Starting Up
The act of actually getting into the game is something we can all manage, but in case you haven't installed it yet there are a few things worth pointing out:
It's free to play
You can get it off Steam
It'll take ages to download
You'll need to create an SOE station account. Yeah, Sony.
While it's installing you might as well read the rest of this, and any novels you were wanting to get around to. Once it's done though you can get set up with the rest of us. 5punkers live on the Miller server (that's EU, but there's no confusion because all the servers have unique names), and we're aligned to the Vanu Sovereignty. They're the dudes in purple lycra. The rest of character creation you can work out yourself, but it's fairly academic since everyone wears a helmet. Right, lets get into the game.
Your First Death
For reasons best known only to the devs, the first time you play you are dropped into a combat zone as a Light Assault. You will plummet to earth in a drop pod, gaze in awe at the huge firefight around you, then get your head blown off because every enemy within half a mile just saw you come down and you have a car-sized empty pod behind you telling them exactly where you landed. Don't worry about it, at least you know where a fight is. Something they also do is put you into a squad together with a load of other people who've just had their head blown off for the first time. None of this is conducive to an easy entrance to the game, so lets use your downtime to familiarise yourself with a few things.
Classes
At the moment there's no harm in trying out the classes, you don't need to commit to anything. Have a think about what you might like to do long-term though - you can play any class, but you're better off getting your unlocks in something specific for a while. You don't have anything to buy unlocks with at the moment, so don't worry about those for now, but be aware that they're mostly sidegrades and assists - very few unlocks directly increase damage, armour, or health. So the classes are:
Infiltrator
Your common or garden sniper. Infiltrators also, as the name suggests, act as sneaky saboteurs. They have two abilities which enable them to operate behind enemy lines and cause disruption; they can cloak briefly and become mostly invisible so that they can slip past the front lines, and they can hack enemy terminals to deny them the ability to change class, rearm, and spawn vehicles (and allow your guys to do it instead). Once you're behind the enemy you can get on with the things that everyone can do too, like shooting people in the back and blowing up their shield generators to assist facility captures, but it's jut that much easier to get there.
Light Assault
You've already died once as this guy. Light Assaults are the mobility of the infantry types. They tote an assault rifle and a jetpack, which, like the Infiltrator, allows them to get to the parts other lagers cannot reach. As a Light your job is to break sieges and stalemates by outflanking the enemy in three dimensions, around or over, and taking out defences to let the main horses in.
Medic
Medics are pretty self explanatory. As in other online shooters, medics can use their magic gun to heal friendlies and raise dead comrades who haven't respawned yet. They carry an SMG by default, and can be a huge asset to an assaulting team due to the amount of time it can take to get back into an offensive after respawning.
Engineer
Engineers are, predictably, to vehicles what medics are to infantry. They hang around the back of tanks a lot getting reversed over. They also do some other handy stuff though. Engineers double up as the supply class, dropping ammo packs to resupply friendly infantry. They also have a handy deployable (manual) turret which can take a lot of punishment and comes as standard with a heavy machine gun (but can be upgraded to anti-vehicle rockets later). What makes engineers very valuable though, aside from keeping people in the field longer, is their ability to repair tactical points like shield generators. When those shield generators are all that's between your rag-tag defence of half a dozen troops, and an entire enemy armoured company, then engineers become everyone's best friend.
Heavy Assault
Heavies are primarily the anti-vehicle class, but they also do a good line in front line infantry assault. They hump around a light machine gun and an AT launcher, and compliment those with a personal shield generator. While not quite as hardcore as they sound - the shields don't take much damage, and the LMG doesn't do much more than an AR - they do have more longetivity in prolonged firefights than the other classes. Couple that with their ability to bother enemy vehicles (it takes around four hits to take most vehicles out) and they're good all-rounders who are rarely at a disadvantage.
Chances are you already know which role you like to play from games like Battlefield. In a one-on-one there is no class which stands out over another, all have pretty similar abilities to give and take damage, so go for whatever you fancy.
Back to the Fight
Okay, so we're in the comfortable shoes of the class we like to play. Now where was that fighting? Reading the map is, I think, the single most important thing to pick up when starting to play Planetside 2. Picking your fight can be the difference between getting spawn-raped, having a long walk to get to the fighting, or being part of an epic assault on the enemy lines. This is the thing that causes most people to give up on the game, as they never get to see the best it has to offer. Here's a map then:
We're the blob of purple in the bottom right corner. At this stage we're not doing too bad, but things can change pretty fast. The dark blue patch in the top left is a result of this; Terran Republic (red) have cut off a New Conglomorate bio lab and are probably battering them, which is in the process of costing the NC about half of their real estate. But fuck those guys, let them fight each other. We're concerned with finding a good scrap of our own. So what do we have?
