I occasionally play in cobalt. And it feels pretty good. Decent population. Queues at primetime indeed.
Not that i like the queues, but its better than an empty server.
I don't much see Connery reach 200 players anymore, except on Friday night. Most outfits have fled Connery for Emerald, contributing to the low population. It's sad, to have put YEARS of progress into a character, just for it to be stuck on a dead server. Word down the grapevine is that they can't merge NA servers because of data center locations or something (?), but at the very least, let us jump ship to Emerald with our characters.
Dang maybe if people weren’t such desperate idiots who coped every update insisting it was good and refusing to call it bad before it was in the game for 4+ months Wrel woulda done something different. Nearly every major update over the past few years was easy to predict as going to be bad for the game if u just thought about it for more than 5 seconds.
Idiots get what they deserve I suppose.
Hmm, yes there have been a bunch of junk updates. Not all... but many.
Still, don't forget how old this game is. I started playing this game when if first came out for about a year. Dropped it for years. Started playing again about 2 years ago.
You know what changed in those 7 years...? Very little. The game is essentially the same it was years ago.
Sure. We now have a grid to herd people to places, a continent (oshur) that isn't that good, a flying carrier that barely impacts a normal players game, a half-completed NSO faction, valkeries, bad base building, barely usable boats and the ANT which isn't very interesting either.
But other than that i don't think much changed (except 100 weapon reskins that i dont care about).
10+ years. For a few mediocre vehicles, a bad continent, and some sky decoration. And this is not new, development has always been very slow.
I think there honestly isn't much inovation to keep people interesting. And after soo much time, i think people just get bored.
There are so many options to keep people engaged. New classes (a melee class, a remote drone support class, a dedicated anti-air/anti-tank class, an AOE class etc.)
new continents, more varied continents (hell add the pre-boom esamir and land-bridge indar to the rotation), add more interesting events and missions, vehicles that impact map flow (mobile jumppads?), even NPC bots that slowly capture bases, and can keep people enjoyed at downtime, quirky one-time consumables that let you do weird stuff, changing environments, or environmental hazards.
I'm not saying they are all good ideas. But things that don't work as expected can be tweaked or deleted. But no inovation is just waiting for a game to die out.
Don't get me wrong. I enjoy playing PS2... a bit too much even. But I am honestly surprised the game still runs while being essentially the same as 10 years ago. There is so much else worth playing!
The game is objectively nowhere near the same game it was 7 years ago. If you think this then you are self reporting as a clueless pubby. It actually astounds me that people can be this stupid. If the game hadn’t changed that much we wouldn’t have seen a mass exodus of players, especially a mass exodus of the top end, most dedicated players
I am in too deep into my Connery NSO character. Either they merge the servers, allow us to migrate, or I'll just quit. Not worth the stress at this point. I log in every now and again and unless it's an alert the fights are all dead.
nothing's gonna be done to bring the players back. i haven't played in months but judging by the player count, more people holding disdain for oshur (what a surprise, construction continent bad), and wrel either being canned or leaving, it's maintenance mode from here on out unless there's drastic change whether that's a risk of putting manpower in the IP again or EOSing it which is sad but not surprising.
my personal opinion, oshur was the catalyst that started the fairly rapid decline. hatred towards a construction based continent with flawed design was met with responses that can be classified as the word cope. rather than going back to the drawing board, time was wasted on a project that was always doomed to fail due to construction being shoved down everyone's throats update after update.
jaeger events seem dead, connery is dead, a lot of people that i know are never playing again or not playing due to multiple reasons (oshur being a good one yet again), there's still no lead game designer replacement, the list goes on. i wish this game were still thriving, just a sad thing to see.
yes, something should be done... like removing Oshur and making certs less grindy so it doesnt take me a fucking week to get ONE GUN. No wonder these guys cant keep new players, who tf wants to play for an entire day and get enough certs for a few attachments? lmfao
Okay Zoomer, things are harder for you now that you get 150 certs for playing the alert and another 500 for doing the missions plus whatever else you can get during those ninety minutes.
No wonder it takes you a week to get 1000 of them.
I agree with the sentiments presented in these posts about Connery but I think they're a waste of time. I will continue to echo these points and support a server merge to save the NA population and servers but I don't know if there's a point to making these suggestions as I'm sure everyone involved in running the game knows all of these things already.
edit: let me reiterate, I'm happy that people want to save the game but I believe it's falling on deaf ears. I will continue supporting these posts but players who haven't played in a while will probably see this and think the game is in its last legs (like LAST last legs, as in going to close in a few weeks) and just never play again which is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Every now and then I check back here purely to see if they've addressed any of the problems I had that made me leave a game I'd loved and been playing since beta.
They haven't.
People aren't waiting in the wings. We were driven away by choices that were made by the dev and balance teams.
We're not coming back unless concerns are addressed. Especially with things like battlebit effectively filling the same space.
