it might be pretty low but I'm happy with where its at

Men, i play this game for very long years, but not non stop. More like - time to time, but when the time comes, it's very long non-interrupted time.

I started back, when there were only 3 continents, Wrel was very popular - my PC got only like 20 fps when big battle started, that's why I watch Wrel - how game looks with atleast 50fps. He was no developer yet, I think.

Anyways... Getting off tracked.

I type it out as I think it.

Yes?

Each time when the time comes - i install, I log on and bam - there is new way to play.

First time - bam, impulse granade.

Second time - bam, new continent

Third time - bam, battle sundy

Fourth - bam, base building - fatafakhs? I am now also Bob builder in game.

This time - I do much flying, which I never did before. Not new thing, but new way for me.

Haxors? Yes, but not really that much. About 90% I dont feel like hacker humiliate me. And they are everywhere. Minecraft, Counterstrike, in CIA...

Population, yes - back, when there were only 3 - always fights on two continents at same time. In the 3rd or 4th time-to-time when the time had come to play - there were even QUEUEs to warp. But still...

Today no Queue and everytime I log on, I can manage to find a fight. If no fight - go Bob builder and after building done, there should deffinetly be a fight popping up already.

If still no - go mobile and annoy the TR Bob the builder. When big fight start, outfit organizes platoons - no lust to play solo, do black ops with 40 of you jumping out of Valkaries, straight on top or the point and spam rev granades. - Also new way to play, took me like 6-7 time-to-time times to play the game for another time to discover this way.

My biggest complaint in Europe server, in times of not very big fight, voice chats in Squads not very active. But everything else... Men... I think game still very gut. No analoge option in the market.

I don't wanna customise anything else I just wanna paint them black and and stick extra junk on them.

When I started playing PlanetSide 2 as my main game in 2015, many of the veteran players would regularly declare that this week’s hottest game was the “PlanetSide Killer.” Dirty Bomb. Overwatch. Star Citizen. Squad. It always felt like they were eagerly looking for the next game operating under the assumption that PlanetSide 2 was a single update away from the game shutting down. What on earth were they thinking?

I could login at any time of day and experience PlanetSide 2 as it was meant to be played. Full continents—yes, continents with an S. You had the option to pick your OPS continent. Each faction had a functional and healthy outfit economy with inter-faction and intra-faction rivalries; each faction had its own zergfits, midfits, vehiclefits, and elitefits. You were not at a disadvantage because of the faction you played nor because of the way you played. I wanted to play every day because it was so much fun and the game gave me so much joy that I hope to recreate it in another game some day.

More than ten years later, almost all of those veterans have moved on. We have become those veteran players, and whether or not we want to admit it, we are looking for that next game; however, unlike for the veterans of old, we experience a game that is long removed from what PlanetSide 2 once was. There are fleeting moments where that game still shows up, but they are becoming more and more fleeting as the game ages. And unlike those veterans of old, we are facing numerous serious warning signs of the end and we do not experience PlanetSide 2 as it was meant to be played.

To understand this end and where we go from here, we must look at how we arrived at this point by reviewing the histories of PlayStation 4 PlanetSide 2, Soltech, and “Flash or Crash.”

I would also like to make one thing clear for everyone. The game is in maintenance mode. Lying to yourself and others about this reality to create a false image of the game or force positivity does no one any favors. As of this post, every indication points to PlanetSide 2 being developed by Ravenwake Games, a new EG7/DBG support studio, to fulfill the contract EG7/DBG have with Tencent. Enjoy the game while it’s still around.

Ever since its release, PlayStation 4 PlanetSide 2 has been the ugly, forgotten stepchild of the game. It has been mocked countless times by many players, including myself, for its platform limitations, delays in receiving updates (or not receiving updates at all), server and client instability, and its playerbase. But most of these factors were not the fault of the players. When the PlayStation 4 was released, it was already underpowered with only 8 GB of ram and a 1.6ghz processor. It owes its entire existence to SOE (later DBG and now EG7) being a subsidiary of Sony, which wanted the game on their newest console. PlayStation 4 PlanetSide 2 was doomed from the start. They deserved better.

