PlanetSide Arena

PlanetSide Arena

Been a while since I wrote anything here, but we got the biggest PlanetSide news in a long time today. I've been thinking about it all day, and I have some thoughts to share.

PlanetSide Spinoffs

First, I want to go over why this makes sense from a business perspective, and the idea of spinoffs and their value.

Creating a new game when you already have 90% of the engine and assets already done is far less work than creating a new game from scratch. It's also a way to get more value out of what you have already invested. H1Z1 was built off of PlanetSide2 with new assets and some new tech & UI on top. PlanetSide Arena is another such investment, only there's a lot less need for new assets. They can create new gun models for some variety and new character models so it looks different, but most of the terrain and other assets appear to be very much reused from PlanetSide 2. From a business perspective, this is a safe bet. You can build a new game with focus spent less on fundamentals and more on systems, UI, and gameplay, and with far less manpower.

So the idea of a PlanetSide spinoff is a good one, from a resource and investment perspective.

H1Z1 was one of the earlier Battle Royale games, and it was one of the most financially successful games for Daybreak in recent history. And over the last few years they have gotten even more popular, with games like Fortnite bringing in a billion dollars. If Daybreak can even get crumbs from that pie they will be in good shape, provided their investment was relatively small.

One of the most encouraging things was something Andy Sites said to Polygon:

"a stepping stone to what’s next. We’re absolutely planning for a future PlanetSide game."

Andy was one of my favorite people at Daybreak (SOE when I was there), and he seemed to genuinely love PlanetSide. And he's rocking a great beard now, so I trust him when he says that they are planning for a future PlanetSide game.

So on the surface, you could say PlanetSide Arena is a safe investment to diversify Daybreak, develop their PlanetSide IP more, and get some cash infusion for further investment into the PlanetSide universe. That all seems pretty good to me, honestly. It's certainly better than the alternative - nothing happening at all and the IP dying. So there's hope for more PlanetSide into the future, even if this particular incarnation of it doesn't suit you.

But, PSA could be more than that.

PlanetSide Arena Abstract

In the simplest terms, you could say PlanetSide Arena is a play space that looks to be roughly the size of a PS2 continent, perhaps smaller (I hope it's smaller), with a pool of players, a set of classes, and a potential pool of game modes. In a lot of ways, this is like how Halo multiplayer works. There's a lobby with different game modes, some team-based, some not, with potentially new crazy game modes coming out all the time. That on its surface is not a bad idea, and certainly not a bad concept for a game. It's flexible.

If you look at PSA in those terms, with the Battle Royale aspect of it as simply one possible Game Mode, and perhaps the premier game mode, then there is still a lot of possibility for the game. I'm not particularly happy about the Battle Royale part of it. I think that's been done and there's definitely a lot of games and probably better ones than what DGC can make to do it. The's a few elements of PSA that I think bring uniqueness, potentially.

1) The Scale.
This is the defining PlanetSide characteristic, and it may be the only one in PSA.

2) The Game Modes. 
PSA doesn't need to be a BR game. It could be a team deathmatch. It could have factional warfare like PS2. I hope there's a game mode called "The Crown" that is just a 3-way 24/7 Crown fight. That would be great.

3) The Vehicles. (Maybe?)
PlanetSide 2 had a lot of vehicle combat that is fairly polished now, and any of them can make appearances in PSA. This is something unique to PlanetSide that other Battle Royale style games don't really have, certainly not tanks and aircraft.

4) The Outfits. (Are they there?)
I have seen nothing about this, but I hope that's not because they aren't there. With team-deathmatch and other team-based approaches, there's a lot of potential to increase the social aspect and stickiness with player organizations like Outfits. I'd like to see multiple-outfit membership possible with a selectable "primary" one which shows the tag.  IMO, Outfits are the end-game to any PlanetSide game.

I'm a bit uncertain how much of this they're actually doing, but the potential is there.

Business Model

H1Z1 made a lot of its investment back with a box price on early access. It worked, and so they're doing that again. I suspect they will make back most of their new investment before the game actually launches. That's good, because hopefully it means the company makes enough to warrant further investment into the PlanetSide IP.

Notice it isn't Free to Play? I'm not surprised. This is a really good thing, because it means you wont have paywalls behind content and the game developers won't be scraping by, spending all their time  trying to monetize you, and making the game a grindy suckfest just to try to entice you into spending money. They already have your money, so instead they can focus on making the game more fun so you stick around and continue to give them more of it. Enough about the business model. It's good, and one I wish PS2 had from the start.

Essence of PlanetSide

So what is it to be a "PlanetSide" game. Well, we only have two so far, and with PSA that will change as they further develop the IP. But lets start with what we have.

The key elements to me, of what makes PlanetSide unique and great, are what I described already in Why PlanetSide is Special.

The scale. The persistent world. The Pure PvP. I'd go a step further and add in Teamwork (Player Organization), and Faction based combat are also part of that identity and really go hand in hand with the scale. When you have so many players involved, teamwork becomes a defining element, and with that many opponents, and bringing the scale to life really involves faction warfare.

What does PSA have of PlanetSide? To be honest, not much. It has the scale. Sorta. And it has pure PvP. Both are there, but the persistent world is not, nor is the teamwork or faction identity.  One of the most appealing aspects of the massive scale of Planetside and Planetside 2 is that I can play with ALL of my friends, anytime we want. No 16-player limits, no difficulty getting us onto the same team. We can just hop in and all play together no problem. That appears missing in Planetside Arena. The Teamwork could come back in, to a certain extent depending on game modes, but the lack of factions, the lack of any talk of outfits or player organization really hamstrings the scale value.

For now, the game looks to be Planetside In Name Only. It has the illusion of scale, but not much of the value that scale brings. It has PvP, but limited classes and abilities, so its not very broad. It has team-based modes but no factional identities to it and apparently not much of a team. The only thing that appears to be "PlanetSide" in this game are the familiar assets. I see nothing else that looks like PlanetSide.

My Take

My initial reaction was not good. I've warmed up a bit to it, especially when I look at the big picture. Scoping in on the little picture, my biggest concern is that they wont' put enough PlanetSide into PlanetSide arena and will be focused more on the Battle Royale aspect at the cost of all the other potential. I believe the removal of the factions is a huge mistake, both to the IP and PSA.

Another aspect of this is the lack of respawning. This may be a Battle Royale game mode only aspect, but I fail to see how you're going to have a massive battle where everyone gets only one life, especially on a massive continent.  I suspect it'll end up playing like a BR game with more players, over a larger area, so it doesn't end up really feeling all that massive. The Massive Clash sounds interesting, but without respawning it doesn't sound interesting at all. Like it has the potential to feel like a never-ending Crown fight, but it won't be. They can easily bring respawning into the game, so I'm not too upset about it really. It's one of the easier things they can fix.

I want to play with my friends and outfits. I want to be able to bring my friends into a fight and have team deathmatch with them. Will PlanetSide Arena give me that? I don't know. I hope so, but that's a pretty big selling point, so I think if it were there they would have mentioned it.

If they can create team game modes that feature respawning and offer us the good old massive PlanetSide 2 battles that we love without the problem of having to wait/find/create them, I think that's a winning formula. Unfortunately without the factions and more diverse classes, outfits, and vehicles I don't really see that happening. That's why I'm concerned that the Battle Royale focus is coming at the expensive of the rest of the game's potential.

So no respawning, no outfits or teamwork emphasis, no meaningful way to play with a large group of friends. That's what I see so far. It's a bit disappointing to be honest. Make no mistake though, I'm going to buy it, just on hope alone, and to help support my friends that work there. And I'll be hoping that it becomes something better, or at least helps fund the next real PlanetSide.

