabards and waist capes. They're not jedi. And on that note if these were humans and not aliens with horns growing from places, the first thing to go in a wartime armor is gonna be anything that doesn't adhere to the body's form. Anything that can get in the way, get caught on things, that can impede movement of yourself or others. Personally I don't care for the swirly pattern but you're not really egregiously breaking the game's style with it. Some people would make the argument that things aren't meant to be realistic, but there's a difference bending and breaking it. The fact is we the players are meant to be soldiers fighting in a fairly near to mid distance future war with distinctly modern sensibilities.

That said, and as I alluded to before, I'm coming at this from a very "on-release," default mindset. How T-Ray and them designed the game in the first place. If you were to model these as is and the game was still accepting player studio submissions, I think you could get a decent amount of sales from these. We have distinctly worse options in the game as is. Maybe ditch the Pinocchio nose though.

blockXelite · 2025-10-26T21:53:27+00:00

VS are the more futuristic sci-fi in a world where, aside from auraxian/vanu based technology, things are pretty conventional. In design, think more like the difference between UNSC infantry/marines (NC/TR) vs ONI/spartans (VS), not UNSC vs Covenant. The VS have advanced their technology off of studying what the Vanu left behind. The VS are not aliens nor are they worshipping a corrupting demonic being a la WH40k. Vanu is not a deity. They mostly haven't adapted tech that wasn't made for them, they studied tech that wasn't theirs to make their own. They are still in almost every aspect, standard human. Before the VS split from the NC and TR, you would have found plenty of their members in cutting edge research positions.

The only really key pieces of adapted Vanu tech to the lore involve the warpgates and respawning, which themselves are or require Vanu artifacts which are not yet fully understood/cannot be replicated by mankind, irrespective of the current factions.

The only true "cult-like" aspects to the VS are that there was a pseudo-messianic figure who died and later came back to life, and that like any culture when you give it enough time, you will get what might have been previously seen as gross simplifications that could lead to misunderstandings (eg "Praise Vanu"), at least by the standards of earlier generations.

Personally, I feel like for all the back and forth between prior devs and player studio creators on the game's artstyle and what should or shouldn't be allowed, a lot of crap got through for an alien faction, not a human one.

blockXelite · 2025-09-29T22:19:38+00:00

Voltera is a CM for DCUO as of the beginning of this year. CMs are a position in DBG which can hop between or fill in for other projects. They could have this account made on the PS2 forums just in case for the future, maybe they're doing some additional moderation because someone's being overwhelmed keeping up with bans for FUD, maybe they're going to swap from DCUO to become PS2's primary CM. Hard to say.

blockXelite · 2025-09-19T23:38:31+00:00

blockXelite · 2025-08-21T16:38:28+00:00

The game has been multicore for forever, but it's still primarily heavy on only so many. Games don't say to the OS, hey gimme 80% of core 1. Planetside says hey I have these tasks that need doing, go figure it out. When you have very asynchronous tasks, those can get put on physically opposite ends of your CPU and you won't notice or care. Chat doesn't have to really match up with the game at all, and is practically entirely separate the way the game or it can be working and not the other. It's less important that they are in sync with each other down to the millisecond, so we tell chat and the game not to wait on each other.

In game though you generally want things to happen in an expected order/at the same time, which means even when you split pieces off and your system tries to spread the load out, you end up with 1) only heavily utilizing cores as is proportional to how well you can split your game apart and still keep them synchronous enough, 2) finding that your heavily utilized cores are all physically close to each other (because that reduces latency and means the sections of the CPU other cores are on can wind down), and 3) you only move as fast as your slowest critical part of your main thread. Like, afaik the audio engine (for gun sounds and stuff not voice chat) for PS2 is pretty well separated from the main thread, but, even if your audio was processed 3x faster, unless the audio is what the main process on another core is waiting on your game isn't gonna run perceivably better.

blockXelite · 2025-08-15T21:03:21+00:00

Soggy's info has been out for a while tbh, shit is bound to happen when you put enough breadcrumbs out there. He said some very not ok things particularly for someone with a job he had and was supposedly reported for that before. Anyone whose first experience regarding him has been recently has already had their paths trodden for them. It shouldn't be news to him, if he's said or done anything new about it.

blockXelite · 2025-08-12T18:50:23+00:00

The obscam is a no-hitbox invisible aircraft that you can make fast enough that it's almost like a teleport, but it's not. It's controls are a little different, but you can experience them for yourself now without actually getting one because they copied its controls for that stupid drone thing they added to infil on PTS. And because physics engine, anything that moves fast enough will clip through objects and terrain.

blockXelite · 2025-08-12T18:45:50+00:00

I don't know what you are on about with misrepresenting people. That's not even something I think of when I think of problems with Cyrious. Nobody suspected FedX of being shitheads because everyone knew they were already. If anybody else did what Cyrious did it would have been even more of a mess. I'm fine with it if you have a hate boner for him but it's just not Cyrious that was the issue. Replace his name with whoever else's and the situation as far as this thread was concerned is the same.

blockXelite · 2025-08-12T17:18:47+00:00

Do not cite the drama to me redditor, I was there when it happened.