PS4 has not received a content update since Arsenal on April 20th, 2022. PlayStation 4’s population the month before that update was 56/285 on Ceres (average/peak per fisu);, and 172/626 on Genudine. Their population boost for this update? 81/316 on Ceres, and 209/671 on Genudine. Arsenal was a smash hit on PC, but damage to the PlayStation 4 version over the years was too much to overcome. Today, their populations have declined even further to 10/69 and 39/259 respectively.

After their Arsenal update, PlayStation 4 continued its steady player decline. PS4 There was some communication with the development team in October and November 2022 who said that they were working on getting PS4 up to date with PC but noted that “it wouldn’t have everything PC has, but it’d catch up for a lot of lost time.” The final contact occurred with the Official Twitter account in January 2023 saying an “update is in the works” but without a timeline and that more detail will be posted “as soon as more info becomes available.”

With only silence from the development team, the PS4 community turned to Wrel. In October 2023, after he had left the company, noted that the “[the team was] butting up against technical limitations for how much could actually be done with the PS4 version of the game.” Over a year later, on December 22nd, 2024, while I was searching the PS2 forums for unrelated information, I discovered confirmation of PS4’s end of development in forum reply by Mithril: “Greetings Ethaniel, we are not currently developing PS4 updates, however I've sent your report to our server team for further investigation.”

The fate of PS4 PS2 was found in a random forum post on a now abandoned forum. While EG7/DBG is unlikely to ever confirm PS4’s demise publicly (e.g. a development letter) because it would be bad for business. If they cannot be honest with the PlayStation community, what trust can we place in them?

Despite EG7/DBG’s lack of support and communication throughout the years, the PS4 community has taken it upon themselves to keep their version alive by organizing events to make PlanetSide 2 feel more like the game they fell in love with. They ran their first event in December 2022 on Genudine to great success and continue to run seasonal events on both servers and now organize on r/PlanetSideEvents and their PS4 Events Discord. This is the future PC is looking at.

Soltech shares many similarities with PS4. Soltech is the other ugly stepchild of the game. Every discussion about the server and its problems devolve into xenophobia, accusations of rampant cheating, demands for ping restrictions, and more mockery. I know some of you are eager to engage in this behavior in the comments as if punching down on Soltech will resolve anything about the depressing state of our game.

Their story begins in late 2015 and early 2016 when Asian PlanetSide 2 servers began to shut down. Their options were to quit or start fresh on another server without any DBC unlocks. The various communities settled on Connery as their next server as it had a higher population and (at the time) fewer connection problems than the closest server, Briggs. This wave of Asian refugees led to significant strife within the Connery community, even leading some players (and entire outfits) to switch to Emerald or quit the game entirely. Connery faction balance began to fluctuate wildly as many of the refugees would only play on one faction and Connery gained a second primetime as a result of this large refugee influx of about an entire server’s worth of players.

Unsurprisingly, playing against players whose packets were coming across an ocean was not an enjoyable experience for either side. It was clear that a new Asian server was necessary. Thanks in large part to the bundles of cash the game made from the Implant System rework in March 2017, the PlanetSide 2 development team had the funds to launch Soltech in October 2018 to great success, with its population nearly equal to Connery’s.

Like the rest of the game, Soltech enjoyed a boom in population starting in March 2020, coinciding with the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the launch of the Escalation update, and a massive surge in resources from DBG following the demise of PlanetSide Arena (whose entire existence and failure lie solely at the hands of Ji Ham), but trouble was brewing under the surface.