The concept is sound, and the base idea is one I like, but the design decisions are suspiciously tailored to one specific game mode. That may be because that's all they have time to do right before needing a cash infusion, and that's what they're focusing on for launch. I get it. I don't like it, but I understand it. It's the nature of the business. I hope they revisit them, and I hope they consider making the game far more social, with more real PlanetSide battles being possible.

Stepping back and looking at the big picture - this is really good news if you love PlanetSide, even if you don't like this particular game. It means there's hope for PlanetSide 3 and another Persistent-world faction based MMOFPS. I really want to see that.

Why PS2 Needs Squad Spawn on Squad Leader

I'm shifting a bit from my normally more historical posts to things which I think can help PS2 and MMO-FPS in general. The game is not dead, and it wasn't my intention for this to be a post-mortem in blog form. However, I will start with a little bit of history for context. So this is going to be long.

The spawn system has been the most core piece of the PlanetSide 2 experience, and it makes or breaks many FPS games. It's undergone many iterations in PS2, but the fundamentals have not changed much in this history of the game. But there were several major spawn changes in PS2:

A Look Back at Significant Spawn Changes

I'm not going to review all spawn options or changes, just the ones that I would consider "game-changer" caliber changes. These are changes that significantly altered the way the game is played.

Squad Spawn via Drop Pod

In tech test (early Beta), PS2 did have Squad Spawn. Squads were 6-man at the time, and squad members spawned on the SL via drop-pod. The SL had a beacon that could be dropped so the pods would come on the beacon instead of the SL. The drop-pod was part-cool effect, and part immersion, as the designers of PS2 wanted to always have players coming from somewhere, and not just spawn into thin air. So to them the players came from drop pods, spawn tubes, and galaxies (more on that soon). There was no publically-known attempt to have squad spawn directly on the SL. 

This method of spawning was reduced to just the squad beacon, as the drop pods at the time were very maneuverable and damaging, and were frequently being used to kill vehicles and travel across a base. Players also had difficulty staying next to the squad leader, due to the drop-pod spawn not being very good in the case of indoor fighting. Players would spawn on roof tops and be farmed by vehicles camping the buildings, and the players would try to steer the pods to kill the vehicles, completely breaking cohesion. You also had players hot-swapping SL to keep a squad going, which was annoying and made eliminating a squad difficult. So with all these issues the spawn on SL was removed, and just the beacon remained, which itself has gotten several changes over the years, along with drop pods which are now far less maneuverable and less lethal to vehicles. But that's the origin of the squad beacon still used today.

I would argue that the problem here was the method of spawning, not the idea of squad-spawning. The drop pods were the biggest problem, especially with the level of vertical gameplay PS2 has.

Sunderer Spawn

In Beta, PS2's original spawn vehicle was the Galaxy, which deployed just like Sunderers do today. This underwent several iterations to handle issues of farming spawners with Flak and to add additional protections. The main problems with the Galaxy as an empire-deployable spawn point were its size (it's actually over-sized, but that's a tale for another day) and its ability to bypass front lines entirely. This made geographical choke points, tank pushes, and ground vehicles largely irrelevant for pushing into a base, because all you needed was to fly a galaxy over them, land behind a rock, and you had insta-zerg. Once landed, a Galaxy was an easy target, and easily killed. They were very difficult to defend beacuse they were just too big and Flak MAX were very effective against them, even when landed. 

A player (I can't remember who, sorry) pointed this out in Beta and made a great case for changing it to the Sunderer, and the devs agreed. The Sunderer created far more stable fights and alleviated many of the problems of the Galaxy. It also more closely resembled the spawn truck of PS1, the AMS. One of many instances where PS1 ideas were able to slowly creep into PS2. And that's how we got the Sunderer spawn.

Reinforcements Needed

Instant Action (now known as "Join Combat") was always intended to be the way you get to fights initially. In Beta, players could Instant Action to locations. Those were directly marked on the map, and you'd arrive in a drop-pod. The IA spawn points were determined by an algorithm, and players had a choice of 5 places they could spawn-in. The problem is that it didn't really have much restrictions, and organized groups created "Steel Rain" where they would select a location and drop-pod en-masse, destroying many vehicles en masse and completely dumping on a fight. This was soon changed to Reinforcements Needed. This used the same system under-the-hood, but it was purely defensive, and it was not available after 50% threshold was reached. This actually had some pretty bad bugs for a long time, which still persist. Its still abusable by outfits and organized players and that's just part of PlanetSide 2 now. It remains a point of frustration and contention among players, some of whom rely on it for their daily entertainment, and others who see it as limiting the gameplay and fight quality.

And that's how we got Redeployside. It was always there in some respect, but there was a time on Amerish when the IA spawn points were not set correctly, so there really was no reinforcements needed or Instant Action on Amerish. It was quite awful, so this system does serve some useful purposes to creating fights and not scrapped entirely. It does need some tuning, but that's not today's topic.

If you notice a trend, most major spawning changes occurred in Beta, when the game was very different than it is today, and the level design and mechanics like Lattice did not exist. Since then, major changes have not really happened. This is largely due to not wanting to risk potentially game-destroying changes. In Beta you can do those things and players are forgiving and are excited by these sort of changes, but once Live you have to be careful not to completely alter the game overnight and destroy playstyles of players and outfits. So since then, there's really only been minor changes to the spawn system, with the exception of one.

Squad Spawn on Vehicle

Transport vehicles (Galaxies, Sunderers, and later the Valkyrie) were given the ability to allow squad members to spawn into it. The vehicle had to be occupied by someone in the squad. This was a fairly significant change, and is often used with Valkyries today (typically to drop C4 on sunderers and tanks). This is a sort of light way of feeling back in squad-spawning, but due to fear of destabilizing the game, it was done very cautiously, and slowly over time. The feature has been mostly positive, and does allow some additional sustaining of squads. You will often see Galaxies or Valkyries hovering high over a fight so its squad members can spawn in and drop out, and low-altitude Valkyries will duck in and out of a fight to drop off spawners and their explosives. 

This also shortens flight-based redeploy for many organized groups, as they can have a squad member spawn a Galaxy from the Warpgate and have their squad redeploy into that Galaxy as it is in-flight to their new destination. This is probably not good for the game, given that it allows outfits to more quickly relocate to places where they cannot redeploy. However, this feature is typically used to quickly reinforce an attack, which does not have reinforcements needed option. As it primarily benefits attackers, I think it is an important feature since attacking is very difficult in PS2.

The Next Big Change 

We are long overdue for a real game-changer in the spawning department. The devs have shown us two areas of improvement that are both notable - capturable hard spawns, and a medic tube. I've already written on what I think of the medic tube on Reddit, and the Hard Spawns are the right idea but the wrong implementation for PS2. With two potential game changers in the pipe, depending on how they are implemented, it is an exciting time. Which brings me to why I feel the need to write on Squad Spawn on SL.

Why Squad Spawn on SL

This is not really new territory for PS2. We've had Squad Spawn on SL before, but drop pods don't work well, and they can be very advantageous in certain vertical locations, and terrible for others. I believe the other major issue - Squad Leader cycling - is something that can be tuned to not be a significant problem. It was a problem with spawn beacons, for example, but not so much anymore. There are other problems, and I'll address them later on. We've also had other forms of Squad Spawn working without breaking the game, like Squad Spawn on Vehicle. This has added some stability to fights, provided you have a vehicle.  The next step is direct squad spawn. It's not a some crazy new concept; it's an evolution of what's already in the game.