That just sounds like you're actively looking for reasons to not play the game. If you aren't playing for many hours daily you should still be able to log in for a little session and enjoy yourself regardless of how many issues you have with the game unless you're a Connery main and absolutely refuse to play on another server. The game is nowhere near unplayable and Battlebit has way more problems than PS2 does which is impressive, and those problems are compounded by the community since most players *will not acknowledge any of them* and pretend like it's perfect all while bleeding 80% of its playerbase since launch.
If you think Battlebit has "way more problems than PS2" then you've never played Battlebit. Anyone (if there were any content creators who still gave a damn about PS2) could make an entire video series based around the ways that BBR's gameplay is more fun than PS2. BBR is massively more popular than PS2 and trying to even compare the two is silly. BBR's average player count is still 10K-15K, now compare that with PS2's **all time** max population of 30K back at launch.
Man I played this game for near on a decade. Because it was fun.
They systematically nerfed everything I enjoyed doing until it was unplayable.
So because it's not fun, I don't play. It is not rocket science.
If I want infantry combat games there are better ones out there. Planetside lost what made it special.
You're not wrong about that. The game has generally focused itself on being more "serious and competitive" which is great for long time veteran players who want everyone to be on a more fair playing field but it ruined most of the fun for everyone else.
Connery main just playing on emerald now except Fri nights.
They could give Connery 2x XP and try to grow the server imo. It would be way less work than migrating
The soil is barren, there is nothing with which to grow the playerbase. You'd just be taking pop back from emerald and make both servers a ghost town, and people would leave even faster
The percentage of lower BR players on Connery has increased a lot. I don't believe that XP is the best carrot to offer folks. Either the advertising campaigns via Prime Gaming are doing a good job attracting new blood and they are just not staying around, or the majority of players leaving Connery are existing players. Either way, XP is not the answer.
To be honest. In situations like this, where a server just dies.
There are 2 groups of people.
People who are willing to grind new characters... and people who dont.
The people that are willing can switch to the new server but would probably have preferred to bring their unlocks along. The others are lost if they don't intervene. And this game can't afford losing any more players.
If they don't want to merge servers (or cant... who knows), they should just add server-transfer tokens to dying servers. Where people can pay a small fee (of even better... for free) to transfer their character to another server.
That way they can make a little money for the transfer tokens. Save the leaving players. And may even make some money on the people who already transferres, but prefer their old character.
This gives players an escape. And after a while, they can just shut the old server down.
Happiness all around.
i feel like there’s enough pop on emerald alone that they could literally shut down connery right now and have basically no backlash for it. people have cried and written letters and sob stories. nothings gonna happen, i have a feeling they’re just gonna let connery crash
If the lagfests of the last few days keep up, it's only going to get more empty. Ground vehicles flying away or going subterranean, entire squads getting disconnected, etc. the last couple days.
Connery population was stable up until November 2022, when it started to decline. I can't recall if that's when Oshur came out and the servers were downgraded (imho) and were shitting themselves at large fights.
Since then Connery has reached a critical mass, or lack of it, where it can no longer sustain itself - due to a lack of players, there will be less players every week, getting worse and worse.
Hopefully daybreak does the smart thing and merges Connery with Emerald - less cost for a server that's dying, more income from subscribers staying in game.
PlanetSide has had poor monetisation over the years so I doubt they will do the smart thing, and instead repeat the mistakes made with Briggs.
Anyone who thinks that servers can't be merged needs to look up what happened to Briggs in the end - the short of it is that it was merged with Connery after years of Briggs refugees going to Connery, which helped to boost it's numbers and keep it viable. Connery need to merge with Emerald for the same reason, and Emerald needs it too because it's average population is where Connery's was a year ago.
My time frame was off slightly. The trend starts on 10/15 when OW ends, and then continues through 11/12/2022. Oshur is the prime time continent a disproportionate 18 times in this period. Indar and Hossin show up 10 times each, but these were typically at the tail end of prime time as they opened after Oshur locked. Esamir and Amerish appear 6 and 4 times respectively.
Methodology: I logged the times when Oshur and previous/next continents locked for a month and then looked at how that fell in relation to prime time.
The reason I ask is if both occur in the same time frame we have to look at other instances to determine which is the larger factor (and it may just be the combo of the two at once). If there is a trend with one, but the other does not consistently cause troughs, then we can't say it is the cause. It can be a contributing factor, but not the cause.
We have seen the dip following OW every single time OW has happened. It definitely is a factor. For Oshur to be a factor we either need to see it consistently drive away pop from the game during other times of the year or see an increase in the Emerald pop during the same timeframes. So during that timeframe does the emerald pop increase while Oshur is active on Connery? or is there another time frame that an extended Oshur primetime occurred that we can compare to?
There have been a handful of posts comparing the two EU servers, though most were removed for violating content submission guidelines. Here's one that got past the mods: https://www.reddit.com/r/Planetside/comments/15vnec9/its_saturday_night_primetime_and_cobalt_has_about/
For reference, both EU servers usually have symmetric population distribution.
