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Planetside For Free
Eurogamer reports that Sony Online is moving Planetside to a free play for a year deal, somewhat similar to the Anarchy Online pricing scheme. From the article: "Access to the massively multiplayer FPS will be limited in terms of BattleRank and CommandRank. 'Essentially, new players will be able to have access to any part of the game but they will be limited on the diversity of their arsenal,' said developer Enrico Pallazzo in a recent forum post outlining various new additions to the game." Limited free play in an environment with ads. I guess I'm glad they're trying new options.
1: The ads are there, and are kind of annoying, but they are only in some areas such as the HART center, where you launch off to the various places to fight, and some spawn rooms. They have not been all that annoying and intrusive, just a poster on a wall. You actualy don't spend much time at all in these places, so its not that bad.
2: The new players it seem will get only the basic rifle and other stuff. No implants, no access to vehicles so they are limited to what they can do. They won't be able to really drain resources from the paying customers so thats not going to be a factor.
PS is really a fun game and I do play it quite a lot. So, welcome newbies, here's your rifle and armor, go fight for the TR!
I've played PS for the last 2 years (on and off) and it is far from boring.
I like to call it genre building:
Only WWII online could compete for scale, but everytime I try it the UI turns me away.
However, the game is 2+ years old, and is Sony does a horrible job of keeping people interested in their MMOs for the long term. They turn to in-game ads or sequels to keep people playing, instead of making sure the game works well and reacting to player feedback.
If only ArenaNet would create an MMORPG...
Anarchy Online (which sounds a fair bit like your brief brief description of Neocron) handles it with in-game billboard (that were there before, mostly) that sport occasionally animated advertisements (e.g., the one that comes to mind is an Air Force recruiting ad). They're quite tasteful, and it's an MMORPG business model that I have a great deal of respect for.
Currently if you log ion to your old account before the 28th Feb you can play for free for 30 days with your old characters. From the planet side website:
You now get 7 cert points at Battle Rank 1. You get an additional cert point for each BR up through BR23, except for BR6, BR12, and BR18. Normally, you get an implant at those three BR's, but with the "fodder" program, I guess you don't get anything at BR6.
Most decent FPS players should be able to get up to BR8 within a couple of weeks of playing a few hours a night. You can get all the way to BR4 just by trying out every vehicle and weapon in the simulator and visiting a few places in "sanctuary" -- and that's without going through the new training programs. I've built a new player up to BR4 in 35 minutes that way.
Does anyone have any stats on maximum connections to PS servers at one time?
There are three servers: European, US West Coast, US East Coast. At primetime in the evening, I would estimate about 600 players on-line on the East Coast server. A continent can have a maximum of 133 players from an empire, and there are three empires. Lately, I've observed my empire to population-lock a continent and have 20-30 people left over to stir up trouble elsewhere. The other empires have about the same population. The past month or so, overall population has risen quite a bit, as they have invited people with expired subscriptions to come back and play for 30 days for free.
Weapon balance seemed, well... spotty. I played back in the Beta days with a room mate of mine, and even with us both in the same room yelling things at each other, we didn't have all that much success--and we're both at least decent FPS players.
Balance is a bit better, but that's a source of endless discussion and argument among the empire. The key is teamwork: even two people working together can't do much against the more powerful weapons. I play with an organized outfit that usually has a platoon of 10-30 people in the evenings, and we have a reputation for getting things done in situations where twice the number of less-organized people will fail.
Vehicles were fun, but the weapons felt very underpowered--we'd both shoot that Lancer anti-vehicle gun at even a Lightning, and it felt like forever before the thing blew up.
Personal weapons are underpowered against vehicles in this game, but I think that's necessary to get people into the vehicles. If only one or two shots could destroy a vehicle, people wouldn't bother with them. As it is now, it's hard enough to get people to use the armored vehicles instead of zerging from the nearest spawn point.
Maybe it was lag. I remember trying to get back into the game for a while, but even after doubling my RAM (to 512) I still had problems.
This has been a continuing problem. I can't play with less than 1G RAM. 512M is not adequate unless you want to be struggling with lag all the time. One of my teammates is always falling behind us because it takes him several minutes to change zones (i.e. move to a new continent). If he is in a vehicle with the rest of us, we can easily reach and disembark at a target in a new zone before he even gets it loaded.
'm also not keen on Clans--small tactical teams I can do, but Clans seem to always end up full of annoying elitists. It seems like it'd be pretty hard to find a good squad without joining a clan.
Some of the outfits are full of annoying people like that. Others are so disorganized that you would do better playing solo. I switched outfits several times before I found one that fit my style.
Lastly, I've heard that there're still pretty serious bugs. Like vehicles randomly becoming invincible, and major weapons randomly doing no damage (like, all the shotguns--and one whole faction's infantry weapons more or less revolve around shotguns).
The invincible vehicle is effectively gone: I've only seen it once in over a year of play. But, the shotgun bug is still there, wh