Remaining members who have been around since it’s earliest days that still play PB2 are probably wondering why have we mostly left PB2. This post will provide several reasons to be listed, that way people can get a understanding as to why we do not maintain any major presence in this game anymore.
I won’t be going into much detail on what I stated in this post, but they should explain enough to make you understand them most likely.
1.Plazma Burst 2’s decline in popularity and the causes of the decline
Plazma Burst 2 has been out for almost 7 years. Yes, nearly7 years agothis game has been out, making it at least half a decade old. And the more old a game tends to get, the more the popularity falls in decline. This is especially more detrimental on flash games titles such as PB2. GSA was lucky to have established themselves in the same year the game was officially released therefore the game was relatively new and was booming in popularity during this time. This was the reason why this clan grew to its fullest extent and becoming immensely popular with the PB2 playerbase.
In addition to this reason, the GSA was considered to be one of the most unique, original, and well structured and more organized than clans that were alive back then such as G$, RGK*, etc. It’s whole theme also suited the game very well, possibly another factor that was attributing to its popularity.
In the more later years, the game has started to decline, which occurred following nearly the end of our war against EKAT. People eventually got bored, or lost interest in playing this game for a variety of reasons. It is something common for anything really, after a good while, we simply start to find boredom of playing certain games we spent so much time on.
Another reason as to why many people left is due to how Eric manages the game and the updates he makes to Plazma Burst 2. His more recent ones has caused many significant issues with Multiplayer and the game itself. The game became more laggy, more buggier than ever, making it nearly unplayable. PB2 didn’t have any of these problems prior to these said updates. Anyone could’ve ran it fine and well, but now it takes somewhat of a decent GPU to even get this game to run smoothly. This is due to lack of any optimization made to PB2’s engine which such proves to be a detrimental problem for PB2’s overall performance in gameplay.
It can be justified that these issues are here because Multiplayer remains in the beta state…. Which has been such for HALF A DECADE. And that isn’t a good thing, yes I know this is just a flash game and Eric is the only developer who heavily manages the game and provides the updates for the game, but I feel the issue is that he never seems to hire developers who are willing to help him manage the game and keep it well maintained and freshly updated. And the fact that it is still states that it is in beta can really kill a new player’s interest.
Another potential cause that has most likely also caused this decline is most likely the implementation of the player points system and the ranked matches system. Now, don’t get me wrong, I do think it is a good idea to have ranked matches for the more competitive part of PB2 and to prevent non-approved matches from being used as a rich target environment. This is all in good. However getting player points is VERY tedious to acquire, ranked matches is always bare-bones and very little. Competitive PB2 matches is rarely a thing now. The player points system has really ruined what made this game more enjoyable for competitive matchmaking.
The list goes on but I guess I will stop here. The whole point is that Plazma Burst 2 isn’t popular as it used to be anymore, people will lose interest and will eventually grow bored of playing this game. This game is almost 7 years old, and of course popularity is bound to decrease.
2.DyingCommunity
When a game is dying, so does its community. The PB2 Community was a really active community once back in the day especially since Eric established the PB2 Forums which was very active as well. A very large community meant for easier growth for clans who play this game. GSA relied on very big and active communities in order to gain a growth in recruitment efforts in base maps. An active community was essential for clans to grow and maintain itself. Without an active community, clans are bound to go inactive and eventually die. It takes a lot more time and energy to maintain the clan than it used to and some people don’t have that time to contribute.
The PB2 Community has really fallen a long ways. Forums became more inactive, the servers doesn’t have 1000+ players anymore, ranked matches is pretty much dead. These issues attributed to the decline of the PB2 Community and as a result of this decline negatively affected numerous clans. How did this affect clans you ask? Well here are bullets I listed pointing out how and why:
- PB2 Staff & their stance on clans – As you may have noticed, the PB2 Staff seems to show a lot of disdain & bias towards clans in general. This is proven by their removal of the Clans thread page, and the post that DoomWrath has made. If I recall, one of his statements in that thread mentions how clan wars gone too far with stuff such as raids and website site vandalizing and the occurrence of DDoS attacks.