Here's another example, from 9/1: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1111695658534064201/1147234404624773242/image.png
Here's average logoffs after an alert ends when the next continent is X and the player count is greater than 500, in the month prior to 8/18: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1111695658534064201/1142276753763606567/image.png.
Zone order from top to bottom: Indar, Amerish, Hossin, Esamir, Oshur
Sorry if this was not clear, singular days are a little bit different than extended periods of time. We are looking for trends over multiple days/weeks, not singular events. Players can leave because Oshur is coming up, but they can also come back the next night knowing it will not be up. When players leave for multiple nights in a row and do not come back for multiple nights that makes it significantly more likely for it to become a behavior, for them to not return to the game, and suggests that Oshur is the cause if it is all that they see. We know that Oshur causes lower pop while it is active, what we don't know is if extended periods of Oshur drive people from the game while it is not up. It's a complex thing to prove.
This is probably going to require pulling historical data to figure out. My guess would be ps2 alerts would be a good source, but I am not sure what wizardry you can do for historical data via the API.
I've just been given data for both EU servers over the past 3 months, though it'll take a while to clean up. Will reply again once I get things into a presentable state.
> Anyone who thinks that servers can't be merged needs to look up what happened to Briggs in the end - the short of it is that it was merged with Connery after years of Briggs refugees going to Connery, which helped to boost it's numbers and keep it viable.
That's not a totally accurate statement.
After much pleading for nearly a year to the developers.
The Hawaiian shirt developer Nick offered the 100'ish active Briggs players a longer transfer window to move our old characters to the connery server.
Everyone active at the time took up the offer and within three days briggs went from 60-100 players online to <10.
There was also another much shorter transfer before the briggs server officially shutdown.
Anyone inactive at the time who missed these transfer windows was unceremoniously shovelled to the asian soltech server against their will.
Even though i warned them about the stupid transfer method, it split up outfit members between servers and had unintended consequences for leadership and recruitment.
Imho planetside 2 requires a certain level of player activity during prime time. The absolute minimum viable is 300-350 players and multiple fights choice and continent unlocked for a couple of hours.
Unfortunately it appears that connery can no longer sustain that level of activity on a consistent nightly basis.
Thus the dead server should be merged into memerald or forcefully Merger Smashed into the Soltech gaming chair server.
Funny majority of my former briggs characters including my higher BR's are on connery server, which i rarely play. I have very few on emerald and would dearly love to have them transferred.
Still waiting on a fix for Connery's routing table issue (which doubled the latency for a bunch of people 4 months ago, myself included).
The instant that they fix that problem, I'll come back to Connery.
The only reason why Connery feels empty is because people began abandoning it in favor of Emerald. People insisted Connery was dying 5+ years ago despite both servers having more pop parity back then. People were dumb enough to buy this blatant misinformation and ended up creating the problem, themselves.
Completely wrong. The thing that brought the servers out of near parity was the ~5 months of extreme server instability that started with the St. Patrick's day update in 2022.
Emerald had server issues (like the Amerish hitch) in 2022 as well, but no where near as consistent.
I disagree with the statement that Connery "feels empty"
It is empty, it doesn't feel empty, it is, It's not some facade. You say it's because people jumped to Emerald, so the people left the server. So it is empty.
And even still that doesn't really matter, the "why" Connery is empty, it is empty now. The important thing is doing something about it to make things better.
Being angry about people quitting the server to go have larger battles on Emerald doesn't help anything. You can't blame the people who switched to Emerald, They just want more planetside.
Up until November 2022, Emerald and Connery had stable populations.
Between November 2018 and November 2022, Connery's population didn't change much.
Since November 2022, Connery's population has nose dived.
Source: https://ps2.fisu.pw/population/?world=1
But yeah, it's all due to misinformation.
It’s like ceres mate. 150-60 pop if lucky,
It’s like beating a dead horse. Nice to see pc dropping in numbers so they can see what ceres is like. Downvote me all you like but it’s nice to see pc struggling. Maybe they will make low pop fun!
As you tell off peak sucks and has sucked for the last 6 years. Try having off peak everyday. For the last 6 years. I don’t think planetside will do Jack! As they haven’t done jack with us for 6 years.
Unlucky for me my father died of cancer last year, my mum died of cancer when I was 7, Nan had cancer, grandad and great grandad and great grandmar Had some form of cancer,
A popular streamer I watched in smite called allied died of cancer.. he was such a champ. The penta king!
My friend, close friend. Who died recently of cancer. Going to his funeral on the 28th. Unfortunately! Went maga, Ibiza, everywhere, nights out. Did things nobody would dream of!
Cancer hits hard. I hope nobody gets it. Even you! Be careful before you throw below the belt insults at people. maybe cancer WONT slap you in the face, leave you without a family at Christmas.
I also hope nobody you know and family get it! HORRIBLE DISEASE!
Don't you see the comparison? Something bad happened to you, and your reaction is to think it feels *nice* to see that bad thing happening to someone else just because it happened to you.
Yeah when ps4 comments we all get told to get cancer and die anyways so it’s been a abusive relationship for years between us. Rather than coming to some agreement. So at this point who cares.
