Downfall... or One foot on the banana peel, one foot in the grave!

    

     Well, it was a long wait and it's finally over... and as the dust settles (HA!)  it's become painfully apparent that the stuff I posted last year has come true: the game is too hard, the community can't handle it and the devs won't be sticking with their original team oriented, hardcore mentality. 514 has become that which it claimed it would never be: SpaceCOD.

It was funny watching these "hardcore" players spend their time using the highest level gear in pube rooms for months on end. Sticking with the militia gear was always an underdog move, but for the good players, it wasn't the gear that mattered. That became pretty obvious when the enemy needed at minimum 4 players in protoad gear to take down a couple guys with militia suits and rifles. 1 on 1... the protoads got jackhammered. The theory was that they NEEDED the gear to stay competitive. And with the new nerfs the theory has proven true: the only way the sub average gamer can stay in the game is if the devs get rid of the mid range gun game entirely, which they did, leading the game to become a twitch based cod emulator. oh wait, cod with shields. Removing the medium range gunplay turns the game into CQC and since they broke the aiming, now you're looking at pure codstyle gameplay. Sad to see such a turn but then again, this community has been sucking on the cod teets for so long they wouldn't know anything else. Case in point, all the protoad gear "hardcore" clans who claim the game is dope now. It's funny because those ARE the codbois but the only people who don't see it (or maybe they are just in denial...  probably just stupid) are the one and the same. Classic. Then again, if you take away the protoad gear, they will find out they aren't as dope as they thought they were. Best to just leave it as is. If you chase away all the casuals wearing clan tags, you'll be left with casuals with no clan tags. That would be about 800 people. Not so massive.

Next, let's talk about the server population counter:
it was at 7k on the day the new build went live. After that, it went down to 5k. From there, it hovered between 2500 and about 5k.
But wait, didn't CCP say there were over 2 million character accounts created for 514? if so, wouldn't that mean at least 10k players, minimum?
So what do they do?
Aha... take one from the old "mag" playbook: Fake the numbers!!
See now if there was a "sort by 514" or "sort by EvE" function, then it wouldn't be a such a shallow move. But there isn't and what they are trying to do is the same things those incompetent morons at zipper tried to do, deceive the community about the actual player count. When asked, zipper claimed the numbers on the server weren't the total numbers because we weren't seeing "all the servers". which turned out to be blatant bullshit.
So CCP is now lumping in the EvE players with the 514 players and trying to make that the "player count". What it seems to me is that they don't want new players logging in and seeing a huge, mmo, fps, planetary shooter with less of a population then some Midwestern high schools.

They claimed they were adding ping rating to the game: well they did... kinda.
they added the SERVER ping to the Faction Warfare tab.
As they were told, this is entirely useless. Unless the ping rating is attached to each player on the LEADERBOARD page, it's a waste of code. Even if you do join a FW server, you can't see the ping rating once you are in the game. So even if it's green, once you join, all bets are off. If the player ping rating was instituted, which it should have been standard in ALL fps games since BF2MC, then there would be a way to weed out who is and who isn't lagging the community. Sadly, the need for Timmy 2bit and his dial up service need to get "fair treatment" when it comes to gaming. So lag to 514 is what "quality" is to EA... "it's in the game".

Skill tree: was fine the way it was. Seriously, it was worth the effort, it wasn't that hard to understand (unless you are a moron who can't read or do basic math.. oh, wait. never mind) It was worth the effort and took effort. It wasn't grinding, but since the community consists of milk fed soft serve pussies, it "felt" like grinding enough to have to remove any hint of it. Any now... what a mess. Lower the skill requirement, get rid of nested prepreqs, remove core elements... there, now it's fixed, says the clueless coder. Talk about taking what was quality and watering it down to ez mode. Nice job, you done it!

Lag: game still lags. lags bad. at some points, it lags completely out. saw this 3 matches in a row. everyone starts running in place, just as the game gets good and... well wouldn't ya know! back to the merc room. ah well, to be expected at this point I guess. Maybe 514 stands for the ms of lag the game has built in?

Terrain mesh is a disaster: running up a 3 foot hill... stuck. in mid air, stuck. 3 foot hill, really? This is what hems up the avatar? oh wait... what's this, this is new: running across an open field and hit a wall. no really, invisible wall. back up, try again. nothing. stop back up and go around. wtf? invisible walls in the middle of an open field? i guess that's one way of balancing game play. And sticky... whenever you bump into something, a box, a wall (non invisible), whatever... you stick to it. it's like everything is covered in some weird syrup that causes objects to adhere to each other.
But hey... at least they gave us grass!

