Too much reward for the winning team

I think SOE had to massively jack the bonuses up to compel players to actively participate alerts and switch continents. Want the bonuses? Don't want the other factions on getting those bonuses? Do your part.

However, they need to redesign the criteria needed to lock a continent, especially during alerts. I mean a faction that won by 1-3% locks the entire continent, seriously? I feel that the winning faction should have at least 40% total territory control and at least a 5% advantage over the faction with 2nd most territory control before the alert ends to qualify for continent lock.

PS1 had a pretty good solution for faction hopping. Just saying.
SOE, why you no like your own good ideas...

So basically you are proposing that people who are participating alerts be punished in lieu of people who refuse to play alerts besides indar?

especially for night cap...

There's a difference between steamrolling and winning. We need to prevent steamrollers from getting rewards by giving the steamrolled some, but we give the winners rewards and the losers few/none.

Yes; PS2 is the same as a real war, gg. Btw, in a "real war" my tank shell kills your tank at 2km distance and my SAM missiles takes out an airplane; we want realism in this GAME after all, right?

Steamroll = Total victory
Winning = Any form of victory

if victory = rewards
then total victory =/= rewards??

wat

I would prefer the game tweaked to motivate players into balanced fights at bases, across continents, and in Alerts... but SOE does not want this.

MANY players like "winning", and SOE is progressively adding more and more ways that players can "win", and more methods that reward players for "winning".

The game has been out now for a little over 1.5 years. This "Population Imbalance" issue has been raised in the forums many times during that stretch. And SOE has not acknowledged it as being an issue or responded to it in any way.

I fully support your continued lobbying to get this issue recognized, understood, and addressed. SOE will respond to any issue if it blows up big enough on the forums. But I do not expect much action on behalf of SOE to address this issue, other than removing new changes that meet with overwhelming negative outcry from the community.

I *would* DEFINITELY suggest for those who continue to post in favor of balance, that they choose their words carefully. MANY players will not grasp what you are talking about, and they will simply react to the words you use in your posts. So instead of you saying "punish winners" and "reward losers", you should focus on pushing ideas they will both understand and support. Focus on saying things like "compelling players into better and fiercer fights at bases, across continents, and in Alerts". Yes, *I* know what your other words are saying, but MANY don't, and they will just respond to the words used and the root concepts they trigger in the brain... and work against (and futher confuse) the cause you are trying to champion.

Steamrolling = obvious victory due to biased circumstances
Winning = success in relatively fair settings

Discourage slaughtering the opposition, encourage more hard-won victories.

I'm rather sure you didn't notice that on a per-brick basis though.

An over-populated faction should receive a resource PENALTY. It's a simple principle of supply and demand: the more players you have, the more resources are consumed, hence there's less to go around.

^ditto about your suggestion for posting ideas.

As for balance, I think the server merges was beneficial for balance's sake when an alert is on as of all the alerts that i participated post merger, it's always 33-33-33 on the continent to be contested.

Some of my ideas to fix this problem and hopefully put a / on all the QQ threads:

4th faction problem:
-Disable the ability to switch to a different faction on a specific server once a certain character has entered the continent on alert.

Players leaving for another faction:
-This is mostly a community problem rather than a game design problem, I've came across VS players that main TR/NC a couple of months ago and their response usually involves the faction player atmosphere. Is it friendly/welcoming? Obnoxious/toxic? There is nothing can be done here except by being an example yourself.

Unity of command:
-Again this is more of a community problem that requires constant conscious work to be able to pull off. I remember back in May and when I was still in DaPP, VS was constantly losing alert after alert, this prompted the majority of the VS outfit to have a dedicated teamspeak server to be able to coordinate their actions as a unit. Now, I'm not exactly sure what the state of environment the VS command is, but so far, it has been working on our favor. I do have TR and NC alts and I observed that most TR and NC players do tend to just play for the heck of it, instead of playing the objective, This is largely due to lesser public squads/platoons available to join, even if there is, usually it's just a random player, worse is they don't even have a mic/beacon.

except those resources also need manpower to be able to be utilized, so it doesn't solve the problem, in fact, it would have a snowball effect in favor of the overpoped faction as more vehicles to kill = more exp.

Penalising the over-popped faction does not create more enemy vehicles for them to farm. It addresses the imbalance.

In a 1:1 fight, wining a resource benefit is a genuine reward. You earned it and can replenish lost hardware faster, giving you an edge.

In a 2:1 fight, the resource benefit is countered by a supply & demand penalty. You already have the edge, but you can no longer resupply tanks twice as fast as the underdog.

