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Not only can you advance to use more items, you can also choose to lead squads and gain Command Experience to increase your Command Rank. Your command rank can go from 1 to 5, and will allow you to plot waypoints on maps for your squad, all the way to being able to call in an orbital air strike every 3 hours which decimates anything in a 10 meter area. You may also draw pictures on the map, or illustrate a certain route your troops will need to take. All in all, pretty impressive. The only way you can gain in command rank is through actually being a squad leader when you take over bases or kill enemies. Command rank increases a little bit slower, but gives you some incredible benefits to play around with. Especially drawing pictures on the battle map that make people laugh their tail off. With a certain command rank, a squad leader can painton themap and you will be able to see what they do instantly. Of course this can also be used for strategic planning to show your troops how you will plan the upcoming stages of battle. Before I move on to the next subject, there also is an action icon on the map which tells you where the action is. So if you want to just hop into some fighting, you are able to do this without much effort.

Most team based PVP games always have those baby's of Thalidomide that somehow lived and bought the same game you just did. Team killers. Planetside has a unique way of dealing with these clowns that love to cause problems. Grief points are racked on your character throughout the course of your gaming. If you get enough grief points, you will end up getting your weapons locked automatically and will be unable to play the game. Get enough of those points, and you'll be banned. The other side to grief is non intentional friendly fire. While they have this balanced pretty good, as it takes a lot to get you to weapons lock, there are some bugs in the system. For instance, when you get ran over by a vehicle in which you cannot get out of the way, for some idiotic reason you end up getting grief points. It's like being sent to jail for felony hit and run and you are the one that got ran over. Aside from that, it works well in that players have to choose carefully which weapons layout they have to use to avoid friendly casualties. For example, if you see a lot of your team storming up the stairs of a base and at the top is an enemy, you probably do not want to launch a plethora of rockets at the enemy causing splash damage to anyone around. That's a good way to get locked pretty quick. As long as they iron out the bugs in the system, and Sporkfire at SOE tells the CSR reps to start subtracting grief for bugs instead of them giving you a macro saying to /bug it, this should be ironed out pretty soon. Again, as long as they listen.