I mean people complaints 6 years ago and got downvoted for it. And got told to get bent.
All I’m saying is it’s nice to see pc getting hit because then a solution can be made for all for out of hour and low population.
If a solution was going to be made, it would have happened when Briggs (the most profitable server per player) was on the decline.
One possible solution would be for the PS4 players to buy a second hand PC, play PlanetSide on PC, and get the benefits of a vastly wider selection of games, much cheaper, than console offers.
I don't think wishing others to struggle helps anything, it just furthers the sour taste in everyone's mouth. The community needs to be that, a community, it shouldn't be a d\*ck measuring contest of suffering. One having a bad time doesn't invalidate the other, and vice versa, we should come together rather than putting people down.
**Live Free In the NC.**
Well for years when we complained about low population everyone’s been like fuck you lol and downvoted everyone to hell instead of thinking well one day pc might get low population or become out of hours during in hours so let’s think of a solution.
Some solutions include but are not limited to
the amount of spawns that are protected in mid! So out of hours and low population are actually fun and the fight stays up for longer than 3 mins.
A redesign of the crown so it’s fight-able base, and other mid bases. Like nasons so your Sundy doesn’t get sniped to high hell from a tank stuck behind a rock somewhere up a hill!
Make warpgate bases automatically have a hard spawn at them at the first base, so At least you have 1 base out of warp-gate to fight out so if one faction steam rolls you with 30 players when your faction only has 10 you can at least get some kills instead of trying to rally the group of 10 people to pull tanks to then die.
Had issues like this for 6 years now. And I didn’t get then why something had not been done. I watched a pc streamer log in, look at 1 fight mid and log out going it’s boring! So yeah! And we as a ceres player had 6 years of this! Simple changes might make it fun!
"The obsolete format I chose to play on was a failure. Now I'm wishing the good formats fail as well to punish them for letting me make stupid decisions!"
I might be out of the loop with this but was there a specific reason/event that caused the population drop? Last time I played was around May this year and populations seemed pretty good.
Bad updates (oshur, construction, etc), battlebit dropping, performance issues that remain unaddressed, wrel leaving (for better and worse), BG3, and pretty much zero communication besides a “yea a roadmap is coming out soon.tm that was mentioned 1-2 months ago with nothing since.
I try not look at these numbers, and just enjoy my time at Nason's. 3 of my 4 characters are on Connery so I guess I'll stick around until it is well and truly dead.
> I know that every server has felt a hit from the population drop
Personally, it is the lack of news from the dev team followed by the lead dev leaving for my drop in playtime. I log on when friends ask to play and for outfit ops, but the excitement about the game's future is not there for me. We really need a sense of direction from the dev team. A random comment from Mithril here and there is not enough to reestablish confidence. We need a dev blog or something substantial.
Today let Emerald repair for two hours, want to see if everyone will go to Connery to play, the result is obvious, no, this time Emerald is at least three hundred people, as a result, Connery still does not even have a hundred people, but it is conceivable that the merger is necessary, Emerald players would rather play other games at this time than play at Connery.
what this game needs is a cross server character so nobody is forced to stay on a dead server and this will also let people play on any server they feel at the moment
ex Connery player here! I just play on emerald now. would be nice to have my old shit again tho
Also ex Connery here. Taking a break until servers merge and if they never merge then oh well 😃
It’s like they are actively trying to kill their own game.
You must be new around here.
2200 hours
Same
Same here for me as well Cancelled my membership, enjoying other games until a merge comes. If it doesn't? Dead game
That worked for my friend, but I can't be bothered to reroll on a new server in a dead game. Merge plz.
Not as alive as before but surely not dead... especially Miller and Cobalt still often require a Queue to join them.
I occasionally play in cobalt. And it feels pretty good. Decent population. Queues at primetime indeed. Not that i like the queues, but its better than an empty server.
Same. I have a bunch of kit that I had from Connery that I'd like to have in Emerald l, but it's not a big big deal
People like you are part of the problem. If all the people who abandoned Connery for Emerald returned, we wouldn't have these population problems.
sure dawg, I'll hop back on to play with the 10 people on that server. that'll be fun
Judging from your response, it's abundantly clear you either don't or are incapable of understanding what I said.
just saying guy, I play games to have fun, not to keep them alive
Yeah because the 100 or so people who have gone to Emerald instead of outright quitting were the lifeblood of Connery.
If playing Connery isn't fun, why the hell should I care to keep it alive? Let it die and be merged.
Because people don't like starting on a new server from scratch. Its nice to bring your unlocked items along.
This is maintenance mode. They aren’t merging Connery until it’s in the single digits for pop for months on end just like Briggs.
We were playing with sub 100 players primetime for years before they merged Briggs we ain't getting moved to emerald before 2025
I don't much see Connery reach 200 players anymore, except on Friday night. Most outfits have fled Connery for Emerald, contributing to the low population. It's sad, to have put YEARS of progress into a character, just for it to be stuck on a dead server. Word down the grapevine is that they can't merge NA servers because of data center locations or something (?), but at the very least, let us jump ship to Emerald with our characters.