Guess what? With Hossin, there's now a +25% xp boost for the overpop faction.

How? most of the steamrolls are usually due to 2/3 of a faction pop decides to not play an alert. what can you suggest that would mitigate the likelihood of the other faction to be in such a "biased circumstance"?

As of right now, PS2 is mostly all about alerts, and if people don't play the alert, which what currently is the goal of PS2, then why would players that play the game according to its current design be penalized?

Which makes the solution you suggested pretty redundant as 2 rockets each from 2 HA will pretty much blow anything up except a sundy. And doing a 1:2 fight on a main base(biolab, amp station, techplant)? good luck with that.

Give the steamrolling faction small bonuses, but give the losing factions compensation by giving them larger bonuses, coaxing players to move to their original side. Once pops are balanced, the loser compensation goes away and the winning faction maintains bonuses.

This hopefully will encourage 4th factioners NOT to switch in game as they will miss out on bonuses if they switch.

Alternatively, we can try 3-hour faction locks on similar servers to prevent outbreaks of the 4th faction.

This doesn't make any sense.

If I was talking about continent population being the baseline for XP, then it would penalize factions for avoiding fights. (Which isn't a bad idea)

I'm talking about Hex based population, which has no reflection on an alert. If you bring 4 times as many people to a Hex to defend or capture, you shouldn't be rewarded. If you outnumber your opponent 2 to 1 to take or defend a base, the logistics division of your empire should chew you out for being incompetent and wasting resources.

Think about it. If you have an amerish alert and faction A decides to participate 100% while faction B and C only put in 50 % that doesn't mean there would be a penalty UNLESS faction A decides to throw all of its population into 1 hex. (Which happens all the time or at least a mega zerg blob of 4+ platoons). If faction A is run by intelligent people (a stretch I know) then they will spread their forces out over a larger number of territories and be able to fight on two separate fronts. With proper troop allocation, they can attack and defend on TWICE as battles as their opponents without incurring an XP penalty and have the added bonus of winning the alert at the end. (Which soon will grant you a huge resource discount)


Right now, there are only "rewards" and people still actively avoid fights. You will see 48+ of faction A pushing a lane against 12-24 of faction B, then about 3 lanes over you will see 48+ of faction B pushing a lane against 25-48 of faction A. Once you start to penalize players for this "Bad" playstyle, especially to the point where they simply stop earning XP towards that next cert, you will see less of this behavior.

The gimped factions already have the exp bonus as some sort of consolation.

Although I have to agree that -50% benefit is a bit too excessive, but SOE had to make the benefits lucrative enough to entice players to play the alert/objective. If they decide to leave the continent benefit as it is then they need to re-tweak the criteria in order to capture a continent in alerts.

Currently the criteria are as follows:
1.) Win an alert - even by 1% constitutes total victory and continent will be locked in favor for the victor.
- While this will make alerts even more intense it effectively invalidates the hard work the losing faction did for attempting a comeback. I think that by adding more specific winning conditions in addition to having the most territory control in order for a continent to be locked would by far make alerts even more rewarding. This way the winner truly won and the loser truly lost.

2.) Capture a continent with 94% territory control
- While attempting to do this on primetime is nigh impossible, it is still possible to pull off on off peak times. A solution to this is to add an alert criteria mechanism wherein when a specific faction has already a specified amount of territory in control, an alert will be triggered on said continent. This will at least alert players from other continents to stop the capture and would make multiple alerts possible. (I've read this feature in the roadmap section, kinda surprised why it wasn't implemented.)

While your suggestion will certainly prevent collusion among factions, I disagree that sending a swarm to overrun a specific location for specific reasons should be penalized as the action of the swarming faction already puts them at a disadvantage in multiple sections in the map.

i totally disagree...Win and you get alot...lose you get alot less...thats the WHOLE POINT OF WINNING! rewards...people need to learn to fight harder..i play NC all the time and omfg at times they fail so badly...and other times when i get fellows of NC to acually charge out of spawn me with...i get stunned of the ability of skill they acually show when they want to...Winning should be incentive enough to fight, and those that Switches factions all the time are weak anyway.

People like that will always change side no matter what just to win.And the idea about hex population bonus...is a bad idea tbh...i agree with the guy posting the UNDERPOP faction SHOULD get a bonus, they have much harder fight on their hands and should boosted somewhat for it.And then i refere to the server population not continent.I see alot of VS being at the short end of the stick due to population, so i see NC alot attack TR since they are pretty much the biggest threat.

Live free in the NC!

Can I rephrase this thread?
Too much reward for the whinning forum team