These are in no particular order.

Its Natural

To stop a squad spawn, you have to wipe out the squad, not a deployable object or vehicle. This is natural for players. They want to kill other players. PS2 is also a game about spawn control, so what better way to have spawn control than the most natural thing to do in a shooter - shoot the bad guys? 

To take advantage of a squad spawn on SL, all you have to do is spawn on the SL. This should be the default spawn option for every player - assuming they are in-range. Doing so means they will naturally stick together as a squad, improving cohesion and promoting more teamplay, and if we're lucky, a little socialization.

Supporting Squad Play Helps the Game and Every Player

A very important reason to do this, is to reinforce benefits of a squad and help encourage players to be in squads. Players may not realize this, but there were very strong correlations with monetization and stickiness in squad-based play, and active outfits. Both of those are great for the game. It keeps people playing, and paying, and keeps our game running and most importantly growing so we can get continued new features and development, and many more years of enjoyment.

Squad Spawn is Safe(er)

In the spirit of not wanting to rock the boat too much, Squad Spawn is a lot safer than an empire-wide medic spawn tube. You won't have an entire empire popping out of one spot with direct squad spawn. Its limited to a single squad, so any one squad spawn area is manageable. 

Outfits can't abuse squad spawn like they can an empire spawn, and everyone can take advantage of squad spawn. They abuse the hell out of reinforcements needed, and can still dump on any fight they want with a little warpgate -> galaxy action or spawn hopping. It so simple that anyone can use it, and anyone can take advantage of it.  

The most critical thing to understand is you don't need organization to use it effectively. Anything that requires organization to use effectively is going to benefit organized players the most. This is the biggest flaw with the medic tube. Squad spawn doesn't have that problem because a single squad isn't critical to a fight.

Sustainable Fights

Squad spawn can add the layer of sustaining that is missing from the game today. You'd have several layers of redundancy to every fight.

• Sunderer / Hard Spawn - Empire-wide reinforcement point, limited by NDZs/placement. Blow up or capture to destroy.
• Squad Vehicle - Valk, Galaxy, etc providing squad-level reinforcement. Blow up or drive off vehicle to destroy.
• Squad Beacon - Easily discoverable and destroyable backup spawn for a squad, limited by timer and spawn rate.
• Squad Leader - Primary spawn for every squad. Kill the SL & wipe out squad to destroy.

With the primary spawn being the SL, the primary way you fight the enemy is kill the enemy. Strategically, you also want to go after deployed sundies, squad vehicles, and beacons. These are good tasks for Light Assault and Infiltrators and players with a more solo play style. But as long as Spawn on SL is the primary spawn, fights will be sustained without Sunderers or Squad vehicles - at least for a time. With Spawn on SL you have time to bring in new Sunderers for resiliency, and bring back vehicles to the fight without losing your foothold immediately and Suddenly. Squads can hunker down when their main spawns are down while others or squad members go back to bring in Squad vehicles, Sunderers, or both - keeping the fight alive and going.

Better Small Fights

Smaller fights have a big problem in the game today, and that is that in order to work you need to have a Sunderer, and a spawn beacon is easily discovered and unreliable. Many outfits can do pretty well with just spawn beacons and a hovering Galaxy or two, which is pretty close to squad spawn, With direct squad spawn, you don't need a Sunderer. You'd probably still want one - a cloaking one in particular that you can stash away as a fallback spawn. Without people spawning at it, it can be easily overlooked by defenders, allowing you to sustain a fight with your primary spawning being on the SL. The spawn beacon could still exist as a fallback spawn as well. With a sustainable spawn for attackers (and defenders), a small fight could be practical, and sustainable without needing massive logistical investment, or constant guarding of a Sunderer which can still be easily destroyed. 

Spread out Larger Fights

When everyone is spawning at an empire-spawn, there is a huge pile of players all in one tight area. This is bad for performance, and bad for combat. Fights need to spread out. Squad Spawn enables that. As squads move out from the empire spawn they will spawn on each other. They could all still be clustered, but chances are they will fan out a bit, spreading out the reinforcement spawn. More of an outpost will be fought over; you'll basically have limited spawns in several places, instead of 1-3 main spawns that can shift with a single vehicle or deployable being blown up.

Spawn Camp Alleviation

With squad spawn, you only need to get a SL out of a spawn to break out of a camp. This can be a very useful role for an Infiltrator or Light Assault as a SL - break out, get the squad spawning outside the spawn room, and now you can flank the attackers, push on the point, go after one of their hard spawns, etc. This is a lot more viable than getting a medic out, which has no stealth or mobility advantages. 

I'm sure there's a lot more reasons to do this, but these are plenty. 

Common Squad Spawn Concerns

I'm sure some readers are already thinking of abuse cases for squad spawn and "what about this..." I believe all problems with squad spawn can be addressed with some rather simple tuning and some small UI features.

Identifying the Squad Leader

How does the enemy know who the SL is so they can prioritize killing them? There's a few options here. The simplest is to make the enemy spot icon for a Squad Leader become a large star icon just like friendlies see their own Squad Leader. If you spot the SL, they will have that star and you'll know who to kill. Can also add an XP award or extra notification when you kill the SL. If the spot icon isn't enough, can add a shield shimmer effect or some other visual indicator that the target is a SL. I'd prefer seeing how the icon and other feedback tools work first though. They should also have a different minimap icon when spotted too. Adds value to recon and spotting, which is a good teamwork activity in general.

Squad Leader Cycling

Most concerns with squad spawn we have already seen happen with Squad Beacons. Because of that, we know the most likely abuse is Squad Leader Cycling. And we know that an effective mitigation for that is adding a delay after cycling squad leaders before the spawn activates. How long? I think somewhere in the 30s to 60s range, maybe 45 to play it safe. Could be easily tuned based on how players start using squad spawn. 

There are legit reasons to squad cycle - like the SL logs off, or moves to a different squad, but with a squad spawn delay that is big enough, it will discourage squad cycling unless it is absolutely dire and they want to take the risk of the delay. I believe there's a number that will achieve that. Not sure exactly what it is, but that's what testing is for! :)

Squad Members Spawning into Unsafe Conditions

Basically, squad members spawning in under fire. Ultimately this is the squad leader's responsibility to be safe. But the SL should  have some tools to help mitigate this, namely awareness of impending squad spawn, so the SL knows to get safe, or get as safe as possible for the teammate that's about to spawn in. An audio cue and maybe a text message are probably all that's needed here, with maybe a 3 second warning. Spawn sound -> 3 seconds later your teammate's coming in. If you hear a lot of them in quick succession you know your squad is in trouble and it's time to get as safe as possible. On the other end, it's a lot like taking a revive - the Squad member has the option to not spawn on the SL, or in the case of more organized groups, coordinate or ask the SL if it's a good time to spawn in. 

I don't think this is a particularly bad problem, and it's easy to mitigate.

Squad Leader is a Shitter

Easy mitigation - join a different squad, or make one yourself. You can also try educating the Squad Leader. They may not realize they have become the SL or simply not know that what they are doing is making the squad less effective. Lot of problems fall into this category, like SL is in an ESF, SL is being dumb, SL is cloaked all the time, etc. 

Squad Leader wants to lead-from-the-front

A common concern with Squad Spawn on SL is that they constantly pressured to play super safe and be a spawn point instead of enjoying the game the way they want. There are a few mitigations for this.

Medics allow the SL to be more aggressive than in games that have squad spawn and no revive, since they can bring the SL back up. Battlefield 2 is a good example of squad spawn w/ medics. 