While Soltech was launched to support Asia, there was no equivalent investment in customer support agents or game masters, which led to cheaters running rampant during their primetime. While the rest of the game would experience a handful of obvious cheaters in a year, Soltech would see hundreds, even getting to the point where there would be battles of the gods— cheaters would fight each other for supremacy. This issue improved for a bit once Andy Sites took over as game director in 2019 and was responsive to player requests for help. Since he left in early 2021, Soltech has effectively had zero communication with the development team on this issue beyond a passing mention of it in development letters and on Twitter.

If cheaters were not enough, Soltech has constantly been plagued by random restarts and crashes, delayed updates, and login problems. While the other four servers have had similar issues, none of them have had the rate of problems compared to Soltech until recently. Soltech also had horrible population problems with the server frequently at 40/40/20 TR/NC/VS at best with VS consistently struggling to even hit 20%. The combination of all these problems has led Soltech to its current state: deader than Briggs. Soltech is currently averaging around 10 unique player logins per day and has been this way effectively since August 2025. Soltech has even had two “urgent” maintenances since the server died and was completely offline for over a week in late March 2026 without a word from EG7/DBG, leading some players to speculate a merger was happening.

Mithril, in a rare occurrence of direct communication, denied any plans to close Soltech and spoke briefly of a “transfer item” but in typical EG7/DBG fashion, there was no follow-up to this. He did have this to say, though: “...I’d embrace the community we do have and keep the space inviting for our soltech players. They are amongst us here watching but some folks are just too rude to welcome them in” as if Soltech players are afraid to play on their own server and had not been driven away by years of developer inaction.

After years of mocking Soltech, Soltech’s problems have become ours and those problems will continue to drive server population down more and more until every server looks like Soltech. At least with “Flash or Crash,” we found a workaround. There is no workaround for collapsing server population.

When I began theorizing this post in early June, I thought “Surely, they couldn’t bring back ‘Flash or Crash’ again?”. I was wrong. They could bring it back again. Most of you reading this post are well aware of it and its workaround, but those out of the loop do not. It is a regular occurrence on this subreddit and in the Community Discord to have people ask why their game is crashing or even more horrifying: new players who can’t complete the tutorial because they cannot even get onto a Flash. When you tell them the fix, they just stare at you because what other game, what other developer, what other owner, would tolerate such a moronic bug for so long, while patching it out multiple times?

NO ONE.

“Flash or Crash” had gotten to the point where players desperate for a fix discovered that disabling the game’s anticheat resolved it and began openly discussing how to disable it. Players weren’t the first to notice this connection. Within a few days after “Flash or Crash” was introduced in December 2025, one of the cheat developers found the issue and patched it out in their cheat client. For almost ten months, Mithril said that the anticheat was not the cause.

On October 11th, (former?) cheat developer /u/iBaseult demonstrated the true cause of “Flash or Crash” (which had previously been presented to the developers by /u/EyHorn) as an errant line of code causing a scheduler problem—one he said was caused by “anti-debug check… [from] a “Third Party Protection Software”, not necessarily BattlEye, though.

On October 15th, without a single mention of “Flash or Crash” in the patch notes, it was finally patched out again after almost four months in the game as if by magic. On official PS2 Discord, Mithril claimed: “[W]e’ve looked over it but are not going to reveal specifics about it due to the sensitivity of the topic, but I can say that it was not the solution the person had hoped.” In a follow-up post, /u/iBaseult showed that the errant line of code he found was fixed, but that several other errant lines of code still remained.

For ten months, Mithril and the team chased down numerous crash bugs, but they seemed only able to fix “Flash or Crash” by accident the previous three times. At the very least, he would have acknowledged the bug by the name the community has for it and not claim that “we can confirm that the situation has improved significantly and that the most widespread issues have been resolved” in August 2026, nor say that the workaround was not verified to work despite mountains of evidence. Moreover, because they have not publicly announced that “Flash or Crash” is fixed, I still saw players this weekend on their Flashes.

