PlanetSide 2 News

A bitter moon hangs high overhead, casting an ominous light over the battlefields of Auraxis. The bitter battle between soldier and SpacePumpkin has begun once again!

This year's Nanite of the Living Dead carries with it a new directive, a new mission, a new alert event, and striking new cosmetics.

Click here for the full patch notes!

This morning's hotfix has provided the following fixes:

[h2]Hitching Fixes[/h2]

• We've identified and resolved areas that cause hitching to take place during and after new dynamic instances (like the tutorial and Nexus) spin up.
  
• These changes should also help the long-term health of the server when it has gone for long periods without being restarted.
  
• We'll continue additional investigation as needed, should problems arise over the weekend.
  

[h2]Outfit Wars[/h2]

• Player counts of each team are now surfaced during the warmup phase while on Nexus.
  
• The "Join Match" button now becomes disabled and displays information when your outfit has reached the maximum number of members in a match.
  

All PC servers will come down for the following update on Thursday, September 8, at 6:00am PT (3:00pm CEST). The downtime for this update is expected to last up to 2 hours.
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[h2]Outfit Wars[/h2]

• Fixed many issues related to the tinting options in Outfit Wars.
  
• When the warmup ends, it no longer prevents the start of the next alert's fanfare from playing.
  
• Fixed an issue with Cobalt's Outfit Wars displaying incorrect leaderboard information.
  
• Global ranking should now display the correct numbers next to each Outfit's name.
  
• Owning more territory than the opposing faction when they have taken your Warpgate base no longer displays the incorrect victors when the alert ends.
  
• Temporarily disabled Overseer speech from Outfit Wars facility capture/defend notifications.
  
• You now receive an error message when clicking the Join Match button on an account that is ineligible to participate in the war, eg. when you attempt to participate in multiple wars on the same server...
  

Dev Note: We're aware of some hitching taking place during match times last weekend and will be gathering more information on Friday in the case that it occurs again.


[h2]Observer Camera[/h2]

• Observer cameras now have better spawn locations on Nexus.
  
• You can no longer redeploy from the observer camera while on Nexus.
  
• The new command "/ow observeend" will cease observing an Outfit Wars match.
  
• You can no longer "/ow observematch" a match your Outfit is participating in.
  

Dev Note: We didn't see any malicious use of observer camera in the last round, but these changes were on our to-do list to prevent it as a future possibility.


[h2]Sudden Death Alerts[/h2]

• Added a new "Sudden Death" alert type that now triggers when a Meltdown alert becomes a Draw.
  
• The first faction to kill 10,000 enemies, or whichever team has the most kills at the end of this 15 minute alert, will lock the continent in their favor.
  
• If this alert somehow ends in a tie... another Sudden Death alert will trigger.
  
• Victorious factions will win rewards equivalent to the current Meltdown alert losses, and losing factions receive no rewards.
  
• Metagame event ids for Census API are as follows: 236, 237, 238, 239, 240 (Indar, Hossin, Amerish, Esamir, and Oshur respectively)
  

Dev Note: The intention of these alerts are to improve upon the "coinflip" Draw mechanics that previously existed, and simultaneously fix a bug that was introduced in the last update that prevented said coinflips from occurring.


[h2]Misc. Changes, Fixes, and Additions[/h2]

• NS-11C and variants now have 3 underbarrel grenades, instead of 2.
  
• NSO Auraxium weapons now use the correct weapon ribbon icons.
  
• Refunded and have hidden the Chimera's incomplete "Power Spike" skill line.
  

Hey there. With week one of Outfit Wars behind us now, I’d like to do a bit of post mortem, and then talk a bit more about some goals for the rest of the year.



[h2]Outfit Wars[/h2]
Firstly, a big thank you and congratulations goes out to the participants, the excellent caster coverage, and the community API wizards who enhanced the event showcasing during the first round of Outfit Wars. On Twitch alone, we reached the highest peak viewership since The Late Shift rolled through in July (https://sullygnome.com/game/PlanetSide_2/30/summary), with more streaming taking place on YouTube separately. It’s great to see the general excitement surrounding events like this, and all the players rooting for one another in chat is a good reminder of how tight knit our community is.



[h2]The Arrival of Outfit Wars[/h2]
Secondly, the delivery of this event and the communication surrounding it could stand to be better. We pushed to get this update across the finish line so that this year's Roadmap was kept up with. In hindsight, that wasn't the right play. As bugs began to pile up, we should have made the call early on to postpone the event until we had room for a thorough test cycle. Most folks have real lives outside of this game, and organizing 48 players shouldn’t be something you need to do a few days (or a single day, in some extreme cases,) before the match. We apologize for the additional burden this placed on you all.


[h2]The Upside[/h2]
Fortunately (hopefully?) most of the rough patch is behind us. We have a handful of fixes on the way this Thursday that’ll clean up some scoreboard and match time issues, and you should expect no further changes to the gameplay space this season. There's still some work we can do to help facilitate casting of the event (mostly in the realm of confusing team colors,) but we'll need to identify when that can be improved.


[h2]Making Space[/h2]
With that being said, in order to maintain the health of the game moving forward, we're going to have to reel in our update cadence a bit. Currently, we're trying to do too much with the resources we have. Big, fancy features like Outfit Wars take the majority of the team to accomplish, and when setbacks occur it's incredibly difficult to play catch-up.

Through September, we’re going to take some time and reexamine what remains of the roadmap, see what needs to be cut, moved, or pivoted away from, and take our update cadence a bit slower through the end of the year. The goal is to focus on solid releases that we won’t need to scramble to fix, while tying up as many loose ends as we can from earlier this year. While this seems like an obvious decision, the truth is that slowing down content cadence at all is risky, and most of the times this was tried in the past have been met with lower player counts and (ironically) more discontent from active players because of how important player count is to this style of game.

However, given the increasing need for some cleanup, and that we're moving into a traditionally high-populated time of the year, we should have a safer space to experiment with slowing down. With any luck, we'll all come out the other side in a better place than we were because of it.


Thanks everyone.

-Wrel, Lead Designer

[h2]Outfit Wars[/h2]
Last weekend's Outfit Wars test identified a handful of issues that we've fixed in this release. On top of that, there has been some confusion on Live caused about match times due to the UI pointing to a couple of different data-sources when trying to display them to the player. This should be resolved, and when the Wednesday match time hits, all of the match times will be in sync with when your matches are actually taking place, and relogging will no longer cause match times to appear blank in the standings screen.

HUD team color indicators are also in a much better place, now allowing for the same level of control you had in the sandbox, while being specific to Outfit Wars.

Players will no longer be able to join a match after the Warmup (as originally intended,) or rejoin a match that they have left or been disconnected from. Lastly, players who leave an outfit mid-match will also be kicked from the matchup. These changes address a variety of exploits surfaced by players during the test.


[h2]Observer Camera Changes[/h2]
The following changes impact accounts with observer camera access.

• Using "/ow observematch matchrank" will take you to an active Outfit Wars match. The matchrank is the rank listed on the Outfit War standings screen.
  
• When in an Outfit Wars match, you will be unable to leave the camera without redeploying to a new zone.
  
• Players in an observer camera when they log out will be placed in Sanctuary upon relogging.
  

[h2]Misc. Changes, Fixes, and Additions[/h2]

• NS Scorpion now drops bomblets again.
  
• Lights no longer flicker on medium graphics quality settings.
  
• Decoy Grenade now has a unique model.
  
• UI.Ok is now okay.
  
• "team_id" has now been exposed in the Census API.
  
• Javelin once again shows thrust FX in all correct movement states.
  
• Chimera no longer loses idle FX the moment it starts moving.