Squad beacons, squad vehicle spawn, and Sunderers are also all mobile spawn options for the SL to return to the fight. As long as the SL puts down a beacon and has a bit of awareness they should be OK to take an occasional death - even one in a bad spot.

Ultimately your SL needs to be mindful not to over-extend or put himself in a bad spot for revives, and needs to be mindful of not putting himself in a bad spot for incoming spawners, but they don't need to play hyper-safe.

Another simple option is to not be the SL if you want to be very aggressive or run off by yourself. SL is a responsibility. It's a leadership role. It's not meant to be a role for everyone, just as not every class is for every player. If you don't like that responsibility, don;t be a squad leader.  Promote someone else in your squad who is playing more conservatively or is more to the playstyle to be the SL.

Squads are Too Difficult to Wipe

Tuning spawn rate, range, cost, and delays can all address this. By "cost" I mean a nanite cost, and before you freak out, I don't think it should be necessary, but it's always available if the resource aspect of the game ever becomes a more important role, or fights become so constant that you need it to create an attrition mechanic. If the fights are so constant that we need this, then I'd say it's a very successful system! :)

Infiltrators as Squad Leaders

I can see cloaking being abused to provide invisible difficult-to-find spawn point, unlike Sunderers which are fairly limited and much easier to locate. I think a simple mitigation could protect against it - you can't spawn on the SL if the SL is cloaked, and adding a short delay after decloaking before the spawn becomes active. This forces the infiltrator to be vulnerable, for at least a short time, in order to enable squad spawning. Only downside to this is noob infiltrators that end up as squad leaders may not know this and inadvertently disable their squad spawn. That's solved with education, or with the same solution as SL being a shitter.

I also think infiltrators have an important role as SL, because they can escape spawn camps the easiest and get their squad in a good position to flank. It adds an important teamwork aspect to infiltrators.  Choice of class for the SL should be an important consideration, and this is the benefit of being an infiltrator as SL.

Light Assault as Squad Leaders

Guys are spawning on rooftops!! We already have that issue with spawn beacons and Valkyrie's & Galaxies. It actually sorta happens all the time these days. It's kind of annoying at times, but not really broken. This would actually help mitigate it by allowing you to counter by having your own SL as a light assault, get up there, and fight them on the rooftops. It could be fun!

Like Infiltrators, I think Light Assault offer a unique benefit when combined with SL spawning by helping bypass obstacles for the squad. It's something for SLs to consider. They should also consider that while they may have a jetpack, their teammates may not. There's also the safe fall implant, which could become more useful if your SL is a Light Assault; equip Safe Fall so you can take the most advantage of their vertical spawn advantage and not accidentally kill themselves.

MAX as Squad Leaders

I don't really see a problem. It's an interesting tradeoff - durability for flexibility. They are harder to kill, but also harder to revive, and it takes a more balanced team of medics and engineers to keep the SL rolling, while normal infantry just requires a medic and can be brought back quicker. Worst-case, disable squad spawn if in a MAX, but I don't think that would be necessary. It's an option if it becomes a real problem, but I doubt it.

But...this only helps outfits and organized players have more advantages!

False! This helps everyone. And being squad-based limits it to the squad, which makes it more difficult for outfits to coordinate them, unlike an empire-wide spawn, which anyone in an outfit can put down and everyone benefits. It encourages outfits to be effective at the squad-level, in every squad. Non-outfit and less organized players can still leverage the value of the squad spawn simply by being in a squad. They don't need to coordinate with anyone, they just need a decent SL and a willingness to spawn on that SL.

What about Fire Teams?

People use those? Honestly not sure what to do about those, but I've yet to really see value in them. I'd say either cut or still have spawn on Squad Leader regardless of fire team.

What about Platoons?

No change in functionality for them.

Tuning

Here's a sample list (not exhaustive) of some of the main tuning knobs for a squad spawn:

• Spawn Range - The range of a Sunderer seems about right as a starting point. Could also have a different range if the SL is in a vehicle like Galaxy or Valk. A tighter range also mitigates the cycling issue somewhat.
• Spawn Rate - Can slow it down if its too difficult to wipe out the squad. Same as Sunderer to start.
• Spawn Activation Delay After Cycling - Time after switching squad leaders before squad spawn activates, a primary mitigation for SL cycling. 45-60 s or so seems like a good starting value, especailly if the range on SL spawn is large. Needs to be big enough to discourage SL cycling, but not too restricting for legit reasons to cycle (like the SL leaves the squad or logs off).
• Spawn Activation Delay After Decloak - Time after the SL decloaks before squad spawn activates (I don't think squad spawn should work with cloaked SLs unless there's a Darklight Implant or other way to more easily find cloaked players.
• Spawn Cost - Nanite cost of spawning on SL. To start with I think this should be 0, unless costs are added to many other spawn methods. But it is a tuning knob that can be used to force attrition. I think it should be something that's added only if needed.

I think I covered most of the common concerns and didn't miss any big ones, but if so I'll edit them in.

The Game Changer We Need

This is the change the game needs to really move the needle and address spawn stability. It's long overdue, and I don't think it would be all that difficult to add to the game. Most of the foundations of it are already there, afterall, we had Squad Spawn before - can't be too difficult to revive and tweak that functionality. The UX work is relatively minor, and overall it's not a massive feature to implement, but it is a massively good feature for the game.

Tell me what you think!

PS2 Origins: The Lattice System

I've been putting this one off for a long time simply because it is such a deep topic, and I fear I won't do it justice. It will likely be several posts to really cover Lattice in its entirety.

First, if you haven't already, please read my two previous related posts on Density and The Hex System. It is really important to understand both of those before Lattice can make any sense. This post is going to be more focused on historical events rather than a deep dive into the merits and criticisms. That will follow in another post.

Before Lattice

To understand Lattice, we have to go back. Way back. No, not PlanetSide 2 beta.  PlanetSide 1 Beta. Some readers may have been in diapers at the time. Not many know these events well, but I remember them quite vividly. I've seen some strange recollections of PlanetSide Lattice over the years, but here are the historical facts and effects as best I remember them.

I started playing PS1 in Beta, around mid-April of 2003. At this time there was no Lattice. There were ten continents that had 3 hard-links to sanctuaries and the rest of the links were to other continents. It gave each empire 3 places to start. To encourage fighting, the big continents each had 2 direct sanctuary links, each with a different empire pairing. There was an order to it, but the end result was that a whole lot of nothing happened. What fighting you did see was on those big continents, and other encounters were few and far between. We would load up in a galaxy in sanctuary, fly out to a continent and start capping bases. We'd spend I think 5 or 10 minutes at each one, anxiously awaiting defenders to arrive, but they never came. They had no reason to, unless they wanted to try to pick a fight, but they rarely did becuase they were more interested in farming capture XP since those captures awarded 5000 xp, way more than any kills. And so we would go around capping various locations, getting certs, and trying out the new skills in the game.

But occasionally, maybe once a day, you'd get a skirmish for a little while, often by sheer chance because two squads happened to try to capture the same base at the same time. And when that happened there was magic - the game was amazingly fun with awesome graphics, especially for its time. There was just one problem - those awesome moments were few and far between.

After about a week the game started getting quite stale and frustrating. It was still fun, but the lack of consistent fights and meaningful engagements really took its toll. Players started inventing fight locations and organizing battles in the forums. It worked to some extent, but the game desperately needed a way to do that on its own. It was becoming obvious that unless something changed, this game with huge potential and many great features was going to be an epic fail.

Here's a beta image of PlanetSide 1, before the Lattice. This was about 2 weeks before I started playing.