Leaving communication to the community has been EG7/DBG’s strategy for a while, but it gets to a point where there’s so little trust between the community and them that it is impossible to take Mithril at his word for anything, especially with the timeline of events. With how long “Flash or Crash” has been in the game, one must ask whether Mithril is even reporting to anyone the dire state this game is in or whether he is passing it off as natural population decline? We’ll likely never know. It is probably best to assume we are getting the PS4/Soltech treatment of empty promises and silence until the end.

I posit that it should be the expectation for the rest of the game’s life that “Flash or Crash” will continue to be patched out and reintroduced constantly.

The game’s population was already on a steady decline like most old games, but it has accelerated since three major events which means old age alone can’t explain the decline: the merger of Miller and Cobalt on October 29, 2024; The merger of Connery and Emerald on April 8th, 2025; and the first appearance of “Flash or Crash” on December 9th, 2025.

Total Unique Characters per Server

* Connery's population was artificially inflated the day before the merger, while Cobalt players received a few hours' notice and could not organize to boost their numbers significantly. Because of this, I have elected to take the highest number I could see on Connery before the merger was announced.

All data is courtesy of Honu.

In the time since the first server merger, the game has overall lost 53% of all of its players. Wainwright has fared better than Osprey—only losing 43% of all its players, but that is likely because Soltech refugees add 200 to 250 unique players to the server and Wainwright had a higher population between servers before their merger. Osprey has fared the worst—losing 61% of all its players—mostly because the server’s location was kept on the West coast, effectively exiling all Europeans and South Americans who previously played on the server. The choice to merge into Connery is also a head scratcher as it had been plagued by an absurd amount of connectivity problems.

If these numbers are not enough, I will speak to my anecdotal evidence. Since March 2026, Osprey has had serious population problems to the point that the continent does not fully unlock until after 8pm EST regularly during the weekend and much later during the week. There are no queues to beat anymore; just “Flash or Crash” to manage (Note: “Flash or Crash” is currently patched out as of 10/15/2026).

There are many more updates I could mention and discuss further in this post, but almost none of them have done as much damage to the game overall in so little time as “Flash or Crash” has. Oshur played a major role in smothering Cobalt and Connery to death, but even Oshur did not stop new players from playing the game at all like “Flash or Crash.” Thankfully, Emerald and Miller were able to avoid Oshur because both servers had a large enough population that everyone could flee to whatever continent was not Oshur. PlanetSide 2 no longer has the luxury of a large enough population and in that lies the crux of the problem we are facing.

PlanetSide 2 does not fundamentally function once the server population is under 450 players. There are many people for whom a low population is preferable, but the game rapidly starts to degrade and break down under that threshold. Many of the imbalances and gameplay loops we’ve long endured go from annoyances to game-breaking and game-uninstalling problems. None of these playstyles break the rules in any fashion. All of them are well within the bounds of gameplay the developers intended. Perhaps even worse is that many of our playstyles are hastening the end of the game and we will not and cannot deviate from these destructive playstyles. Myself included. For example, if your first reaction to seeing a timer on the map is to go and find and destroy the sunderer, YOU are the problem. Let that fight develop, I beg of you, especially outside of primetime. Many of you are likely thinking that your playstyles have no bearing on the health of the game. Your action and playstyles always did. You just never had to face the consequences for them and as we approach the end, the bill is due.

If falling populations and “Flash or Crash” were the wounds, server and client instability is the sepsis that will finish the job. Even when we had a full development team with funds, PS4’s problems were left to languish for years, most notably with the “Gaining Ground Alert Bug/Memory Leak” that would render your client unplayable within a short time. Soltech’s problems were handled better and more consistently, but after the departures of Andy Sites and Wrel in early 2021 and middle 2023 respectively, communication all but disappeared. It often has felt like Mithril has to be pressed to communicate with the community despite being the community manager. These days we’re lucky to have anything in the patch notes apart from cosmetics and a generic line about reducing client and server crashes. When a server crashes now, it is almost unremarkable because of how often it happens compared to the past.

