Producer’s Letter: Escalation Arrives on March 11

Hello everyone,

Let me start by saying THANK YOU for your patience and support over the past 4 weeks as we’ve been preparing the Escalation update for launch!

As you know, this will be one of the biggest PlanetSide 2 updates we’ve done since launch back in 2012. Not only do we feel an obligation to live up to the immense level of hype surrounding Escalation, but as the newly formed Rogue Planet Games studio, we want to set the tone in terms of quality for all future updates. Which is why we have been MUCH more aggressive playtesting this update on the Public Test Server (PTS) than you may have been accustomed to in the past. 

That being said, with any update for a game of this scale, it’s practically impossible to catch every bug, or perfectly tune gameplay on a Test environment. There are just too many variables that cannot be accounted for until the update hits Live. But we believe the extra time we’ve taken, along with the amazing level of community support and feedback in our playtests, has created a much stronger foundation for this update that will allow us to immediately shift our focus to finetuning/balancing, rather than scrambling to hotfix critical issues. The past couple of playtests have given us the confidence to announce a new launch date of Wednesday, March 11 (less than a week from today!).

With the Escalation now officially set to launch, a portion of the team has already started work on our next update. Escalation is just the beginning of what we have planned for PlanetSide 2 in 2020 - after launch, we’ll schedule our next dev livestream for late March/early April to unveil the details of our next update.   

A few other topics to cover…

EMERALD SERVER UPGRADES

The Daybreak TechOps team has confirmed that they will perform the final round of PlanetSide 2 server hardware/software upgrades for our NA East Coast data center (Emerald) on Wednesday, March 18. For those keeping track, all of the other regions received their upgrades several weeks ago. The exact downtimes will be announced once we’re a bit closer. But it should be under 6 hours, and we will make every effort to perform the maintenance during off-peak hours for NA East players.

LEADERLESS OUTFITS

With Escalation so heavily focused on Outfits, the topic of “leaderless Outfits” has surfaced among the community. First, to clarify our use of this term; we have thousands of Outfits in PlanetSide 2. Over the years, some of those Outfit leaders stopped playing the game, leaving their otherwise active Outfits effectively “leaderless.” To address this potential issue, we are planning to implement a simple, efficient process to promote new Outfit leadership in-game.

Beginning on Wednesday, March 11 (Escalation launch day), players can submit a Customer Service ticket requesting that Outfit leadership be reassigned due to current leader inactivity. If the Outfit leader has been inactive (not logged into PS2) in the past 180 days (6 months), CS will assign Outfit leadership to the next highest ranking recently active Outfit member with the longest service in the Outfit.

To ensure past Outfit leaders have an opportunity to return post-update within a reasonable amount of time, all Outfit leaders that have their leadership reassigned due to inactivity will have 30 days from March 11 to return and submit a Customer Service ticket to regain their “Leader” ranking. 

This process should address a majority of these issues, but we’ll continue to monitor going forward.

EU DATA CENTER MIGRATION

Finally, Daybreak is in the process of moving all EU regional servers to a new data center. This will require a physical hardware relocation, and they’ve dispatched their entire TechOps team to perform the move first-hand, to ensure that it’s done as quickly and efficiently as possible. The PlanetSide 2 EU server moves (Miller and Cobalt) are scheduled to overlap with our Escalation update, and will require bringing EU servers down for 12 hours prior to our game update on the morning of March 11.  More details will be posted closer to the date, but we want to give our EU players a heads-up this is coming. The new server location is in close proximity and there will be no change in connection quality.

Thank you all for being part of the Rogue Planet Games family!   

Andy “IronSites” Sites

Head of Rogue Planet Games
Executive Producer, PlanetSide 2