While I can understand this from the staff’s perspective. However these things happened years ago and shouldn’t be used as a main reason to pretty much separate the clans from the PB2 Community. Clans are built from communities and also grow from it, which in conjunction the community also grows. It was last year where they realized this was beyond their power as staff to go beyond their jurisdiction to take action upon these clans.
- Terrible Updates
In the recent years of Plazma Burst 2, it hasn’t really gotten any big updates for a few years now, no new engine updates, multiple skins, weapons, fixes, etc. While yes, Eric is currently working on Plazma Burst 2.5. which looks considerably better and seemingly an optimized version of PB2 with a number of new features and a variety of new content. That is all great and now however, that much focus on the game that won’t even come out for like another year or so is proving to be detrimental to the current status of the original PB2.
One of these updates resulted in instability with the game’s engine and overall performance in gameplay. I believe it was the update involving the implementation of the new Advanced Level Editor to replace the old one which is now heavily obsolete. This implementation was added in conjunction with a new engine in which resulted in further instability with the game. Breaking self-boosting, increase connectivity issues and more lag.
I mentioned before that the updates involving the implementation of the PP system also contributed in PB2’s decline. I already explained why this caused many people to quit. No one likes the PP system at all. Well, most of them anyways, and Eric has never made any better alternative to it nor remove it from backlash.
Eric has never addressed any of the major issues that PB2 currently has. Such as the performance lag, frame rate issues, and constant major disconnections from match sessions. This made PB2 less playable. This wasn’t an issue at all back in 2011-2013. This is due to the lack of any optimization made with the game for current OS such as Windows 10, I could be wrong. PB2 still runs using flash in which many browsers no longer support due to HTML5 being more favorable and more light weight.
- Toxicity
As it wasn’t obvious, PB2’s community isn’t really great. Mostly filled with ranked match tryhards, Noobs, and those who don’t even play the game anymore just simply dwell on its barebones forums. Most of the PB2 population mostly consist of guests which could explain the lack of many ranked matches. Many players prefer to play on custom maps such as bases, or maps that involves the host as a god to maintain order of these maps. Safe to say, we can call these RP maps or hangover maps, people do either one, people also use these maps to host sex-rp matches, which gets cracked down and taken down by staff and other players.
There isn’t that much decent players which made recruitment even more difficult and pointless. We can’t survive from a community that’s mostly rotten to the core and nearly on its last legs. That’s how a lot of clans fell apart, some clans who try to expand outside of PB2 weren’t so lucky though and eventually died. Like BOA for example. We were just lucky that we had many members who invested in time and effort into maintaining this clan and for keeping it active by doing many activities.
3.Steam (and other platforms)
Most of our current generation GSA members play higher-end games on platforms like Steam & Blizzard. Some of us play Team Fortress 2, Space Engineers, Black Desert Online, etc. Some of us also play Phantasy Star Online 2, Destiny 2, and Overwatch. We play these variety of games because they are fun, have active communities which makes it good to recruit people from those games. While some of these games are required to be purchased, anyone can jump on the action, if they have a decent PC to play them or at least some of these games.
This is overall self-explanatory, Most of our members prefer playing those titles, since they are more favored than browser games. So I don’t need to go into detail as to why.
Anyways, I suppose these are all the reasons I can think of. We don’t play PB2 anymore but occassionally, we’d do gamenights in which at times we’d play it. Though mainly for nostalgia purposes. We do not know if we’ll come back for PB2.5. however, everyone has basically moved on to playing bigger titles on Steam, Blizzard, whatever the case may be. Our members enjoy playing on those mostly and that isn’t a bad thing, it brings more variety of games for us to consider trying out and to expand the community onto these games, that’s the benefit for our future and we hope to continue trying new titles that we hope that many people will like.
