Double xp was great as long as it lasted, but normal xp feels so lackluster now. Getting 25 xp for kill assist? I was getting 25 xp per second just for fixing MAXes yesterday! Maybe their nefarious plan was to get people to buy more xp boosts to keep chasing that high, I dunno.
I was home sick today so I played a fair bit. When I came back online after the server reboot I was all WTF? because my repairs were giving me 11 and 12 XP. Then I remembered double XP was over. Bummer. Seems to me like what they call double XP should be the standard.
I used to think that cert gain was too slow and prices were clearly too high. And I guess I still do, but not as much.
I’ve been thinking that a lot of people are weirdly motivated by unlocking stuff more than they’re motivated by just having fun by playing the game. I don’t get it personally, but it’s super common. And when those people start to unlock everything, or at least everything they want, they start losing interest in the game.
Now you’re thinking… I’ve been playing 2 months, I should have at least half of all the stuff I want… but they want people to be playing for years. They don’t want people getting what they want in a few months and then quitting. On the other hand, they don’t want people quitting because they don’t feel like they’re progressing fast enough. It’s a tricky balance.
I’d say that maybe somewhere around 1/3rd more XP than normal, factoring in boosts/subscription for the really dedicated people, would probably be a good compromise, but then again I’m saying that as a guy who’s racked up 15k certs.
Something happened when I was playing this evening that gave me a bit of a panic.
I was the gunner in a pub’s prowler. We were taking quite a bit of fire, from both the air and a heavy, so I figured it was a good time to abandon my new friend. I press “E” to get out (we’re still under fire and I’m starting to hear beeps) and the message “Can’t get out of vehicle because all exits are blocked” pops up.
There was nothing for me to do but keep pressing E while hoping the pub moved a bit. Luckily he did, right before he exploded.
I got that message too, as I was crashing aircraft. Maybe there are designated spots around the vehicle that must be clear of obstructions to exit.
List of things they are working on to include in the next update.
Looks pretty good, though I’m curious about the exact XP rewards after all those tweaks.
Alright, so the note on the new patch notes says that a token for transferring servers will be available in the January 30 patch.
Now I think this is a bad idea and that merging servers would be much healthier for the long term of the game, but just the same.
Our server is the worst US server. It sucks. There was no way on launch day to know that our server would end up as the worst US server - all the US servers were high populaton on launch day, and ours was plenty busy for the first few weeks. But then the population started trailing off pretty hard.
And population is the life blood of this game. The main feature is the huge fights. Having to look for a big fight, or capping bases empty is boring as shit. Genudine has become unplayable outside of primetime hours, and even during primetime hours it’s hit or miss.
On the other hand, I’ve been playing an alternate vanu character on Connery from time to time lately, and I would estimate that Connery has well over twice the active populaton of Genudine. There are big fights going on at all times. It’s a night and day difference. A random, normal fight on Connery at 10pm on a Monday beats the biggest fight you’d find on Genudine all week. Even 2am on Connery has more people than most primetimes on Genudine.
And this will only get worse. People will use the server transfer tokens to get off crappy low population servers and head to high population servers. Genudine will take a sudden nose dive in population and basically die entirely.
That’s why we have to move. Connery is like playing the game as it was in launch week - massive battles everywhere. Genudine is dead in comparison. I’m actually pretty pissed that we haven’t had an option to transfer up until this point, because we’d have had a lot more fun if we happened to be lucky enough to pick the right server randomly in the first place.
I don’t know what the terms of the transfer is. It says a new transfer token will be available in the depot, the in game store, so it will probably cost SC. Maybe they’ll give out one free transfer to everyone, but I doubt it. My hope now is that the price is reasonable and not punishing, maybe 500sc. If it’s in SC, rather than real cash via the website, the good news is that 2x and 3x sales will lower the effective price of the transfer.
I hope everyone will transfer with us, and I hope the cost is minimal to facilitate that, because the reality is that we’d be crippling our own fun to remain there. It’s not even close. Things are just flat out massively better on Connery. And with a significant portion of the remaining population transferring off Genudine, the gap is only going to get bigger.
Sorry I’ve been out of the game lately, but work has simply been too damn busy. Hoping to get some action soon with you lot!
I’m fine with transferring, assuming it doesn’t cost much.
I’m fine with transferring too. I’m redoing the floors on my house so my desk and the computer will be packed up until next week, but after that I’ll be back on.
Today’s daily sale is the 7 day 50% experience boost, 250sc. This is probably the best sale they’ve ever had - everyone benefits from having the boost, halving them is awesome. Factoring in discounted SC, it gets me down under 10c per day for a boost. I bought 16, I may buy more.
I suggest everyone buy a few at least for double xp events and such. I mean, if you’re ever going to buy a boost again, you may as well buy it at half off.
