No, this Dave I will always disagree. It had great potential, what was released was truly a players game, a freeform environment where we, the players decided where we wanted to battle, a real sandbox with massive armies!

Did it have issues? Of course. The first game of its type ever of course it had issues. 2 main problems arose, ghost capping and problems in fight coordination yet there were solutions to cope with both of these. Simple solutions but instead (as we know) you chose to upheave it all to a forced geography system taking the sandbox away replacing it with battlefield rush.

Now it might have been hard for YOU the game developer to predict how fights would flow and build for it but for the player it was a free environment and huge battles did happen (after all, who comes to an FPS to not fight?) just it was hard to work out exactly where that was.

Now ive heard you and zander talk about the reasoning behind it and I see why it was decided. Im not here bashing you on this, I see it was a culture thing you all decided on and while you could easily have dealt with massive player issues you chose to change the whole system to be easier to design on going forward, that is what I see as the real reason.

I will forever feel disappointed how devs justified lattice with the community leaving them going on about ghost capping thinking lattice was the answer and how hex was the evil causing it, you rode on that sentiment which from a code point of view was quite disingenuous as the ghost capping problem would have been stamped out instantly adding a simple 'someone has to be present in the hex to progress the flag' rule making it worthless to ghost cap at all...but then making sea changes to the game as we went along has been a signature for SOE (which, based on playing years of boxed and web FPS which only changed a bit over the life having such a turbid development was unsettling at times, sometimes too much change is a bad thing but thats a different discussion).

6 months from launch people were still new to the game and the lattice changes met with resounding applause, now it was like pre-programmed game modes familiar from previous generations of gaming...yes they cried, we understand THIS!, death to ghost capping! (which is wrong because ghost capping was never addressed and still happens nightly, albeit in a smaller capacity). which was really saying 'death to free form sandbox problems' and the opportunity to learn how to develop for a truly user driven world was lost, not only to the devs involved but also the players. That was the point MMO for planetside suddenly just meant large game and I will forever mourn the huge loss of potential that the sandbox environment could have bought were problems addressed directly.