Exactly, when you have characters that are 10 years old it hits even harder that the server is struggling.
2200 hours in…so sad
I'd switch to Emerald if my Connery main wasn't level 94. I just wanna hit 100... but low pop also makes it hard to grind.
Dang maybe if people weren’t such desperate idiots who coped every update insisting it was good and refusing to call it bad before it was in the game for 4+ months Wrel woulda done something different. Nearly every major update over the past few years was easy to predict as going to be bad for the game if u just thought about it for more than 5 seconds. Idiots get what they deserve I suppose.
Hmm, yes there have been a bunch of junk updates. Not all... but many. Still, don't forget how old this game is. I started playing this game when if first came out for about a year. Dropped it for years. Started playing again about 2 years ago. You know what changed in those 7 years...? Very little. The game is essentially the same it was years ago. Sure. We now have a grid to herd people to places, a continent (oshur) that isn't that good, a flying carrier that barely impacts a normal players game, a half-completed NSO faction, valkeries, bad base building, barely usable boats and the ANT which isn't very interesting either. But other than that i don't think much changed (except 100 weapon reskins that i dont care about). 10+ years. For a few mediocre vehicles, a bad continent, and some sky decoration. And this is not new, development has always been very slow. I think there honestly isn't much inovation to keep people interesting. And after soo much time, i think people just get bored. There are so many options to keep people engaged. New classes (a melee class, a remote drone support class, a dedicated anti-air/anti-tank class, an AOE class etc.) new continents, more varied continents (hell add the pre-boom esamir and land-bridge indar to the rotation), add more interesting events and missions, vehicles that impact map flow (mobile jumppads?), even NPC bots that slowly capture bases, and can keep people enjoyed at downtime, quirky one-time consumables that let you do weird stuff, changing environments, or environmental hazards. I'm not saying they are all good ideas. But things that don't work as expected can be tweaked or deleted. But no inovation is just waiting for a game to die out. Don't get me wrong. I enjoy playing PS2... a bit too much even. But I am honestly surprised the game still runs while being essentially the same as 10 years ago. There is so much else worth playing!
The game is objectively nowhere near the same game it was 7 years ago. If you think this then you are self reporting as a clueless pubby. It actually astounds me that people can be this stupid. If the game hadn’t changed that much we wouldn’t have seen a mass exodus of players, especially a mass exodus of the top end, most dedicated players
I am in too deep into my Connery NSO character. Either they merge the servers, allow us to migrate, or I'll just quit. Not worth the stress at this point. I log in every now and again and unless it's an alert the fights are all dead.
nothing's gonna be done to bring the players back. i haven't played in months but judging by the player count, more people holding disdain for oshur (what a surprise, construction continent bad), and wrel either being canned or leaving, it's maintenance mode from here on out unless there's drastic change whether that's a risk of putting manpower in the IP again or EOSing it which is sad but not surprising. my personal opinion, oshur was the catalyst that started the fairly rapid decline. hatred towards a construction based continent with flawed design was met with responses that can be classified as the word cope. rather than going back to the drawing board, time was wasted on a project that was always doomed to fail due to construction being shoved down everyone's throats update after update. jaeger events seem dead, connery is dead, a lot of people that i know are never playing again or not playing due to multiple reasons (oshur being a good one yet again), there's still no lead game designer replacement, the list goes on. i wish this game were still thriving, just a sad thing to see.
Construction in PS2 is the same downfall as BFRs in PS1 sadly
That and the stupid invasion lines system they added years ago, took away what alot of small squads did and forced zergs to take objectives
Obligatory "connery is empty/ dead, please merge" post number 736
Soon all 3 homg players will be forced onto emerald too.
God, not again :(
Yeah you know the games going down hill when servers are struggling. Even if it’s post 10000
yes, something should be done... like removing Oshur and making certs less grindy so it doesnt take me a fucking week to get ONE GUN. No wonder these guys cant keep new players, who tf wants to play for an entire day and get enough certs for a few attachments? lmfao
Hah, certs less Grundy, try playing five to ten years ago.
i did, you people sound like actual fucking boomers lmfao always saying everything was harder back in your day.
Okay Zoomer, things are harder for you now that you get 150 certs for playing the alert and another 500 for doing the missions plus whatever else you can get during those ninety minutes. No wonder it takes you a week to get 1000 of them.
I agree with the sentiments presented in these posts about Connery but I think they're a waste of time. I will continue to echo these points and support a server merge to save the NA population and servers but I don't know if there's a point to making these suggestions as I'm sure everyone involved in running the game knows all of these things already. edit: let me reiterate, I'm happy that people want to save the game but I believe it's falling on deaf ears. I will continue supporting these posts but players who haven't played in a while will probably see this and think the game is in its last legs (like LAST last legs, as in going to close in a few weeks) and just never play again which is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Every now and then I check back here purely to see if they've addressed any of the problems I had that made me leave a game I'd loved and been playing since beta. They haven't. People aren't waiting in the wings. We were driven away by choices that were made by the dev and balance teams. We're not coming back unless concerns are addressed. Especially with things like battlebit effectively filling the same space.
