In a recent interview with The Mittani, SOE’s Matt Higby revealed that the developer is planning on expanding its new alerts system to generate objectives across all of a server’s continents. Currently, when an alert event kicks in, say capture as much of Amerish as you can, the server will begin to struggle as all its players try to get to Amerish and pitch in for the cause. This soon leads to server queues. The new alerts will be planetwide so you can help your faction from any of the continents.
Higby also went into weapon balances and how pro-gaming will feed back into the standard game.
Two examples of new alerts that Higby provided were “Capture All Biolabs” and “something like ‘Capture X% of Worldwide Aerospace Resources’”, More excitingly, Higby also detailed a new kind of special alert, one which would affect the world “such as CTF type objectives that require you to bring 25 objects which randomly spawn in the world (and show up on the map for all players) back to your warpgate, but only a harasser can carry it and it goes half speed.”
It’s easy to see how over the coming months and years SOE could come up with some unique, rare alerts that drastically change the game for a short time. If done right alerts could be come one of the most attractive features of the game, like Guild Wars 2’s random world events.
Higby also spoke about SOE’s policy on releasing equipment. This follows complaints that the developer had released a new weapon type for sale only to release a better weapon a few weeks later, essentially making the first weapon released obsolete. “We never want there to be objectively inferior options and superior options for any weapon type, but rather for there to be different reasons to use the weapons in different situations, or based on personal playstyle preferences, Higby said “The idea of releasing a weapon and then a few weeks later releasing a “better” version doesn’t really fit with that goal and is not something that we’re doing intentionally.” He also said that they’re currently “looking through all our weapons, figuring out the ones that are being played the least, and which are underperforming regardless of how they’re being played, and figuring out what buffs we can make to bring them up to the same level as everything else.”
Finally, while talking about some of the features that are tipped towards pro-gaming, Higby said how he hopes these advances will improve Planetside 2 for standard players, too, “our goal with adding these competitive gaming focused features is to ensure that they add as much to the “macrogame” of Planetside 2 as they can […] For example, the battle islands will also eventually be added to the primary game as conquestable continents fleshing out the intercontinental conquest gameplay that we are building towards.”
There’s a lot more in the interview so do go read it.