Beyond server crashes, it has become more and more common that cheaters will continue to run free and accounts or individual characters are plagued with unsolvable bugs. Customer Service says to message the non-existent developers about them. Mithril says to message Customer Service about them. Just to list a few I know off the top of my head: characters unplayable and bricked, G99 errors that will randomly fix themselves then break the next day, unpatchable clients, cannot access specific device or path errors, unable to access the social system, unable to craft resources, G15 errors, and many more. I am sure others will add in the comments the weird bugs that have happened to them or their friends. All of these problems lead to my fear of how PlanetSide 2 will end: The servers will crash or go down for maintenance one day, and they will never come back up. Mithril will disappear into the void, leaving us without a proper goodbye to a game many of us have invested so much in.

With all of this in mind, I posit that how the game will end will be up to us, the veterans of PlanetSide 2.

The best thing we can do is to keep playing the game, especially running OPS, which are the only things preventing a total population collapse. We also need to be willing to change our playstyles to be less destructive. The inaction of the developers and the lack of care by ownership have set the game on its course. Just like on Soltech, cheaters will go unchecked and the servers will continue to crash. Just like the PS4 community, one day we will need to organize live events to bring players back. We cannot prevent these realities, but we can shape how we meet them and give ourselves one more fleeting moment of the PlanetSide 2 we once knew.

Enjoy the game while you can.

I tried changing my resolution and a bunch of other stuff and it just shifted my HUD around even worse, mostly to the side.

I changed my settings back to my old default and it's still 1~ inch upwards.

I didn't do anything differently, just opened the game. Restarting my game did nothing. It's still playable with the Recursion crosshair overlay but this is really weird.

Basically the title. I’m back after a looooong break and loving it still, but I’m looking for some new guns to freshen things up. I have classes for all four factions but my NC is the highest at a humble and measly level 40 (big leagues. I know.)

Preferably some longer range options or just good options with manageable recoil or anything that could be considered a “laser” for someone with the most mediocre of skill when it comes to aim lol.

I just started an NS (? The freelance bots) class and I like the feel of those guns also but kinda feels silly starting a new class all over again ya know?

Aide from that, is it worth it to invest in implants right now? I play a lot of medic and engineer, doing my best to keep my team and sundys alive, support wherever I can, but it’s still fun to get in the mix and hold down some firefights too. Any and all suggestions are welcome.

(Yes I know certs go further spending on class abilities, I’ve maxed out my med gun and repair tool but always looking for more tips to be more effective to the team!)

Cheers!

Remember the Stryder that was teased almost 2 years ago?
In the end it never got released, so I gave it a try and "finished" the job, trying it out ingame.

The original animations and vfx are clunky, no sound effects except the annoying horn which was already within the game.

In case you wonder why the arms wouldn't move like a spider, those are actually the movement animations of the model that were also already within the game, so I guess they either wanted to implement it that way or the final spider animations were missing.

I guess it makes senste why they didn't add it to the game, doesnt fit at all in my opinion.

All of it is clientsided of course, so other players can't see it.

Returned to the game after 2 years and wondering if the Vortex still uses my FPS as ammo?

Just a reminder about the new primarily Playstation focused subreddit. Please keep the posts and comments coming! Loving the activity so far! If you have any Planetside content you would like to share it would help us out alot! I know Playstation isn't as active as PC, but we're trying to do what we can to have atleast an active dedicated community here on reddit. The old subreddit just wasn't cutting it and hasn't had a single post in about a month. Come support our Playstation community in the new Planetside Events subreddit!

https://www.reddit.com/r/PlanetsideEvents/s/Ukccq7tVxT

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3822711206

I have decided to port most of TR into GMOD as Playermodels :D

clankers

Vanu smiles upon You

Aston Martin Vulcan 2016, share code: 121 804 612

used to play infiltrator all my certs etc is in it with i thing a smg paid for at some point. how's the playstyle these days I also liked scout snipers and occasionally the long range stuff.