Friday night 1/25 they’re doing the ultimate empire showdown thing on Connery. I think we should definitely play on Connery that night - see what the game is actually like with a full capacity server. We could have the biggest fight we’ve ever experienced… and have it on Amerish. Should be a unique experience. A bunch of have vanu characters on Connery already, so if you haven’t yet done so, create a vanu character on there.
Also, I want to start organizing some of the awesome ideas we’ve had and actually doing them. Mass jihad jeeps (people should’ve had time to earn c4 by now), burster maxes in the sunderer clown car of death, etc. Let’s start putting that together and recording it.
Looks like double xp this weekend - maybe related to that Empire showdown thing. It’s raining certs again! 
Dalton is on sale today - since they’re changing the balance between the zepher and dalton it’s probably going to be worthwhile to have both, so if you’ve got the SC I recommend grabbing it.
I wish the double XP weekend would’ve been next weekend, post-transfers, because even during double XP events Genudine is still pretty sad.
Today is the ultimate empire showdown thing on Connery from 4-7pm, but because of that I’m sure Connery is going to be huge and full all day. So I’m going to be playing there, on my vanu. I’ll also almost certainly be playing on Esamir and Amerish all day, because I’ve never had gigantic fights on those continents and finally the server is going to be packed to the gills.
It also serves as a preview of what Connery may be like after transfer day - it won’t be as jam packed as it will be today for the event I’m guessing, but you can see what a server near or at capacity will look like.
I may just end up buying a boost and levelling my secondary vanu character all weekend. I know not all of you will want to bother, but Connery will be a happening place this weekend and I just really honestly don’t want to go back to Genudine. There will be solo caps of major bases even during double XP, meanwhile Connery will have huge battles on esamir and amerish.
I’m still steadily working up my NC on whatever server we made those. There always seems to be some good battles on Indar. At least when I auto-join a group, it’s a multi-group squad (or whatever, I can’t remember what the call the “raids”). And that bases are often contested.
Lately, I’ve been using a lot a Lightning with a HE anti-personnel main gun. Useless against air and takes like 6 hits to take out another tank. But wow do infantry die easily. And I’ve gotten to be a pretty good shot with it–I can account for range drop fairly well. I’ll sit at the edge of where my IR scope can pick up body heat and take out infantry as they pop up. Last night I had to drive back twice to another base to get more ammo (which shows how good the fight was, our column of tanks and troops and air support couldn’t quickly capture the enemy base).
How do you check to see how full a server is? I’d certainly swap if it meant I could fight on other continents.
This shows whether a server is low/med/high/very high, but it’s only vaguely useful. Medium is a huge range from what feels like 800 people to like 3000 in my estimation. So one “medium” server can be much busier than another.
A better way to judge population is to watch them over a week and see how early the server gets into medium and how late it stays at medium before it drops back down to low.
You can infer a little bit from the chart at the bottom of this page, but it’s by no means conclusive. Only names that have been looked up before on the stat site show up in that number, so it may skew in some way, and it lists all characters ever made/looked up, rather than those that are active. It shows about 80% more characters on Connery than Genudine, but Genudine has been in a death spiral for a while and has a higher percentage of inactive characters, so the actual number is more like 3-4x.
Basically what I’ve learned is that the very active servers in the US are Matherson and Waterson (east) and Connery (west). On transfer day, fewer people are going to go from high pop servers to low pop servers than do the reverse, so this trend will increase.
They’ve released the PS2 Roadmap with planned future improvements.
So I was at the 2000 man fight at The Bastion yesterday. And I have to wonder - that has to be the biggest online FPS fight ever, right? Creating history. They don’t play up that angle in the PR.
The rendering distance became pretty ridiculous. I’ll post a video later.
It has been interesting reading this thread today from the beginning. For some reason I missed the thread and Steam entry; I’m downloading the client now.
Are you folks mostly playing Vanu on Connery now? Or still on Genudine? Or is that all up in the air?
The Vanu on connery thing is just a secondary character - we made those before we decided what faction to be, one on each west coast server. Unfortunately, randomly TR was on genudine, and that’s what we stuck with, and that’s the crappiest server in the game.
So we’ve played Vanu a few times just to check out connery and experience some big battles again. We don’t have plans to make those our new main characters. However, we currently don’t know wtf they’re doing with the servers. We were supposed to be able to transfer our mains on Jan 30 (becoming TR on connery), but then they yanked that out and they’ve said they have “another solution to low population” servers. I can only hope that’s merging, because transfers are now planned to be implemented in March.
So I can’t right now tell you where to start your character. Most of us that still play are playing TR on Genudine, but to be honest I’m tired of it. It’s too crappy a server. I’m just playing the game less, and when I do play I’m playing my alternate on Connery.
So… I don’t know what to tell you, unfortunately. We’re waiting to hear what this “other solution” is.
Server issues aside, are you feeling the Vanu love? Or do you feel the TR are just plain better?