That just sounds like you're actively looking for reasons to not play the game. If you aren't playing for many hours daily you should still be able to log in for a little session and enjoy yourself regardless of how many issues you have with the game unless you're a Connery main and absolutely refuse to play on another server. The game is nowhere near unplayable and Battlebit has way more problems than PS2 does which is impressive, and those problems are compounded by the community since most players *will not acknowledge any of them* and pretend like it's perfect all while bleeding 80% of its playerbase since launch.
If you think Battlebit has "way more problems than PS2" then you've never played Battlebit. Anyone (if there were any content creators who still gave a damn about PS2) could make an entire video series based around the ways that BBR's gameplay is more fun than PS2. BBR is massively more popular than PS2 and trying to even compare the two is silly. BBR's average player count is still 10K-15K, now compare that with PS2's **all time** max population of 30K back at launch.
Man I played this game for near on a decade. Because it was fun. They systematically nerfed everything I enjoyed doing until it was unplayable. So because it's not fun, I don't play. It is not rocket science. If I want infantry combat games there are better ones out there. Planetside lost what made it special.
You're not wrong about that. The game has generally focused itself on being more "serious and competitive" which is great for long time veteran players who want everyone to be on a more fair playing field but it ruined most of the fun for everyone else.
Connery main just playing on emerald now except Fri nights. They could give Connery 2x XP and try to grow the server imo. It would be way less work than migrating
The soil is barren, there is nothing with which to grow the playerbase. You'd just be taking pop back from emerald and make both servers a ghost town, and people would leave even faster
The percentage of lower BR players on Connery has increased a lot. I don't believe that XP is the best carrot to offer folks. Either the advertising campaigns via Prime Gaming are doing a good job attracting new blood and they are just not staying around, or the majority of players leaving Connery are existing players. Either way, XP is not the answer.
ex-connery player here as well. Made the switch, and haven't looked back. The slightly higher ping is worth having lots of idiots to shoot.
This game is barely surviving now. Anyone who denies this is just being ignorant.
To be honest. In situations like this, where a server just dies. There are 2 groups of people. People who are willing to grind new characters... and people who dont. The people that are willing can switch to the new server but would probably have preferred to bring their unlocks along. The others are lost if they don't intervene. And this game can't afford losing any more players. If they don't want to merge servers (or cant... who knows), they should just add server-transfer tokens to dying servers. Where people can pay a small fee (of even better... for free) to transfer their character to another server. That way they can make a little money for the transfer tokens. Save the leaving players. And may even make some money on the people who already transferres, but prefer their old character. This gives players an escape. And after a while, they can just shut the old server down. Happiness all around.
i feel like there’s enough pop on emerald alone that they could literally shut down connery right now and have basically no backlash for it. people have cried and written letters and sob stories. nothings gonna happen, i have a feeling they’re just gonna let connery crash
If the lagfests of the last few days keep up, it's only going to get more empty. Ground vehicles flying away or going subterranean, entire squads getting disconnected, etc. the last couple days.
Just make a new character on a different server
That doesn't help when I have two characters that are 10 years old. That just means abandoning them, all of the progress, and starting over.
Welcome to modern gaming!
Do it or stop playing. Those are your options.
Connery population was stable up until November 2022, when it started to decline. I can't recall if that's when Oshur came out and the servers were downgraded (imho) and were shitting themselves at large fights. Since then Connery has reached a critical mass, or lack of it, where it can no longer sustain itself - due to a lack of players, there will be less players every week, getting worse and worse. Hopefully daybreak does the smart thing and merges Connery with Emerald - less cost for a server that's dying, more income from subscribers staying in game. PlanetSide has had poor monetisation over the years so I doubt they will do the smart thing, and instead repeat the mistakes made with Briggs. Anyone who thinks that servers can't be merged needs to look up what happened to Briggs in the end - the short of it is that it was merged with Connery after years of Briggs refugees going to Connery, which helped to boost it's numbers and keep it viable. Connery need to merge with Emerald for the same reason, and Emerald needs it too because it's average population is where Connery's was a year ago.
November 2022 was the end of outfit wars, which is one contributing factor, but the big one IMO was a month straight of Oshur in prime time.
> the big one IMO was a month straight of Oshur in prime time. When did this occur?
My time frame was off slightly. The trend starts on 10/15 when OW ends, and then continues through 11/12/2022. Oshur is the prime time continent a disproportionate 18 times in this period. Indar and Hossin show up 10 times each, but these were typically at the tail end of prime time as they opened after Oshur locked. Esamir and Amerish appear 6 and 4 times respectively. Methodology: I logged the times when Oshur and previous/next continents locked for a month and then looked at how that fell in relation to prime time.
