I recommend against sunderer. Everyone thinks these things give tons of exp and they kind of do, but…
The result is the landscape plastered with them so you can’t deploy near a battle and if you find a good spot somehow, someone on your own team will kill you to plant their sunderer there.
Engineer or medic is where it is at.
Houngan
1822
Ghost-capping bases is a bad way to gain XP, you’re sitting for five minutes to get 250-1000xp. Two minutes of being in a serious firefight should give you 1000 easy, once you understand where to be and what to do. Join AT, it will get you going very quickly.
KevinC
1823
You’ve put 20 hours in a week into the game, that’s half as many hours a full-time employee works and longer than many $60 AAA single player games last. If you’re playing that much and you’re that concerned about it, skip a Starbucks coffee one day and buy your gun or whatever. Better yet wait for a station cash sale (I would imagine there’s going to be one before too long) and get a couple - more if you grab a bundle or pick something up on a daily sale. By no means is it necessary, though, the Equinox has nice attachments available for it but other than that it’s a lesser gun. It has more recoil (other than the first shot), takes longer to reload, and has a slower rate of fire.
I concur; I’ve purchased a small number of spacebucks, most on the last 3x sale, and it’s been money well spent. I play less than an hour a day over the week, most of the time, and I like being able to kit out my character with some key stuff.
Chaplin
1825
Sorry, I did not intend to offend and given the responses, I seemed to have been broadcasting an offensive tone. For any future readers, the wisdom I have picked up is:
- CPU intensive game (client may need optimization over time)
- Cert gain is very slow; use them only for non gun upgrades
- recommend premium boost if plan to play the game awhile to aid cert gain (the longer the plan you buy, the higher the multiplier)
- Most players buy weapons with real money for $5 to $10 per weapon per character
- recommend buying Station Cash cards at Walmart then cashing in on multiplier days (2x or 3x) to help step 4
You probably need to play the game more and read about it less.
I don’t think it is that cpu intensive, although perhaps it could be shifted over to the gpu a little more.
Cert gain is not that slow. Go be a medic or engineer and rake in the experience, or play when they have one of the double exp events.
I’ve never had a premium boost. Done just fine.
Buy cash when it is triple cash and then use cash when the item you want is on sale.
Planetside 2 is a freemium game. They aren’t a charity and the developers still need to eat, so of course it is monetized. The game is super generous though. You really only need to pick one gun you like for your favorite character. Maybe even the starter weapon. This isn’t an rpg. Sometimes weapons are better overall, but generally it is just that they are better at a specialized role.
If you’re a cheap bastard, you can certainly get away with buying a 2nd burster, buying a single gun for your favorite infantry and MAYBE, MAYBE, buying a single missile launcher for heavy.
If you don’t mind actually spending like $20-30 on the game you can do what most people do and use station cash to buy their few weapons/vehicles and using certs to upgrade them.
KevinC
1827
You’re not being offensive at all, Chaplin, I was just trying to… help? Educate? Put things in a different perspective? Something like that, I’m not sure exactly what you’d call it. :)
Bottom line is you can be very competitive without spending a cent, having access to every vehicle and every class in the game. If you’d like to specialize more or play with new toys it’s either going to take a good chunk of time or cost a few bucks. Your cert gain WILL go up significantly as your skill level and knowledge increase, however, so don’t be discouraged at a first week’s rate.
Yeah, of the various freemium games out there, PS2 works about as well as it can in terms of letting you just play without bankrupting you. Sure, a tricked-out BR 50 dude with a bajillion spacebucks invested might have an edge on your BR 4 newb, but you can still kill him pretty much as easily as he can kill you, in most circumstances.
And also, someone who is BR50 who spent $0 on the game will almost certainly have the advantage on someone who is BR5 and spent tons of money. The game is super laid back in getting money from you.
True, because the stuff that actually makes you harder to kill, and gives you more tactical options, is mostly obtainable via certs, not spacebucks. And certs directly translate into time played.
I agree with both of these points for the couple dozen hours I played. I think it might be an AMD/Intel thing, but I did buy a new CPU since I uninstalled so maybe I’ll have to install it again and check. It makes sense that such a large scale game would require a lot of CPU though.
KevinC
1832
It definitely works the CPU harder than the majority of games over the past several years (the same holds true with Guild Wars 2). I think it’s just a shock to a lot of people because for the past five years games have pretty much run on any CPU at all as long as you had a decent video card.
Chaplin, also log in for a minute each day and take a look at the daily deal in the store. You can pick up stuff pretty cheap that way too.
How exactly does cert gain work? Is it directly based on xp gain? Is it based on xp but with added bumps for time played and for kills? It seems really erratic to me most nights. I play mostly engineer and heavy assault, and there are nights I’ll think I’m doing really well scoring lots of kills and assists on sunderers and tanks and capping bases like crazy, and my cert gain will seem small, then other nights I die tons while scoring maybe a dozen kills, have a few lazy base caps with a lot of repairs and other hum-drum stuff in between, and my cert gain looks great. “F**cking cert gain, how does it work?” ;-)
That said, certs are not the be-all-end-all. Join us in Azure Twilight and you’ll have a blast even when you aren’t gaining a single cert. Even though the AT-101 stuff says you should have a Solstice-SF and an Annihilator (or other lock-on, I have a Hades) it’s not a requirement for joining ops. As long as you are flexible and willing to jump into whatever role is asked of you (mainly Heavy, MAX and either medic or engy most ops) you’ll be fine. I ran with the default guns for a long time, using certs to upgrade the sights and then sinking the rest into vehicles and class certs that SC can’t buy. Now that I was able to take advantage of a triple SC day I have slightly better guns on my engy, LA and HA, but I’m still short on certs all the time as I’m sinking them into attachments for those new guns and still working on my class and vehicle enhancements. As others have mentioned, Planetside 2 is the most forgiving F2P game out there, anyone can be successful without spending a dime, and that’s multiplied 10x if you join a good outfit that works together to accomplish goals.
