PlanetSide 2 has a big PTS patch in store for later this week, Daybreak announced just ahead of the long weekend. While the new player experience will be a large chunk of the patch, the studio has a dev blog up on what else players can expect.
Notably, the studio is retooling the Koltyr map so that it opens when player pop is low, thereby funneling players into one continent, though that will hopefully be rare. “When a new, large-scale continent unlocks, we’ll check server populations during the Unstable Warpgates process,” Daybreak says. “If the population is too low when Warpgates are stabilized, we’ll spin down that continent and unlock Koltyr instead.”
If the servers are experiencing high pops, on the other hand, the game will kick off an alert rather than waiting.
“When populations are high enough on a particular continent (around the 800-player mark,) we’ll immediately fire off an alert, instead of leaving it up to the Empire Strength process. This will give communities of players a more tangible goal to work toward during ops night, instead of having to potentially wait multiple hours for an alert to fire off. There’s a risk that continents may start rotating too quickly once this change goes Live, as we’ve seen with some previous alert setups, but we’ll see how it plays out and make adjustments as necessary.”
DBG and Rogue Planet are also working on lighting updates, colorblind filters, suit slot balance, and implant adjustments. The patch should hit the PTS later this week.