This image captures well the chaos of pre-lattice PlanetSide. There's captures going on all over the place with no coherence or battle lines, just ghost capping. In case you're wondering, the yellow-greenish splotches are weather fronts. :)

PlanetSide Is A Series of Tubes

To those who read Density, the problem should be obvious. There weren't a lot of people in Beta, and the capturable land mass was massive. Player density was extremely low. The entire world was capturable at any time, and nothing encouraged you or even helped you find the enemy. Around this time there was a popular forum post. I can't remember for certain whether it was a player or a dev who posted it (I'm reasonably confident it was a player), but that person outlined the problem fairly concisely and proposed a simple solution - a connection network linking all the bases on a continent into a web, and you can only capture bases where your faction had an uncontested link.  About a week later, that idea was in the game, and the effect was was about four orders of magnitude more combat and action, and entertainment. It was incredible, and I was hooked for life.

With Lattice came other changes to experience earning for captures - no more did a capture give you a static 5k XP. Instead 5k was the upper limit, and how much you got for a capture or resecure depended on enemy presence throughout the stretch of time before and during the capture attempt. And those captures/defenses were the only way to earn "command XP", which is what Squad Leaders had to level up their squad leading. So not only were there fewer places to attack or defend at any given moment, but each squad leader and member was motivated to go to where the enemy actually was. Ghost caps were not valuable; places that were defended were valuable.  

Here's what the lattice looked like late in PS1.

Same continent as above, only with Lattice. Clearly much more ordered and coherent. The yellow links were the border links - anything with a yellow link attached to it could be captured by you or is vulnerable to capture. To see what you can and cannot attack or what you need to defend, just look at the yellow links. Solid color links are secured and not vulnerable to capture.


The old days of ghost capping and avoiding the enemy were over. Now finding the enemy was easy - they and us could only attack a few places. Go to those places. It also led to an ebb and flow - defending a base led to a counter-attack on the nearest enemy base in the lattice. So the battle would transition from base to open field to base. If you lost you'd spawn at the next base back and the process would repeat. Quick travel wasn't easy except for drop-pods from sanctuary, so players tended to stay in the fights they were in, so those battles were consistent.

It wasn't just the lattice that did this; the experience changes motivated players to create fights, and the spawn rules and travel restrictions kept those fights reasonably stable. But the Lattice is what set the framework and took that massive play space and reduced the actionable play space to a much smaller area, increasing the density greatly. You could still go anywhere on the continent, and the fighting would eventually progress around the continent, keeping things fresh. It was a nice compromise of having a big open world but needing to have some focus for the players to have real and consistent fights.

Impact of the Lattice on PlanetSide

Lattice was in the game for a couple weeks before launch, and it played a big role in saving the game from certain failure. I have zero doubt that without the lattice, PlanetSide would have been a cautionary tale instead of a revolutionary game.

Lattice, combined with Continent Locking is what solved the scaling problem of player density. The connectivity of the ten continents broke up combat into typically 2-3 continents at any one time, which scaled down to one continent off-peak when all the others locked and players gravitated to wherever the best fight was found. At peak we would see many unlocked continents with battles raging on all of them. Within each continent, the Lattice focused the limited population to a subset of the bases and kept the fighting solid. The many relatively small continents & locking allowed the play space to scale with population decently well, and the lattice did the same within the continents. OK, lets fast-forward to PlanetSide 2.

Why No Lattice in PS2 Launch?

Ok, at the risk of being too forward, I'm going to be a bit candid. One of the big reasons was the stigma on PlanetSide, largely passed down from the top. There was a strange belief that PlanetSide was not "successful." I always found it bewildering, because if it wasn't successful, why the hell we were making a sequel and borrowing some ideas from it but not others? And I firmly believed (and still do) that many of the ideas in PlanetSide were very successful and sound, especially Lattice since I saw first-hand how it transformed the game in a very positive way. Regardless, PS1 was generally viewed as a big tub of bath water and it needed to be entirely thrown out, babies and all. Not everyone on the team believed that, but the PlanetSide fanbois were very outnumbered. It was sad.

However, be that as it may, the biggest reason is that a new game often has new fresh ideas and generally people want to try new things with learnings from later games. It's a fair point to say that the way an old game did things may not be applicable in the current era of gaming and to start fresh. To put it into context, the breakout game Battlefield 2 was released two years after PlanetSide. That's how far back we're talking. PlanetSide pre-dates vanilla World of Warcraft.  Many things change, and with it, ideas on gameplay. To great credit, PlanetSide 2 got a lot of inspiration from Battlefield Bad Company 2, which IMO was the best Battlefield ever released. The general idea of PlanetSide 2 is that we have a giant Conquest map, as if you stitched 6-9 battlefield Conquest maps together you get something like Indar. I wasn't there for the creation of Hex, but I believe that's roughly how it originated. If you want more information on this design, check out my post on The Hex System.

So the reason PlanetSide 2 did not have lattice straight away was because borrowing from PlanetSide 1 was taboo, and the team believed they had a more modern and effective design. As I explained in the Hex post, it did seem like a pretty good design at the time. The need for the Lattice simply wasn't there, and even if it were, nobody wanted to see it without first trying out the new hotness.

Rush Lanes

As described in the Hex post, Hex had problems straight away, and while it was stitched up it had fundamental flaws that go back to Density. In spite of greatly improving Hex, it was still not performing the way it needed to, and in the process of being fixed up and responding to how players played the game, the game shifted to being very different from what was intended under Hex. After going through Beta and 3 months of Launch, the ideas upon which Hex was designed had fallen apart, and it was slowly changing into becoming more lattice-like.

Meanwhile players were still avoiding each other, doing a lot of ghost capping, and large zergs roamed around capping things, occasionally bumping into each other, and then going a different direction. Nothing really forced them to fight each other, and nothing motivated them to fight each other, so those fights didn't happen.

A common pattern we did see was where bases were really close together we'd see a smooth flow that often played out like a Battlefield Rush map. There was a common lane of combat between Allatum and Zurvan where players would go from Allatum to Ti Alloys, to THE CROWN, to Zurvan. That would go back and forth and when it didn't dissolve and go another direction, it was a good fight. That pattern existed in many places on all continents, but particularly on Indar. The next evolution of the Hex system was to further restrict the connections to reinforce these lanes and create more stable fights. These were then known as "Rush Lanes."

Here's a picture of the Indar Rush Lanes.

The hexes were made tiny to have clear separation between the lanes and reduce the number of connections, which was not possible with the larger hexes and when every hex bordered another. In the middle we can see the aforementioned Allatum <-> Zurvan lane, as well as many others. The intent was quite simply to focus the fights more. We erred on the side of less connectivity to really push the idea to the limit to see how dramatic the effect would be. Even early testing on a very unstable test server showed far better fights with a much lower population than typically on live.

Return of the Lattice

The astute observer would recognize that Rush Lanes bear a striking resemblance to a Lattice, except it's uglier and more confusing.  Remember above where I said PS1 had a stigma associated with it, and ideas from PS1 were taboo? The moment anyone said "Lattice" some influential people would shut down and immediately write off the concept as being part of PS1, and therefore a failed idea. When describing Lattice in more abstract terms and drawing on similarities to recent popular games like BFBC2's Rush Mode, we could have a conversation without triggering the automatic PS1-is-fail response. Please don't think that everyone was dumb and didn't make the connection; that is not true at all. Everyone knew that Rush Lanes were really Lattice, but we weren't using PS1 context so it was successful in deflecting the instant dismissal. We could move past the stigma and talk about the merits of the system irrespective of its history in PS1, because we weren't talking about PS1 at all.