Exp -> Cert Gain.
Time -> Slow passive cert gain.
That’s it.
KevinC
1836
250 EXP = 1 cert. You have a very small “bucket” that will fill up with free certs while you’re offline, but this is only somewhere around 10-15 or so (subscribers get a little bit more, but it’s still very small).
Alan_Au
1837
Normally, you gain 1 cert passively for every 2 hours while logged off. These accumulate up to 12 certs and are collected when you log in.
You are given bonus cert awards for reaching a certain number of cumulative kills with each weapon in your arsenal. This depends a lot on the amount of time spent with any particular weapon.
In-game, certs are awarded for every 250 XP earned by any means.
It’s certainly possible to earn “hundreds of certs per hour” in some situations, but on average a typical player can expect to earn 0-50 certs per hour. If you want to earn XP/certs, ghost-capping is not an efficient use of time. That is, you’re missing out on a lot of the XP that comes from combat. The advantage of running with a large outfit is the ability to participate in a large battle without getting killed instantly.
Houngan
1838
I’m more like a hundred rather than hundreds, though plenty of folks claim that. Consider I have 50% Alpha boost and play Engineer/Heavy. Shooting down one fighter = cert, killing one non-respawn enemy usually is close to a cert, base cap is 1-6 certs, dropping an ammo pack at a smart place is 15xp per use, so close to a cert, etc.
When we’re attacking a base, I’m usually killing two or three enemies per minute during the hottest portion of the fight, or getting four or five assists. I think a lot of folks get stuck in one role and don’t branch out dynamically; when I’m engy I’m going to figure out where the current choke point is, drop ammo, maybe throw up a decoy turret, then flank thirty meters and see if I can’t start putting bullets into legs and arms. It all adds up and only takes 30 seconds. When the choke point moves forward, I move the ammo and repeat. What I DON’T do is linger behind the main offense force waiting to do repairs or revives and not fighting. I get in there, throw grenades early, and shoot until I die. Respawn, repeat. I haven’t looked at my K:D ratio since the first few weeks, I just don’t care about it. The certs are found at the pointy end of the spear.
Well that explains why I seem to do so much better cert-wise when running as an engy then. Ammo pack XP is 5-15 per resupply depending on bonus and if it’s a platoon-mate who gets resupplied. Repairing a turret, gen or SCU can easily rack up 100+ XP, and repairing MAX units in the field is probably 25-50XP per MAX repaired. I also have a nice Sunderer loadout, with AMS, Ammo, Combat Chasis and a Basilisk and Bulldog for all-around defense. When I deploy that into a hotspot I’m racking up 2-5XP per respawn and 10-15XP per resupply. Also, like Houngan, I’m a combat engy. As soon as my stuff is deployed I’m running forward, aiming down my sights and killing as many folks as I can. Too bad I don’t get 2XP for repawning at my own Sunderer, I’d be BR50 by now.
As a heavy I tend to get more kills and assists, both with my Orion (I haven’t seen a need to change guns yet) and my lock-on Hades launcher (bought before the Annihilator, and I can’t bring myself to spend more SC to upgrade) than I do as an Engineer (Solstice SF). On the other hand, the steady flow of XP from nearly every activity, including during downtime between combats, makes the Engineer the better XP machine overall. I need to cert AP mines for when I’m not hunting armor, and I need to cert up the chasis and guns on my Sunderer a bit more as well. Mineguard would also be nice. Then I might start certing stuff for a Vanguard or Lightning for when AT rolls as a tank column.
I suck at flying, so that’s thousands of certs I can save right there… =)
Teiman
1840
SOE seems to have changed idea about the booster of the Alpha Squad preorder thing, has decided to make it as good as the 7 days 50% extra xp boost. Even better because affect also resource gain. So now theres no reason to buy one of these boosters for … 179 d. Thats really nice workaround for a problem. (the problem was having a crappy booster with 179 days left, and have a much better that last 7 days, but destroy the 179 one).
I had “burn” my Alpha Squad boost for a 7 days one, and with this change, I had a new Alpha Squad booster in my backpack. So SOE has even helped people like me :D
About the money thing. This is a good game, but probably the best idea is to play it for a week, before deciding how much or what you like from the game, and then buy SC or not based on this.
There are a few weapons for infantry combat that can be bought with 250 certs. And 250 certs is nothing. But I make more sense for most people to “Bootstrap” your account by buying the most character defining weapons from the start with SC.
Another reason to wait a week before buying anything, is that the factions weapon feel very different. Is posible to like the NC thematically, but hate the weapons, or stuff like that. Is good to test all factions, and choose the one you like better. SOE has announced that in the future some “common pool” things will be shared, so If you buy one on your NC account, it will unlock in the TR and VS accounts. But this is far in the future and we don’t know the extend of it. Worst case scenario, is only skins.
Waiting for a x3 SC period make sense, and If you are a USA citizen, some shops have special cards with extra 500 sc bonus.
Even if you buy SC in a smart way, you will probably waste this SC in impulse buys. The game have a lot of “put SC money here for awesome” slots, and some are completelly fluflly and irrevelevant, like skins, and these things will user your SC very quick. The average Planetside 2 player buy a lot of SC points and unlock several weapons with SC. Playing with a unupgrade soldier is feasible, and fun, but It will take a eternity to unlock specialized tools to play specialized roles. And SOE deserve money for making this fun game for us, so I hope every player put at least 20$ on this game.
