Okay, so it doesn't entirely suck...

I'm not the most patient person in the world, so my...uhm, outburst was the culmination of a great deal of frustration with the game. I'm still trying to play Planetside, but so far I have yet to accomplish anything. I seem to either wander around looking for something to do, or I find action going on and promptly get killed.

Part of the problem is that the, uh, gosh-darned tutorial doesn't work. And it's not just my computer or my install. Perusing the online forums reveals that this is a systemic problem, apparently when the PTB patched a hack problem, the patch nuked the tutorial. At best you get to a certain point in the various tutorial adventures it just stops working; at worst, it crashes to desktop or forces you to power-cycle your computer to fix it.

Which means that I went into the game with only the fuzziest idea of how things work or what to do. It's a pain in the ass. But I still keep trying it, so we'll see.