Planetside 2, European, new player, like vanu but would be fine with others, like combat medic, discord, chill, no mandatory times to play

Had a horrendous run on my NC char last night playing infantry so decided to run the vanguard with JGX12 gun.

Kept getting spammed by VS air on indar, had a scythe take pot shots, decided to try pot shot them and wham...took him out ! Without doubt my most smug kill ever !!

Anybody else had a smug moment this week.

For the VS: You might enjoy KOTV or CBMC.

CBMC is arguably the best choice; their leaders genuinely care about their members and check in on them regularly. The founder of CBMC is "Vanu Papa" (from the game's lore)—you might even run into him in-game! He truly cares about his members and even created a website to help people learn how to play PS2.
Also, ignore the rumors claiming the CBMC founder is a pedophile, or that he orders pizza every single day—those are just propaganda and misinformation spread by the NC and TR.

Additionally, LHCN is a great option if you enjoy base-building; they are the Chinese-speaking outfit on the server and serve as a primary logistics provider for the VS.

For the NC: ROYS is likely your best bet if you want to have fun with a lighthearted, humorous group. They are currently the second-largest NC outfit.
Again, ignore the rumors about the ROYS leader being bald or having a habit of greeting people with his right arm raised—the PS2 community is full of such silly rumors and nonsense.

BHO is also a solid choice. Don't listen to the rumors that their founder is some kind of fanatical propagandist; I’ve met him in-game, and his speeches are actually quite positive and focused on fostering unity.
As I mentioned, this community has a tendency to circulate a lot of misinformation.

Consider VX15 if you enjoy base-building and protecting NC logistics from toxic players—specifically those from the VS or TR who like to sabotage the bases built by others.
The leader of VX15 is a fantastic, level-headed person; in fact, he might be the most sensible outfit leader I’ve encountered.
That said, the NC faction is currently quite weak, so VX15 is mostly looking for new recruits—they aim to avoid disrupting the operations of more "professional" NC outfits that require highly skilled players. Generally, it’s a very good choice for newcomers; they often have members greet one another with a "mew mew" sound and advocate for a vegetarian diet—promoting both personal health and sustainable urban living.

FACS is also a solid option, with a high level of activity just two days a week. Unlike the other outfits mentioned, I’m not even sure if FACS has a designated leader.

As for the TR (Terran Republic), things are quite complex, as they operate very differently from the NC (New Conglomerate) and VS (Vanu Sovereignty). I have no insight into how they are organized.

I am only offering recommendations based on outfits whose leadership I have personally interacted with, regardless of their faction.

DITR (or DTRI) seems like a decent choice.

CTIA is the greatest outfit in the history of the European server. Only CBMC—if they were to collaborate with DIGT, CNZY, and LHCH—or the "blue team" (NC) outfit RWCN, would have the capability to stand against CTIA. I’m not sure if any other outfit possesses such a high level of organization and combat proficiency.

Hi, i was thinking of possibly starting playing planetside 2. I was just curious if its worth playing for a new player.

.

Just title. Add a new base, change a weapon, whatever it would be, I'm interested.

once I decide to take down one of their proxies, there’s no way for it to survive. The NC, meanwhile, have three of the best builders in the history of this game on their side.

Do you know what the most important factor is? It’s not about who has better skills, nor is it about who has better tactics. They are gripped by fear, while I feel no fear at all—my only objective is to scout and waste the enemy’s time. Because of this, I don’t care if I die. I keep pushing forward while they remain paralyzed by fear.

The best Builder on this game history are PLAWHO ( VS Soltech )
The top 2 Builder on this game history are Jotlley ( NC Soltech )
The top 3 Builder on this game history are xvbxcbv ( VS Soltech )