Over the last week, many Planetside 2 players have been expressing their dissatisfaction with the game’s recoil compensation mechanic, which a patch recently reintroduced. On Wednesday, Sony Online CEO John Smedley tweeted that this was “inadvertent” and that it would be removed immediately. However, that doesn’t seem to have been what happened.
A little background on this: us Planetside 2 players are used to the recoil from firing a weapon causing it to pitch upwards. Long bursts of automatic fire have us gently moving our mice to compensate for this, much as we might do in any first-person shooter. However, the reintroduction of recoil compensation has interfered with this because, while it doesn’t compensate for recoil that way that a player does when firing, it does immediately attempt to reset where a weapon is aiming after it’s finished firing. This causes problems.
If you’re firing single shots, this can potentially be helpful, as your weapon remains level after each one, but after a sustained burst of automatic fire, where you’ve subtly, gradually slid your mouse, Planetside 2 takes that mouse movement into consideration, add its to its own recoil compensation and leaves you aiming at the floor afterwards. Here’s how that looks:
As you can see, it can be a particular problem when trying to track moving targets. I don’t know about you, but in my games of Planetside 2, all my targets tend to move an awful lot.
Although Smedley’s tweet is now two days old (less eight hours, I suppose, for the time difference), I’ve just applied the latest patch and I’ve found my automatic weapons are still being compensated in this way. Checking the Planetside 2 forums, I don’t seem to be the only person who is still affected by this.
Are you still experiencing the same compensation? Let us know via Twitter or in the comments below.