Development Update – November 2023

Hello, fellow Auraxians! We're thrilled to bring you this development update, giving you a sneak peek into some of our upcoming plans for PlanetSide 2 and some clarity on our intentions for future communication and better transparency. To kick things off, let’s talk about what’s coming this week: Outfit Wars! 

Outfit Wars – Nexus Season 2 

The Enlistment Phase for Nexus Season 2 begins Nov 15th, and the first round of qualifiers for the new season of Outfit Wars begins December 1st! We are excited to host this event this year and are looking forward to watching this year’s matches play out. Feedback around the timing of this year’s event along with the concern over player participation is something we have noted. Although today’s letter will not get into many details about future Outfit Wars plans, we want to share that we will review the event and will consider some future adjustments. We will have more details on what that entails when the time is right. Learn more about this year’s Outfit Wars here. 

Game fixes and a new future 

Undoubtedly, the departure of one of our key team members has impacted our communication with you all in recent months. However, we want to assure you that the current team is more than capable of carrying on the PlanetSide legacy, and we have some exciting plans ahead. As we regain our footing, consider this the first of monthly dev updates we plan to publish moving forward. Our Community Manager Mithril will continue to gather vital feedback and bug reports via post-patch notes on Reddit, forums and social threads. We will also do our best to address your questions and concerns on those channels as timely as possible. 

Moreover, we're delighted to inform you that our dev team has welcomed some new members in recent months and has been actively tuning in to your feedback from various channels such as our forums, community Reddit, Discord, and social media channels. 

In the past couple of months, we have released various game fixes and miscellaneous additions to the game which you can check out here. For each subsequent update in the coming months, we will continue to focus on fixing critical bugs and other malfunctioning mechanics wherever possible. Several new game fixes have been prepared, and we can’t wait to have you check them out. As we want you to have a fun gaming experience on Auraxis, we hope these fixes will remedy some of the pain points of the game.  

As we need a little more time to announce the entire roadmap for 2024, we're eager to share details on some of our current projects. Here's a sneak peek at one of the many things we are working on!  

Capture the Conduit Update 

Current State of Capture the Conduit 

In its current state, Capture the Conduit (CTC) suffers from many issues and is recognized as being a hassle to play with. We hear you. Here are some of the issues we are reviewing with the current CTC status. 

• Long capture times 
• Repository, flag, and hard spawn placement often makes them too easy to defend 
• Even when a base is undefended capturing it can take a while 
• While capturing a base it is too easy for defenders to reset the capture progress 
• The base status information on the map is difficult to parse
• It is difficult to get a sense of urgency based on the UI 
• It is difficult to ascertain the exact status of the base based by only the conduit count 
• The faction roles are extremely limited, with 1 faction being the attacker and the other a defender 
• This leads to more static concentrated battles without good in-base flow 

 With all of this in mind, we created a set of goals we want to achieve with this update: 

• Change the Capture the Conduits mechanics to improve capturability of bases 
• Improve map flow within bases 
• Make the status and urgency of bases more apparent in the user interface 

Before we continue describing the changes, we understand the common question asked by the community is: “Why not get rid of Capture the Conduit entirely?” The current iteration of Capture the Conduit moves the game away from what we are trying to accomplish. One of our big picture goals moving forward is to minimize the repetitive nature of capturing territory and to increase the diversity of tactics, loadouts, and play styles the game supports. Having only one way to capture a base narrows the scope of the game when one of its strengths should be its openness. 

How the new Capture the Conduit will work

To solve many of these problems listed above, we will be "hybridizing" Capture the Conduit bases with more traditional Capture Points. This should make many aspects of capturing a base more readable, familiar, and reliable while still maintaining the more interesting aspects of needing to capture conduits. 

How the new system will work: 

• Bases are no longer captured by bringing the number of strikes to zero by delivering Conduits to Repositories. 
• Instead, bases are captured via the traditional method of holding capture points until the overall base is captured and changes ownership. The new system will use conduits to activate repositories, turning them into capture points. 
• Once a repository is activated, it behaves like a normal capture point until the base is captured, or the capture point progress is reversed and deactivated. 
• Activating a repository will grant some amount of immediate capture progress, giving attackers a buffer from recapture. 
• Currently, more flags can be captured to speed up the capture process. This is one of the mechanics that we are looking for public testing and feedback on. 
• Overall, conduits themselves will behave the same, and be subject to the same rules and restrictions as they are now. 

Soon we will be releasing one or two of the updated bases to the test server for playtesting and feedback. On top of checking that the mechanics are functioning properly, we want to pay particular attention to the timings involved in capturing a base, such as empty vs. defended and how the balance of population affects the capture times. 

Additional Updates 

As part of the new CTC update, we are also reviewing the 22 Capture the Conduit bases. Here, we will be evaluating and adjusting elements like the placement of conduits, repositories, spawn locations, and sunderer locations. The goal here is to adjust them to accommodate the new mechanics and improve overall flow. As a result of the evaluation, and on rare occasions, some bases may revert from Capture the Conduit back to their previous base type. 

Here is Andvari Barracks on Esamir an example of the kinds of changes we are making: 

• We’ve added more protected Sunderer positions to help sustain attacks. 
• Line of sight directly to the spawn room now has obstructions to increase protection from sniping. 
• We’ve placed much more cover between the spawn room and critical areas of the base to reduce the amount of time defenders are completely exposed. 

Looking forward to your feedback on these updates in our forums. Don’t forget to follow the latest PS2 discussions our X, and Facebook. 

We want to thank you all for your continued support and passion for this game that we all love. We’re looking forward to celebrating our 11th anniversary with everyone this Nov 20th and can’t wait for another amazing year on Auraxis with you all. We’ll see you planetside! 

- PlanetSide 2 Team