I’m not quite sure what’s gotten into Planetside lately – you get nothing for over a year, and then all of a sudden, two events come along a week:

Planetside Players: Event Calendar (Via OGRank)

Two more events, and the implication that Tuesdays and Thursdays are ‘Event Nights’ now, all of which seemed to be meeting a somewhat mixed reaction. The Home Defence event will see one randomly selected empire artificially placed on the back foot, having to hold their two home maps, while the other two empires try to capture one each within the set time span - a GM-accellerated Zero-basing, in fact, while the Monolith event will see randomly spawning ‘Flags’ showing up around the world, each needing to be taken to an empire’s capitol base, most likely - a bit like that Sylithyist thing in WoW.

Just recently I had the pleasure of being in the wrong base at the wrong time during a ‘Protect The Commander’ event, which saw a random player from each team be promoted to ‘Commander’, given a BFR with 20x it’s normal hit-points, and all unleashed in the middle of the currently entrenched nightly three-way, causing so much lag, I had to give up for the night, and of course ‘Cowboy Rules’ keeps showing up on Desolation – the Battle Island initially designed for tank battles, reducing members of all empires to ‘six-shooters’, ‘pellet-guns’, and ATV ‘horseback’ – NOT what anyone signed up to play, Reserves, or otherwise.

Coupled with the evidently still ongoing ‘Outfit Wars’ events, which being a soloist, are something of a mystery to me, there seems to be plenty of distraction about these days, for those tired of the normal business of base capture and counter attack. Trouble is, at this point in the proceedings – three years in, and over a year since the Expansion – I’m not sure many of the players remaining, actually are. The reason we're all still there, fighting the same battles over and over, three years in a row, is because we know what we like.

Various courtyard and Sanctuary bitching, and of course, forum ranting, seems to suggest that many players aren’t really that fussed with these new events, viewing them in a similar manner to the more familiar and frequent Player-Driven ‘Event’, the CR5 Home Continent Recall Order, where one player tries to stop the rest of his army from shooting enemy soldiers in a target-rich, but essentially unwinable environment, and all go to a different map to beat off six people with an AMS. Fun to watch, but rarely satisfying.

In both cases, the sudden choice of new orders – to stay and fight where you are, or to go to the event, or recall and resecure, or whichever, causes problems, in that each soldier makes their own mind up, and that the after the resulting half-and-half split, neither new sub-force is likely to win. The people who went won’t be enough to make a new beachhead or fight off a determined strike-force, and the people who stayed won’t be enough to hold the line, and until one of these half-forces is routed completely, and joins the other, very little progress will be made. Inertia is a bitch.

Having GM events further draining away resources, in a game which has always been about numbers, doesn’t help much, but worse still, is the realisation by the GMs - of this ambivalent attitude. There’s nothing worse than a throwing a war that no-one will attend, and the last few of these bizarre lag-inducing gunbattle gymkhanas seem to have been dropped right on top of the most hectic fighting already in progress. Last one I was at, lagged me out almost completely, and rendered things pretty unplayable for me. Performance has never been PS's strong suit, but usually I struggle on with it, but this time it really was the 'slideshow'.

Much of the general annoyance seems to be with a perceived frivolous wasting of scant development resources on this kind of thing, when many players are still keenly anticipating the changes listed previous here:

Van Hemlock: The Tour of Duty

Note the date, 24th January, nearly ten months ago. I told you to take it with a pinch of salt! To be honest, if I were SOE, I’d have not mentioned the plans at all – instead just surprising people with the new bits and pieces, rather than create an expectation that is now becoming a resentment. (Never mind Base Redesign, The Phantasm stealth plane, The Naval Expansion, Sanctuary Strikes, The Space Expansion, and other craziness…)

I can only imagine that for Planetside’s sole remaining developer, this kind of event is much easier to design, code, shoehorn into the server code, test, balance and implement, than many of the rather more ambitious new units suggest back in January – the biggest bang for the buck. While it is reassuring to know PS actually has developement resources again, and is unlikely to actually be switched off any time soon, something a little more substantial than Capture The Flag bonus stages might go down better with the masses...

Again, I find myself using the Chess analogy – very rarely does a good game of Chess have a Super-Lightning-Bonus-Round, and certainly plays well enough without. I do wonder however, if it might not be better to have no attention at all, than have half the army suddenly whisked away to chase Rabbit-Balls about, while the rest of us just have to hope a similar number of enemy troops also want to go play. I'm not sure about anyone else, but personally, I just assume that the other teams will actually try, and win, and get our tanks for 24 hours, or whatever, and not really worry about it that much. A bit like the dubious 'Daily Winner' - in reality, no-one wins Planetside...there's always Tomorrow...

Still, it’s good that these things are a scheduled occurrence now – Tuesdays and Thursdays are fast becoming World of Warcraft nights for me…