Once we saw the system in Test and the very promising results, it was clear that this was the change the game needed. We were then committed to it, so we addressed the elephant in the room - Rush Lanes, while functionally effective, look absolutely terrible. instead of shoe-horning the Hex system, a complicated computer science data structure was used - a graph. :) That graph then got visual representation and improvements. This is the point the Hex system completed its transformation into Lattice.

Here's the  functional equivalent of Rush Lanes with the Lattice face-lift and new map UI. Hex coloring is in heat map mode so the lattice links are more clear.

As with the original PS1 lattice, the yellow links indicate capturable/vulnerable bases.

After a long road, PS2 has a lattice similar to PS1. However, it is important to note that the number of bases on a PS2 continent are far more and the size is far bigger than PS1. The lattice didn't quite play out the same way. That's a different problem though, one of continent size being too big and not granular enough to enable good scaling. But the effect on combat was still quite dramatic. Moment-to-moment gameplay in PlanetSide 2 was greatly improved with this change, and many of the zerg-balls avoiding each other ended and fights became a lot more stable.

Looking back, the Lattice was an inevitable evolution of where the Hex System was going as it was being tweaked. The directions of the changes culminated with Rush Lanes, which were a hex representation of Lattice.


I think this post being a mostly historical chronicle is a good start. I'm going to save the analysis of the merits and criticisms of the Lattice for my next post. Thanks for reading!

No Deploy Zones

Probably the worst-named feature in PlanetSide 2. Putting the word "no" in a feature name is not going to make it popular, but it is an important feature that I believe has been misunderstood over the years. So for the rest of the blog post I'll simply use a much better sounding acronym.

NDZs were added fairly early in PS2's lifetime and were something I was adamant about to fixing flow.

NDZs In Crayon

So what's the purpose of the NDZ? To encourage the flow of combat to be around the capture point instead of the spawn room. When you can place an attacker spawn point next to the capture point, the fight shifts to be between the capture point and the spawn room with pressure to push in on the spawn room. This is illustrated by my amazing artistry skills below.

The attackers end up staring at the spawn room, the defenders end up sitting in it, and in order to have any real chance at defending they have to destroy the two attacker spawns. This is a tremendous advantage to the attacker and essentially shits all over the fight.

The NDZ ensures that the attackers can't completely secure the capture point simply by parking spawns on them, and pushes the fight to be more around securing the capture point than containing the spawn. (Yes, I know this won't happen ALL the time, nothing is guaranteed in an open world MMOFPS, we have to do what we can to encourage fun behavior and discourage unfun behavior)

Here's the same situation with a NDZ.

They can still place spawns right outside the spawn room on the opposite side, but that's rarely an issue unless the base has some really bad flaws (and some of them do). Also a spawn over there doesn't really help the main fight in most cases. The main point here is that players generally spawn and move towards objective, and by ensuring the NDZ is about the same radius as the defender spawn you typically get fighting in the combat area and around the capture point instead of around the spawn room. It doesn't eliminate spawn camping by any means, but it does move the fighting out away from it when the numbers are reasonably close.

Proper NDZs

NDZs are best utilized when designing an outpost. Unfortunately most were retro-fit. Here is an early image from when Wokuk Ecological Preserve was under construction during Amerish revamp. The big wireframe red sphere is the NDZ. It covers the entire main combat area of the base and is centered on the capture point (or rather, where the capture point will be).

The green ruler is the distance from the capture point to where the edge of the NDZ is. It is exactly 100m. The NDZ completely encloses the spawn room and teleporter exit, visible at the top. This gives the defenders a slight distance advantage over where attacker spawns are placed.


You can also see the NDZ while Fort Liberty was being created (very early stages!), along with some of the thought processes: https://www.twitch.tv/planetside2/v/43293995

Problems with NDZs

I know what some readers are thinking - "but this NDZ at <outpost> is terrible" - and they would be right. An NDZ is only as good as its placement, and most NDZs were placed hastily and a bit too conservatively to be of value. In those early days when they were initially created, we had about 250 bases that needed to have NDZs added to them. Many NDZs were not placed well, to the point where they didn't really do much to stop the behavior they were intended to stop and ended up not making much sense to players trying to park Sunderers. We also didn't know what would really make a good NDZ at the time, so there was some experimentation involved. And we were very busy so fixing them up was left to be done during revamps instead of an explicit NDZ correction pass. It would probably only take a few minutes to fix NDZs at most bases, but even if it was only 5 minutes, that's still nearly 21 man-hours to fix/verify them at every outpost. For one person that would be over 3 work days doing nothing but placing spheres. After a day of that just about anyone would want to be eating a shotgun. And that's also why they weren't placed well - even if very fast, not easy to place them well, so those doing the placing erred on the side of having an ineffective NDZ over a poorly placed one that might severely disrupt the fight. And that's how we got to where we are.

Another issue is that due to how they render on the map, multiple areas placed in a base for an NDZ would create overlapping circles and cosmetically would look rather awful. So we needed to use only one NDZ area - a sphere - for each base. That sphere is not always the right shape for what the NDZ needs to be, and some outposts had elevation extremes that made the NDZ very difficult to place properly. Sometimes you needed a rectangular NDZ, but that looked bad on the minimap so it was avoided.

Also NDZs are a bit unusual for 3-point bases, as they break the normal rule that the NDZ should be around the capture points. In these bases the NDZ should be around the spawn room, or cover a large area around it so attackers cannot put pressure spawns right outside the spawn room and control the entire area. Having attacker spawns next to the capture points is actually OK, as it still promotes fights between spawns and capture points, and most 3 point outposts had those points spread around the spawn room in different directions, making it far more difficult for an attacker to secure all three at once. In these cases having a NDZ around the spawn made the most sense. One example is Nason's Defiance, which actually has intentional sunderer spots under the capture point at A and very close to B.

A final problem is only a problem at certain outposts, and that is that the NDZ only affects attacker spawns. In most cases this is OK, as destroying a defender spawn at the cap area is part of the fight progression, and defenders moving up spawns helps push out attackers and create an offensive front. However, certain outposts are extremely defensible in certain areas, making removal of the spawns very difficult to the point where it breaks flow. These bases need attacker and defender NDZs. Fort Liberty is a good example, I am sorry to say. Sometimes level designers make mistakes. :(


So hopefully that clears up some of the NDZ misconceptions. They have a good purpose, but unfortunately many aren't placed well. It is one of the many challenges of going with ~300 unique hand-crafted outposts. Where they are placed well I believe they are a big reason for some of the better flowing bases.

Free 2 Play!

First, apologies for delays in blogging. I've been playing a lot of different games like Skyrim (again), Civ 6, Clash Royale, some PlanetSide 2, and finally got around to Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. All great games, btw. Civ 6 was particularly distracting. Just. One. More. Turn... Ok, back to it.

I've made some comments in the past on Reddit and in person for those who I had the pleasure to meet at events like SOE Live about my extreme distaste for Free To Play. I don't dislike Free 2 Play entirely; games like Clash Royale fit well for F2P. Sometimes it makes sense for the game. Sometimes its forced and not such a great fit. Free to Play is more than micro-transactions. What I want to talk about today is the model, how it impacts the dev process and how it indirectly affects the game in a negative way. The case study of course will be PlanetSide 2.

