Zitat:Do you have any more information you can give us about the plans to bring PS2 into the MLG?

The guys at MLG are absolute authorities at what works and what doesn’t in the world of “competitive gaming”. We’re working with MLG to create a lot of new features to allow our competitive minded outfits and players to be able to stack themselves up against their rivals and ultimately compete against other outfits from around the world. This will all start from within the existing Planetside 2 gameplay, where outfits effectiveness on the macro-level battles on Auraxis will be ranked on leaderboards against other outfits with similar sizes. Those outfits who wish to participate in MLG events and who have high enough leaderboard rankings will be able to sign up to be seeded into a competitive bracket. Matches from that bracket will be played throughout the course of a season with each outfit fielding a platoon of players against the other outfit’s platoon and battling it out on brand new competition focused battle island maps that we are creating and which support competitive objectives, win conditions and hopefully create an exciting viewership experience. The finals and maybe even semi-finals will be played live at forthcoming MLG events.

As much as possible 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, so that if you’re a fan of competitive gaming in general, or not, you’ll see something interesting in the additions. 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, and the outfit leaderboards will be there for all players, regardless of if they are participants in MLG events or not.

Zitat:The Alert system is amazing - it’s gotten us to visit Amerish. At the moment, Alerts amount to ‘take this continent in two hours’. Are there plans to have more localized fights triggered by alerts, such as a massive single ‘hold the Crown’ battle, or ‘Hold these three stations on one continent’ to trigger particularly intense battles? Could you let us know what kind of ideas you have?

We are actually currently working on several new Alert types and expanding the system in general. Right now the only Alerts we have are ones that involve conquest of an entire continent, which is great for a change of scenery in the game but which also has some obvious problems, notably that only a certain number of players on the server can participate before the server queues kick in. This makes us only activate events during off-peak hours when more players can get to the focus continent.

A lot of the ideas for new alert types avoid this limitation, for instance “Capture All Biolabs” which rewards you for capturing as many biolabs as possible during the alert – this is something that the entire server can participate in without worrying about having to get to a certain continent. Other examples might be something like “Capture X% of Worldwide Aerospace Resources”, or completely new mechanics 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. Things along the lines of that CTF objective that really add some variety to the way the game is played during the alert are especially appealing to me.