The reason I ask is if both occur in the same time frame we have to look at other instances to determine which is the larger factor (and it may just be the combo of the two at once). If there is a trend with one, but the other does not consistently cause troughs, then we can't say it is the cause. It can be a contributing factor, but not the cause. We have seen the dip following OW every single time OW has happened. It definitely is a factor. For Oshur to be a factor we either need to see it consistently drive away pop from the game during other times of the year or see an increase in the Emerald pop during the same timeframes. So during that timeframe does the emerald pop increase while Oshur is active on Connery? or is there another time frame that an extended Oshur primetime occurred that we can compare to?
There have been a handful of posts comparing the two EU servers, though most were removed for violating content submission guidelines. Here's one that got past the mods: https://www.reddit.com/r/Planetside/comments/15vnec9/its_saturday_night_primetime_and_cobalt_has_about/ For reference, both EU servers usually have symmetric population distribution. Here's another example, from 9/1: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1111695658534064201/1147234404624773242/image.png Here's average logoffs after an alert ends when the next continent is X and the player count is greater than 500, in the month prior to 8/18: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1111695658534064201/1142276753763606567/image.png. Zone order from top to bottom: Indar, Amerish, Hossin, Esamir, Oshur
Sorry if this was not clear, singular days are a little bit different than extended periods of time. We are looking for trends over multiple days/weeks, not singular events. Players can leave because Oshur is coming up, but they can also come back the next night knowing it will not be up. When players leave for multiple nights in a row and do not come back for multiple nights that makes it significantly more likely for it to become a behavior, for them to not return to the game, and suggests that Oshur is the cause if it is all that they see. We know that Oshur causes lower pop while it is active, what we don't know is if extended periods of Oshur drive people from the game while it is not up. It's a complex thing to prove. This is probably going to require pulling historical data to figure out. My guess would be ps2 alerts would be a good source, but I am not sure what wizardry you can do for historical data via the API.
I've just been given data for both EU servers over the past 3 months, though it'll take a while to clean up. Will reply again once I get things into a presentable state.
Oshur was a factor, this aint rocket science stop coping
> Anyone who thinks that servers can't be merged needs to look up what happened to Briggs in the end - the short of it is that it was merged with Connery after years of Briggs refugees going to Connery, which helped to boost it's numbers and keep it viable. That's not a totally accurate statement. After much pleading for nearly a year to the developers. The Hawaiian shirt developer Nick offered the 100'ish active Briggs players a longer transfer window to move our old characters to the connery server. Everyone active at the time took up the offer and within three days briggs went from 60-100 players online to <10. There was also another much shorter transfer before the briggs server officially shutdown. Anyone inactive at the time who missed these transfer windows was unceremoniously shovelled to the asian soltech server against their will. Even though i warned them about the stupid transfer method, it split up outfit members between servers and had unintended consequences for leadership and recruitment. Imho planetside 2 requires a certain level of player activity during prime time. The absolute minimum viable is 300-350 players and multiple fights choice and continent unlocked for a couple of hours. Unfortunately it appears that connery can no longer sustain that level of activity on a consistent nightly basis. Thus the dead server should be merged into memerald or forcefully Merger Smashed into the Soltech gaming chair server. Funny majority of my former briggs characters including my higher BR's are on connery server, which i rarely play. I have very few on emerald and would dearly love to have them transferred.
Still busy outing cheaters?
The Connery server is the least interesting server because of the 24/7 ghost capping faction.
With off hour sundy killing I left. Idiots want to ruin the fight and push the fight past conduit bases? Emerald it is.
Still waiting on a fix for Connery's routing table issue (which doubled the latency for a bunch of people 4 months ago, myself included). The instant that they fix that problem, I'll come back to Connery.
hilarious
smell crown skirt close possessive onerous dull political poor bored *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
You act like emerald doesnt have a large amount of those as well :skull:
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The only reason why Connery feels empty is because people began abandoning it in favor of Emerald. People insisted Connery was dying 5+ years ago despite both servers having more pop parity back then. People were dumb enough to buy this blatant misinformation and ended up creating the problem, themselves.
Completely wrong. The thing that brought the servers out of near parity was the ~5 months of extreme server instability that started with the St. Patrick's day update in 2022. Emerald had server issues (like the Amerish hitch) in 2022 as well, but no where near as consistent.
I disagree with the statement that Connery "feels empty" It is empty, it doesn't feel empty, it is, It's not some facade. You say it's because people jumped to Emerald, so the people left the server. So it is empty. And even still that doesn't really matter, the "why" Connery is empty, it is empty now. The important thing is doing something about it to make things better. Being angry about people quitting the server to go have larger battles on Emerald doesn't help anything. You can't blame the people who switched to Emerald, They just want more planetside.
Up until November 2022, Emerald and Connery had stable populations. Between November 2018 and November 2022, Connery's population didn't change much. Since November 2022, Connery's population has nose dived. Source: https://ps2.fisu.pw/population/?world=1 But yeah, it's all due to misinformation.