The PlanetSide 2 Model

PlanetSide 2's F2P model was based on League of Legends. The idea was an in-game currency (Auraxium, see this post on what happened to it) would act like gold and become a currency for buying primarily boosts, cosmetics, and weapons. All of those things could also be purchased for real currency.  On top of this was a subscription for those who wanted traditional MMO benefits that offered a boost, some currency for puchasing items, and a resource boost that included boosting Auraxium. It's very similar to League of Legends, Heroes of the Storm, etc if you just mentally convert heroes -> weapons. There was also a natural pressure to buy the weapons because they were expensive compared to much-cheaper boosts which you could get more out of in the long-run. So the ideal was to use in-game currency to buy boosts, and money for weapons & subs.

The primary driver behind this economic model is convenience. You're buying xp boosts to get certs faster, so you can get guns faster, or buying them directly. In order for purchasing that to be an actual convenience the game must be inconvenient without those things. Therein lies the evil rooted in F2P; you must intentionally make your game less fun so you can sell things to make it more enjoyable. The result is that grindy feeling, and feeling compelled to spend money so you can get real enjoyment in the game. When I encounter this I feel resentment because I know the game could be more fun, but the developer is intentionally making it less so I fork over more money. Personally, I'd much rather pay up front money for the game than deal with that constant unpleasantness which will eventually drive me away.

Fairness to Players

Then there is the mismatch of economics. Some players pay nothing. Some players pay 10x or more what they would normally pay for such a game. F2P offers you the "power" to choose how much you want to spend on the game - it was even the slogan "free to play your way." Lets do a little math. Lets assume that only 1 in 10 players actually monetizes and pays real money for a F2P game, which is a good conversion rate (IIRC, the industry average is between 5%-10%, so 10% is great). Compared to your traditional box price of $60 which would bring in net revenue of $600 for 10 players (for simplicity lets remove retail costs and assume it's being bought directly from the developer), how much would the lifetime revenue need to be for the one paying customer to break even? $600. That doesn't sit well with me. I just don't think its a fair thing to players willing to pay money to gouge them to compensate for others who pay nothing. Most people these days are willing to spend $20-$60 on a console game, so why not do this for a AAA shooter?

I'm making a critical assumption here - that the number of players would be the same between a traditional box price and F2P - and that is unlikely. Its generally accepted that F2P brings in more due to the risk-free nature of F2P. How much more? That's unknowable, but there are many games that convert to F2P and see a revival, like Dungeons and Dragons Online, and end up making more money than they did before. There are also games that didn't. And the stickiness is different too, as I will discuss below.

Development Impact

I said I wanted to talk about impact to development, so lets get to that. When you are a F2P game, you must always be thinking about monetization - how what you are doing affects existing monetization, and how you can add to more monetization. You are personally motivated to do this - if the game makes more money, you see royalties sooner, and the team and game can expand (the carrot). If you don't, then folks leave the team or get laid off (the stick). For more on this, see my last post. So one way or another, monetization affects everything you do. Take Directives for example. One of the purposes of Directives is additional exposure to buy more weapons. That's why each directive tier adds another directive to advance and most are weapon-based. We didn't have to do it that way, but we did because it was a monetization opportunity. Directives also help motivate players to keep playing for the achievements, so it is also present to help with stickiness and longevity.

Another impact is that things which have clear monetization value get prioritized over things which do not. Just look at the major systems features I worked on, in the order I worked on them -> VR (try out things before you buy them), Tutorial (new player stickiness is direct revenue increase), Directives (stickiness & subtle monetization push). All have clear and obvious monetization value.  They were also needed and generally liked by players, so it's not all bad. What about metagame features like resource revamp? No direct monetization value. New weapons, vehicles, etc took precedent. Some features that were big draws like a continent revamp were prioritized because they could bring players back and were things marketing could rally around and promote. It's much harder to sell things that could make the game simply more fun or play better when you have pressure to make more money.

We could have done things to make the game more fun and enjoyable, but the business model always demanded we sacrifice fun to the green god. In a way, the game became a slave to its own business model, because that's the financial reality of game development.

New Player Impact

Having worked on the Tutorial, I learned a lot about new player stickiness. It's not the best tutorial, but I'm very proud of it given the impact it had on stickiness and the extremely limited resources I had (shameless plug: apart from some UI additions, I made the entire tutorial from scratch in a few weeks, including the scripting engine and level design).

There's a psychological influence property called Commitment & Consistency (Its how POWs get brainswashed, fascinating stuff - if you're interested in this sort of thing I recommend reading books by Robert Cialdini). Basically, people tend to be consistent in their decisions, which means one decision, even a small one, commits you to a path you are likely to stay on. Monetizing in a game is a big commitment. You decided to buy into a game. (And yes, I know what you're thinking - I too have a Steam library full of unplayed games, but nearly all are from flash sales and bundles, not games on which I paid full price). You will tend to want to get your money's worth and give it a better shot than a game you didn't. I believe games which have the right box prices - up front commitment - have much better stickiness over a F2P game, which requires only the commitment to download it. If you aren't immediately hooked, you can dump it and not feel any real loss, because you didn't really commit. If that happens, there's no money or enjoyment gained from others for that player. This is a big advantage I believe any sort of gating cost has over a pure F2P game. Note the box price has to match the expectation, otherwise players get angry and demand refunds, like No Man's Sky.

There's also a stigma for F2P games. Players see F2P and their quality expectation immediately drops to some mobile fart app. That's not good as a first impression. I recall articles talking about how surprising PS2 for a F2P game. New players have to overcome the F2P stigma before even trying the game.

Then it has to hook them. And since they're free players, the game is slow and grindy, because it was intentionally made inconvenient so the F2P model can work. These are all difficult hurdles for a new player to get through to really see the fun in the game, and are a big reason why a lot of players don't stick around long enough to see how awesome of a game it can be. I believe these aspects of F2P wipe a way a lot of the potential increased player base benefits of F2P. This is also something that can vary greatly between games. Some designs can minimize these hurdles, and developers could actively address new player issues.

Some PS2 players might be wondering why new player features keep cropping up from update to update - this is why. The new player experience is bad, partly because its a complex pure-pvp game, and partly because of the business model. Sadly I don't think there's much in the way of silver bullets to solve that problem.

Am I Right?

So am I right about all this? Well, I would point you to H1Z1 - the game released after PS2 that was originally touted as a F2P game. As I write this, H1Z1 has been in "Early Access" for almost two years (23 months), and it still has the same $20 buy-in and in-game shop.  It also has a game mode that was added recently as a stand alone game for another $10 "early access" price. And as of this writing, I can't find any reference at all to H1Z1 being a F2P game on its website, but you can still see it listed as such in old articles when it was announced.

Seems clear to me that the F2P experiment at SOE/Daybreak did not work out as they had hoped, and they have returned to a reasonable box price + in-game shop as a monetization model once they saw how much revenue that brought them in Early Access. They also set expectations low with perpetual "early access." That's a fair way to go, IMO. You still have the opportunity to sell cosmetics and game modes like battle royale to scale up investment, but with every player putting in some money you can afford to focus on making the game fun instead of bleeding out every cent from the whales who actually pay for the development. You can still have whales, but the pressure on them is greatly reduced.

Had F2P been all what they wanted, they'd still be using it. Lesson learned, at a steep cost. I hope this post helps explain some of the reasons why.

If you think I'm wrong, by all means, please comment and share your thoughts. Preferably in a civil manner. :)

Financial Reality

It is hard to really understand the financial reality of game development until your paycheck and livelihood are tied to it. I certainly didn't think about it much at all prior to becoming a game dev. While making and playing PlanetSide 2, I saw countless posts from players talking about how the devs were making money grabs here, rolling in cash there, and otherwise protesting any and every attempt to generate more revenue for the game. Those same players often wanted to see different features made entirely. I wanted to explain some of the background to that, and why those things are so very often misunderstood, and so very important to any game you love. As a player you often have selfish priorities but don't really see the big picture - when the game makes more money, you will generally get a better game and more development on it. And when it doesn't...it doesn't.

