Details about upcoming community features and changes inside!

Recently, Planetside 2's creative director, Matt Higby, jumped on the forums to address the community and inform them about some upcoming community focused changes, that would be coming to Planetside 2.

The Road To Victory

Higby started off by talking about some of the changes to the Planetside 2 Roadmap. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the roadmap, it's essentially a separate page on the official site that details a lot of the upcoming game changes or features that the team is looking to possibly implement. Players are able to comment and leave suggestions or criticisms of each feature, which the team then looks at in regards to how it should be implemented.

There are only a handful of companies that have taken a more "open" approach to revealing or announcing changes before they're concrete, in fear of the community's reaction if some of the features never actually happen. So far however, this approach seems to be working pretty well for Planetside 2. Higby had this to say on the matter

"First up: Roadmap Update. It’s been about a month since we've released the Roadmap website and so far it has been incredibly helpful for us on the team to see your ideas and suggestions on upcoming features. So, huge “Thank you!” to everyone who has participated in discussion of our upcoming features on Roadmap, and if you haven’t yet, please do check it out. We’ve already changed priority and direction on several features based on feedback and suggestions from the Roadmap site. In some cases feedback has caused us to reevaluate a feature and/or changed the scope of required work which will cause features to be moved forward or backwards in the schedule to match their new estimated delivery, so, you can expect to see a reshuffling of features on there soon. As we realign the features we’ll be going through each, giving more details where possible, and including the reasons for them moving in the schedule so that everyone understands how their favorite upcoming feature is coming along."

He also talks about some of the technical changes they plan on implementing to the Planetside 2 Roadmap, in order to have it be more accurate and make more sense overall.

"At the end of the day, the goal of the Roadmap is to give the an accurate view of what will actually be getting delivered month-by-month. It will never be 100% accurate 100% of the time, but we’re working on a plan to ensure it is kept up-to-date with our best estimates of when features will be released."

Bringing It To The Players

Now we heard pre-launch about them adding more out of game features or apps that will allow players access to more in game information, even when they aren't in game securing capture points. Well it appears that the time is finally upon us! The second part of Higby's post focused on their new "Planetside 2 Players Site", which is currently in beta.

The website will allow players to view tons of character related information such as comprehensive character and progression stats, detailed stats on class, weapon, and vehicle usage, real time & historical killboards for each character and friend status. Included on the site as well are leader boards which can be filtered based on different criteria. He does mention however, that the site is still in beta, so to be gentle. Sure we will Higby. Just in case something breaks however, you can report it along, with any other bugs, here on their forums.

Server Mergers For more Massive Battles

Lastly, Higby talks about server mergers(insert dramatic music here). No, but seriously. Most MMO's go through this at some point and despite how players typically react to server mergers they almost always make the community feel more alive and active. In the case of Planetside 2, this can only be a good thing, considering that they're game wants you to have the most massive battles possible. In relation to the matter Higby had this to say

"Next week we will be doing server merges to help even populations across all game servers. Right now we have a lot of disparity between populations on our servers, some are highly populated with active fights across all continents, some are not. This is a factor of which servers were most popular at launch, and players gravitating to one or two servers per locale. Now that the crush of new players from launch and the holidays has died down, and our server populations and incoming new players have stabilized we have a good idea of where each server stands in terms of player population, empire population and we can model merges to optimize the populations." He goes on to say

"The result of these merges will be a more consistent and full server population during off-peak hours, more players to support better utilization of all of the continents in the game and, generally a lot more massive in your massively-multiplayer."

So it sounds like they know what they're doing over there. Furthermore, if you are effected by any of the server mergers you won't have to do anything. Whenever you log in after the merges are complete, you will simply see your new server location on your character selection screen. At the end of the post Higby also mentions that shortly after the mergers are complete, they will begin allowing players to acquire "server transfer tokens" to allow them to move characters over to different servers.

Overall it sounds like the community can expect some pretty exciting changes coming to Planetside 2 that involve some of the more "community aspects" of the game. Feel free to view Matt Higby's full post here. Or head over to the Official Planetside 2 website for more information on the game. See you on the battlefield!