1. Our warp gate. This is where you would normally spawn when entering the game, and is the best place to grab a vehicle from. If you don't want a vehicle though you're in for a long walk, so we should probably avoid it unless you want to watch people crashing aircraft.
2. Instant action buttons will drop you into an area that's currently seeing a lot of fighting. They pretty much match up with the green 'deploy' icons on the map, but the problem is that they're out of context. So there could be a lot of fighting because you're hitting an enemy stronghold in horse, but you're just as likely to spawn into a massacre and get blasted as soon as you land. I avoid these buttons.
3. Deploy tags. These are pretty much like the IA buttons, but they have some map context. This gives you an idea of why there's a lot of fighting there. Take Mao Tech Plant in the north east, for example. That's held by the NC and is only connected to Vanu territory by a string of purple. Since big facilities make ideal strongholds they tend to be the last place to fall in an area (as can be seen with Saurva Bio Lab in the north west). So the map tells us that the place has probably just been overrun by NC horses. Deploying your drop pod there would likely lead to a repeat of the last pod landing you made. At the opposite end of the map is the tag just below Allatum Bio Lab. We've got that facility but the area (Vanu Archives, seen on the IA buttons) is in Terran hands. It could mean we've recently taken the Bio Lab and the large horse that would have gathered there is driving south, or it could mean that TR are hooking round the labs to cut them off. Either way, with the Bio Lab still looking strong, it should be a decent fight for us.
4. Other indicators can give us an idea of what's going on. The most obvious is the red circles in the small red sector in the centre of the map. That's The Crown, and is a natural fortress notorious for being near impossible to capture. Those circles will pulse like explosions in red and blue, the more frequent meaning the more fighting is happening. These indicate some big battles and aren't a bad bet for some spectacular fighting. If you're after something smaller scale look for flashing territories. These are under threat from enemy horses, but aren't necessarily the scene of fierce fighting. Putting your cursor over the area will bring up a little box above the IA buttons which will show a rough idea of horse composition - a pie chart of influence by faction (doesn't necessarily correspond to numbers) and the scale of the enemy. If the influence is in your favour and it says 'enemies detected' then there are probably friendlies hunting down a few infiltrators or saboteurs. If they have a lot of influence and it says 'enemy platoons detected' then it's probably being zerged with little resistance from your own guys.
5. Continent population. Needless to say, the more people one side has the better it will generally fare.
6. Other continents. There are three continents in the game, and by clicking on them here you can see the local maps. They might be better if one side is dominating the one you spawned on, and you can choose deploy tags in the other maps just as you can in your own, or go to the global terminal in the warpgate. The colours signify who last dominated the continent.
7. The redeploy button. This is your friend when you're stuck in the middle of nowhere with no fighting and no vehicle. It effectively 'kills' you and lets you respawn, but without the actual death.
So we have an idea of where we want to be, but getting there isn't necessarily that straight forward. For one thing, you're dead, and so you'll need to respawn before you can travel (although as of the next patch they might be done off the same map).
Respawning
Nearly there now. The respawn screen has a smaller version of the main map, marked with little green blobs. These are your respawn points, and correspond to the buttons on the right. Note that the hotspot markers (the red circles) are also present here in horse. The skull and crossbones shows where I died last. Matching up the information that there's a lot of fighting going on at Crossroads Watchtower, I just died there, and there's a button for it in the 'reinforcements needed' area, you can probably work out that the area is a mess at the moment. Hence why the green arrows are pointing at the Broken Arch Road respawn just down the road, so I can approach the maelstrom from afar rather than spawning in a bulletstorm.
You might have noticed the little icons on the respawn buttons, just on the right. These indicate the facilities at each spawn; which vehicles are available mainly. Not shown on this screenshot are Sunderers. Sunderers, the APC battle buses you'll see kicking about, can be deployed as mobile spawn points (with an unlock). They have limited facilities but are pretty much guaranteed to be near the fight.
Armed with the information from the main map you should be able to choose a spawn which puts you in a good fight, or a quiet spot from which you can deploy to one. Finding the right battle is the key to enjoying the game, and if it turns out you were wrong you can always use that redeploy button.