[2023] It is important to remember that the people currently in charge of Planetside 2, are not the people who designed and developed the game.

Planetside 2 was released in 2012 by Sony Online Entertainment (SOE). It had a massive budget and a big development arc. The ambitions were big and part of those ambitions was a carefully thought-out gameplay style. Its execution wasn't perfect, there were a lot of crazy imbalanced weapons and vehicles over the years that ended up having to get nerfed, but the idea was there and fundamentally it worked. Planetside 2 was a game that got thousands of players absolutely hooked, it was one of the most addictive games out there.

In 2015 SOE was acquired by a company called Columbus Nova. They rebranded it to Daybreak Games and shortly after a large part of the Planetside 2 development team was laid off or moved to other projects. Several more reshuffles followed. Later they hired a very opinionated youtuber by the name of Wrel, someone who made weapon review videos, but with no actual experience as a developer. Eventually Wrel became lead developer.

It is important to understand why this dev team has made so many decisions and changes to the game that seem out of place, that just don't work, that the community never asked for or even changes that got pushed through despite heavy opposition from the community. This team does not fundamentally understand how the game was designed, how it works. For instance, in 2017 the majority of damage resistance types were removed from the game after the dev team admitted to not understanding how they were coded. On top of that, they have an attitude of ignoring and even ridiculing the community feedback. Especially wrel has made some egregious comments that illustrate both his antagonistic attitude

and at times have betrayed how ignorant he is

of how many aspects of Planetside 2's gameplay work.

Now, the Planetside 2 player population is nearing an all-time low and I doubt many will be surprised as to why.

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