Wikipedia has a great article on game development that covers some of the financial aspects. If you're interested in details, I recommend that. But here's the short of it. Making a AAA game is usually very expensive. And since you don't typically make money until you ship that game, you need most of that money up front. Tens to hundreds of millions of dollars, depending on how many developers are on the game and for how long. That means a business loan. When you do ship the game, the folks that loaned you that money don't just forget about it. They are investing in the game, and they not only want their money back, they also want to see a return on that investment. That means that a good chunk of the money the game makes goes to paying off a massive loan and investor returns; it doesn't go to devs so they can buy golden Lamborghinis. Then you have operating costs of the game - the salaries of the devs still working on it, the hardware, the customer service, the office space lease, the coffee in the break room, etc. And you have future costs for the game paid in-advance - how much will it cost to run it for the next several years? How many devs? What sort of support? After the loan and future costs are paid off is typically when you would start to see royalties, assuming the game makes that much money to cover operating and future development of the game. During all that time, the dev team is usually on salary or hourly, just like most of the jobs out there. In a perfect world, the game makes good money, investors are happy, it continues to get funding, and after a while the dev team starts to get some royalties for their efforts. But even in a perfect world that takes time to happen.

But what about an imperfect world? What if the game doesn't make enough money to pay off its loan or cover operating costs? Typically the response to any product not being in the black is obvious. 1) increase revenue. 2) reduce costs. Games are no different.

To increase revenue, new features will go in to try to bump it directly or indirectly (new things in cash shop, better player retention, etc). Those features are not free, and may not be anticipated. That means to make those features happen, other features get postponed or cut in favor of the revenue-increasing ones. This is usually in addition to cost cutting measures, as you don't really know if the revenue increasing features will work and they take time to build. So costs are often also reduced.

The biggest cost to reduce in a game are its people. Can't really cut game servers, and building space is not easy to adjust. People (devs, testers, customer service, etc) are easy to adjust, and they are a significant cost. This is especially true if you factor in multiple years of future development.  Remove one dev and you've shaved several hundred thousand off the amount of money you need to sustain the game in its lifetime. When one dev is removed, so too are all of the features, ideas, improvements, assets, and bug fixes that dev would have created or contributed to the game. Really important features would be offloaded to other devs, which means some of the features they would have worked on get cut instead. Because of this, typically lesser paying more volatile jobs are cut first - customer service, testers, and non-critical (or not-as-critical) staff. Then as that process continues more and more significant staff gets reduced, and with them more significant feature reductions deleted from the future of the game. Also out the door goes some types of projects, which may no longer have the manpower to effectively create. The scope is reduced. While sometimes devs simply move to another project in the company, sometimes they are simply laid off. The loss of personnel has another effect - morale goes right down the shitter. Watching talented friends and colleagues who helped you build a game pack up their stuff and likely forever leave the project is soul crushing. It's much worse for them (obviously), but I want to focus on the effect it has on the game. All those things are very bad for the game.

Most players will never know all of the cool stuff that might have been. Few are observant enough to put the clues together. From the player angle, you don't see the cost reductions; they see the new features that don't necessarily make sense to them, and features they are excited about get postponed, sometimes indefinitely. Why are they doing all this player retention work? Why are they putting out more things to sell? We want X Y and Z!! The shallow thinker looks at this and incorrectly thinks money grabbing greedy bastards ignoring what the players want to add more lining their already gold-lined pockets. But what's really happening is the financial reality of the game is taking its toll - reduced feature set, re-prioritization of that set, and scope reduction for those features. Those devs aren't trying to nickel and dime those players; they are fighting to save the game those players love and their jobs.

The big takeaway for the average player should be to try to read between the lines, and give your dev team a little benefit of the doubt. If you see monetization features going into your favorite game instead of things you might have expected, don't think those devs are being greedy. They may have thought of a way to make the game more successful, bring in more revenue, and increase feature development. Or they could be in trouble. In either situation, it's in your best interest as a fan of the game to be helpful. Give feedback that would help those systems and features be successful. If they aren't successful, then the result is likely fewer features in the future. And if there are troubles that process will repeat until the numbers balance out or the game collapses. Neither of those outcomes is good for those who love the game. You should want the game to be successful, and help it be successful if you are able. Support it; encourage others to support it. Give feedback and ideas on how it could be more successful. Do you not like the monetization features? They are there for good reason. Instead of trashing them, try to offer ways they could make it be more acceptable. And most importantly - give the devs a break. They're normal people working under stressful conditions on volatile projects that have very little in the way of job security. However much you want the game to be successful, they have a much bigger investment in that outcome.

Don't Listen...

I wanted to share some great advice I got early on in my time on the PS2 team, from Thomas Schenck (@tomslick42), who is now on the H1Z1 team as the technical director, IIRC. It is applicable to players, devs, and really anyone who uses or develops any product.

In the crunch days before launch of PS2 and the many weeks that followed, we all spent long days and nights at the office making PS2 as great as it could be. During some of these late nights I would often chat with Tom about all sorts of design ideas - he had a lot of them, and also some game history to share. On top topic of feedback from the players, Tom had a great statement that stuck with me throughout my time as a designer. It still sticks with me, because I believe it applies to all forms of software and product development in general.

Don't listen to what they say;  

listen to what they're telling you.

When you work on a game, or any product, you gain knowledge into how that product is made, and more importantly why things are the way they are. You have requirements, insights, and information that is not available to consumers of that product (in this case, the players). They can never know all of the things you know, even if you try to tell them. So the context of the developer is fundamentally different from the context of a player. What a player might see as a problem may be an important part of a design for the developer, which the player wouldn't understand or value. So when a player gives feedback like "This thing sucks, remove it" the developer can't rarely ever take that feedback literally. Instead the developer must interpret that feedback as "This part of the product doesn't feel right" and try to get a better understanding of why the thing isn't working the way they had intended.

I had a similar experience recently with a friend working on a board game he and his buddies were designing. I helped play test the board game, and gave feedback. As I was giving feedback and suggestions, he was translating it into the source of the problem. When I said "it feels like I have nothing to do during this time" his response was "so you want more player interaction?" He had received that feedback before, had thought about it, and immediately recognized the underlying problem from the symptom I had given him. I had thought of ways to alleviate that problem, but his understanding of his game was far better than mine, such as how all the parts moved together. He had a very different response to my feedback than I expected, but it was correct because it took into account all of the history and requirements and other feedback of which I had little knowledge.

Takeaways

Players:

• Try to be as detailed as possible when describing problems, that helps devs frame the problem in their context. 
• Emotion and feel are great things to use, as that usually cuts to the root of an issue.
• Feel free to make suggestions, but expect that they will likely do something different because you don't have all the requirements.
• Lack of response or changes completely different from what you expect doesn't mean your feedback wasn't received - it can often mean a dev combined it with other context unbeknownst to you and arrived at a fix (or lack thereof) they believe is appropriate to all requirements.
• Sometimes they will agree with you, but may not change something for other reasons that override your feedback, or are awaiting other solutions that may address it.

Devs:

• Player feedback may lack context, but it's still giving you an angle that you may not see - their perspective. Just as your context is different, so is theirs.
• Even seemingly toxic feedback can be great. Matt often looked at 4chan and went out of his way to get every piece of feedback - good and bad - that he could to understand what people really thought of the game and how to best improve it.
• Dont' listen to what they say; listen to what they're telling you. :)

And thank you, Tom! You probably had no idea how much I took that to heart!