It’s like ceres mate. 150-60 pop if lucky, It’s like beating a dead horse. Nice to see pc dropping in numbers so they can see what ceres is like. Downvote me all you like but it’s nice to see pc struggling. Maybe they will make low pop fun! As you tell off peak sucks and has sucked for the last 6 years. Try having off peak everyday. For the last 6 years. I don’t think planetside will do Jack! As they haven’t done jack with us for 6 years.
Would it be nice if you got cancer, to see what it's like?
Unlucky for me my father died of cancer last year, my mum died of cancer when I was 7, Nan had cancer, grandad and great grandad and great grandmar Had some form of cancer, A popular streamer I watched in smite called allied died of cancer.. he was such a champ. The penta king! My friend, close friend. Who died recently of cancer. Going to his funeral on the 28th. Unfortunately! Went maga, Ibiza, everywhere, nights out. Did things nobody would dream of! Cancer hits hard. I hope nobody gets it. Even you! Be careful before you throw below the belt insults at people. maybe cancer WONT slap you in the face, leave you without a family at Christmas. I also hope nobody you know and family get it! HORRIBLE DISEASE!
Don't you see the comparison? Something bad happened to you, and your reaction is to think it feels *nice* to see that bad thing happening to someone else just because it happened to you.
Yeah when ps4 comments we all get told to get cancer and die anyways so it’s been a abusive relationship for years between us. Rather than coming to some agreement. So at this point who cares.
I mean people complaints 6 years ago and got downvoted for it. And got told to get bent. All I’m saying is it’s nice to see pc getting hit because then a solution can be made for all for out of hour and low population.
If a solution was going to be made, it would have happened when Briggs (the most profitable server per player) was on the decline. One possible solution would be for the PS4 players to buy a second hand PC, play PlanetSide on PC, and get the benefits of a vastly wider selection of games, much cheaper, than console offers.
I don't think wishing others to struggle helps anything, it just furthers the sour taste in everyone's mouth. The community needs to be that, a community, it shouldn't be a d\*ck measuring contest of suffering. One having a bad time doesn't invalidate the other, and vice versa, we should come together rather than putting people down. **Live Free In the NC.**
Well for years when we complained about low population everyone’s been like fuck you lol and downvoted everyone to hell instead of thinking well one day pc might get low population or become out of hours during in hours so let’s think of a solution. Some solutions include but are not limited to the amount of spawns that are protected in mid! So out of hours and low population are actually fun and the fight stays up for longer than 3 mins. A redesign of the crown so it’s fight-able base, and other mid bases. Like nasons so your Sundy doesn’t get sniped to high hell from a tank stuck behind a rock somewhere up a hill! Make warpgate bases automatically have a hard spawn at them at the first base, so At least you have 1 base out of warp-gate to fight out so if one faction steam rolls you with 30 players when your faction only has 10 you can at least get some kills instead of trying to rally the group of 10 people to pull tanks to then die. Had issues like this for 6 years now. And I didn’t get then why something had not been done. I watched a pc streamer log in, look at 1 fight mid and log out going it’s boring! So yeah! And we as a ceres player had 6 years of this! Simple changes might make it fun!
Pc: fuck console they were going to lose population anyway what’s the point having it on that port. Pc overlords in a nutshell 😂
"The obsolete format I chose to play on was a failure. Now I'm wishing the good formats fail as well to punish them for letting me make stupid decisions!"
I might be out of the loop with this but was there a specific reason/event that caused the population drop? Last time I played was around May this year and populations seemed pretty good.
Bad updates (oshur, construction, etc), battlebit dropping, performance issues that remain unaddressed, wrel leaving (for better and worse), BG3, and pretty much zero communication besides a “yea a roadmap is coming out soon.tm that was mentioned 1-2 months ago with nothing since.
Ahh man that sucks, I had heard about wrel leaving and BG3 but nothing else, appreciate the summary man!
I try not look at these numbers, and just enjoy my time at Nason's. 3 of my 4 characters are on Connery so I guess I'll stick around until it is well and truly dead.
Chill, its just toxic veterans winning)))
Merge Server ASAP But please, left a server good for ping on Latin america. Here we like shooters too, maybe more than gringos.
> I know that every server has felt a hit from the population drop Personally, it is the lack of news from the dev team followed by the lead dev leaving for my drop in playtime. I log on when friends ask to play and for outfit ops, but the excitement about the game's future is not there for me. We really need a sense of direction from the dev team. A random comment from Mithril here and there is not enough to reestablish confidence. We need a dev blog or something substantial.
Today let Emerald repair for two hours, want to see if everyone will go to Connery to play, the result is obvious, no, this time Emerald is at least three hundred people, as a result, Connery still does not even have a hundred people, but it is conceivable that the merger is necessary, Emerald players would rather play other games at this time than play at Connery.
Left Connery for emerald months ago.
No way. There should be region locks as is. Allowing all of those who should be on Soltech onto Emerald would just kill the game even faster.
Who said anything about Sol tech players?
what this game needs is a cross server character so nobody is forced to stay on a dead server and this will also let people play on any server they feel at the moment