Controller sensitivity = a bit of a mess. under 50 is too low, over 60 is too high. aim assist is bizarre. But then again, with no mid range gun game, who cares. it's all shotguns and mass drivers at 5 paces. Gotta keep those codbois happy.

Squad size: They actually did something right here, kinda. 6 man squads is a great thing. Well it's nice. But in reality all it means is even more pubstomping by those "hardcore protoad clans". But, then again, with 2 more folks in your squad, that's 2 less douche bag AFKers or even worse, those useless "sniper pussies" who hide anywhere but where the work is. So in the end it's probably better to have protoad noobsmash then to have teams of afkers and shipdit snipers sucking up server space. can't really tell which is worse.

Even though it's not here, I'm gonna go ahead and talk about Planetary:
This should be funny. From what I can gather, there will be a set time when players can attack other players planets. And once it's done, you have to wait another 23 hours to attack another. Sounds a lot like the old swimming pool days: "Adult swim only, please, adult swim only".
I predict that on the 14th, many a player will be fired up and ready to roll. Problem is, there is a huge difference between those that "can" and those that "are able". Between the cost and the window times, i think what was perceived as a sandbox mmo type of thing is gonna dwindle down into "well if we can't do planetary and we are sick of pubstomping, lets just go clan battle for a couple million". and that will be that. if clan battles are going to fill up the downtime, which it appears there will be a lot of , then this game will be pretty boring pretty fast. With only 5k players on, of which maybe half are clans... the writing is on the wall. Planetary from the outset was the element that made this FPS into more of an MMO. if there is no sandbox element to it or if it is one of those training wheels/handholding things, the type of thing you can do, but only when the devs let you, then this thing is gonna go down fast. too much sitting around waiting. hey, if I'm wrong, I'll admit it, but from what has been gleaned so far, it seem this is the way it's headed. My expectation based on the new build will be that the PC on the 14th is gonna be a bit of a let down.

New players:
anyone joining this game on the 14th or later is intergalatically screwed. Can't do a stat reset now, can ya CCP? Painted yourselves into a corner on that one. Keep the stats the way they are and new players are gonna come and go like a revolving door. Reset the stats and all the codbois... er sorry, "hardcore protoad clans" will leave because then they won't have that upper hand they need to keep their self esteem up. catch 22... leave it alone and it's messed up. Reset it and it's messed up. Damn man... you guys messed up! never shoulda let ANY of the beta stats carry over. Look at it this way: if you are devving a game and that game is a quality game, then there would be no need to coerce players to keep playing it. if it's a great game, they will play it anyway. Only a sub par game would need to let the beta testers keep their stats. How else can you stop the drain on your player retention? And for those players who claim otherwise, please. It's a frigging game. You either play it or you don't. But it's not your job so you don't deserve any special consideration just because you beta tested it. Hell, some of you were dumb enough to spend money on a beta. YOU paid to play a beta. Classic. But your sense of entitlement to your stats is gonna cost you player count in the long run. Hope it's worth it.

I spent a couple hours trying to find the first dev interview from WAAAAY back in the day. It was very specific about what 514 was going to be. Can't find it. Not sure if they took it down or it's just so old it's buried, but if i could find that thing, I'd copy paste it in an attempt to get the devs to realize how far away they have moved from the original idea. Maybe it's Sony with their over watch and their "casual gamer" standards. Maybe not. Either way, this thing is nowhere near what it was hyped to be when it first hit the scene.

Oh yeah, one last thing:
MAG DEVS:
There have been a couple rumors swirling around that CCP hired some of the folks from mag to work on 514. If this is not true, well then rumors are rumors, so meh.

if it IS true:

Fire the MAG devs ASAP!!! Hand em their checks and kick em off the property!!! The folks from mag shouldn't even be allowed to do concept art or even make photocopies of concept art for 514!! Between their inability to listen to the community and their just plain stupid decisions, anyone involved in the mag fiasco should be legally barred from ever designing another game. I will say this though: if you guys DID hire the mag devs, that explains a LOT of why 514 is going down the toilet. Those guys ruined mag... please don't let em ruin 514. You guys seem to be doing a fine job of that on your own, without any help from Zpr_IncompetentDev or the rest.

Had high hopes for 514.
Reality set in.
Now we're just dealing with the afterbirth.
Anybody gotta bucket and a mop?

Peace
Bassmeant