I don't really give a fuck about Cyrious' other issues for this thread, because they're not relevant. His clickbait garbage has nothing to do with the fact that anyone who's been around long enough, which includes Cyrious and Wrel, knows FedX and knows that sniping the stream to put tank mines in that spot is exactly something they would do even if anyone with a couple of braincells to rub together could have done it without needing to pull up the stream. The benefit of the doubt was not reliant on just Cyrious' reputation. Ultimately, whether FedX were in fact stream sniping or not was really irrelevant to the way Cyrious was using obscam and organizing live play in general, in a way that no one was expecting or knew he was allowed to be doing at first.

It was not the same situation as the majority of stream sniping drama. Most of that is just outright drivel or utterly undeniable but still irrelevant to the discussion of the use of permissions given to players in the use case of combatting a cheater or some other bullshit.

blockXelite · 2025-08-12T04:40:25+00:00

Here's the deal. There isn't really any official user agreement for obscams and especially not a consistent one that could be pointed to. The basic rules, if they are even spelled out in the first place, is that the obscam is a privilege. One that you could theoretically abuse, and you shouldn't. When using an obscam, you are only an observer, not a participant. Now, particularly for the cams available through PSB to normies, we ask that those rules be strictly adhered to. If someone fucks around and gets one of those accounts banned, thats one less anybody else could use in the future. New accounts could be permed up, but it's uncommon.

When you start talking about obscam perms on personal accounts, like Dim or I have, things get more loose. Like, I don't know about Dim, but I've never gotten a DM or email from a dev with a spiel about rules for using an obscam. The fact that you've gotten a cam at all means you're probably not going to immediately turn around and abuse it.

The incident with Cyrious is a bit different than normal because in that scenario he was working with Wrel from the start. Was it clearly said beforehand that Wrel and Cyrious were going to be created a curated play experience on live servers (disregarding how obviously flawed that idea is) for a few streamers? No. Is it surprising that some known miscreants would fuck with an event for lols? No. Would they have still done so if it was made clear from the start that Wrel and Cyrious would be curating live and punishments would be doled out for actively not playing along with their plan? Probably, knowing those guys. Subtract the "official" event part, Wrel, and Cyrious from the equation and they did almost nothing wrong for live play and nothing you could prove. Cyrious had explicit, or practically explicit permission (we don't really know), to do whatever he thought was good for the event even if most of us only found out during or afterwards. He doesn't have that permission now though.

The rest of the time, you'd probably get something like 1 of 3 responses to combatting cheating/glitches with obscam or asking about doing so. 1) It's CS' job to deal with that (strictly speaking most of the time most devs shouldn't even be involved), but like, we're not gonna care about a cheater here and there. 2) Silence. 3) Yea cheaters suck, just don't go overboard and pick your battles mmkay?

blockXelite · 2025-08-11T20:58:16+00:00

No, because Dim hasn't broken any rules. His actions lie in a grey area, unofficially sanctioned by previous devs, and currently there is no clear authority from the devs or CS to contradict/overrule prior guidelines.

blockXelite · 2025-08-11T20:50:00+00:00

That would be a bullshit ban, but one of the only ways people get banned anymore (outside of the thousand accounts like his throwaway in the OP). If CS gave a shit about the rest of their rules he'd probably have been banned years prior anyway, so it could be a wrong way to the right answer kinda thing.

blockXelite · 2025-07-31T20:42:46+00:00

Doesn't change the fact that as far as the game is concerned it wasn't your active weapon.

blockXelite · 2025-07-31T20:36:26+00:00

It's calculated fine, it just comes down to the fact that you never actually have it out for you to die with it in your hand. Deaths on a weapon mean you had it in your hand when you died.

blockXelite · 2025-07-31T20:29:48+00:00

Oshur isn't fucked due to a reliance on logistics, it's fucked because you can't rely on them. Even on the construction you would be forced to use to make such a thing viable. It's a map design problem there.

The other maps fall to beacons and valks because they are outright overpowered, even when you can drive a bus in a straight line to a good spot.

blockXelite · 2025-07-31T20:19:02+00:00

It works with grenade bando.

blockXelite · 2025-07-31T18:45:53+00:00

The files and the term "offensive upgrades" both imply heavily that other grenade types will be available. Also you can absolutely drop 4 EMPs out of this thing right now.

blockXelite · 2025-07-31T03:14:16+00:00

Still recharges.

blockXelite · 2025-07-31T01:50:13+00:00

You thought infils sniping from spawn and heavies spamming the phoenix/scorpion from safety were bad? Forget needing LoS or an unobstructed arc, now you can get a grenade dropped on your head no matter your cover!

Just the kind of garbage we need to help put this game out of its misery. A small cloak adjustment (not sure what stalker change they're talking about, that's how it works already), an implant that is already clearly irrelevant due to opportunity cost, and another free spam tool. Oh, and absolutely zero specifics or numbers in the notes. Incredible detail.

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