So this just happened on Miller during an alert (4:20 pm)

We're usually on the front lines and trying or best to make something happen. Our strategy given the fact that we usually just pull 2 squads in primetime is to distract as many of these TR pissants as possible, but as it stands the outfits that try to actually play the alert are but a speck of light in an otherwise bleak world. Because the TR have population on other continents you can pretty much ignore the alert and you will still get a good fight elsewhere.

We're trying to have all the NCTO outfits get on the Teamspeak and coordinate our efforts similar to TRAM but it's just not happening at the moment.

I don't see how it could work against the VS. In the end, we get a good, hard fight - on Indar or otherwise. Personally, I don't care where the alert is - if I'm on the continent where it starts, I'll obviously stay there, else I'll keep on fighting the battles I'm already fighting and enjoying. Well, unless the SL or PL orders us to the other continent, but then I'm mostly a soldier. My CO orders, I follow.

Why do you guys think TR has a higher population? I don't understand. Do they have some sort of advantage?

If it's consistent than it's not 4th faction, now is it?

I think that's the part our TR friends don't understand. We don't need to be on an alert continent. On pretty much any continent we are (with the exception of Indar primetime) it's minimum 20% bonus, alert or not. So if the bulk of the TR troops are on an alert continent steamrolling everything and I am fighting on another continent and still get 30%+ bonus exp, why would I switch to an alert continent to begin with? For the measly exp we'll end up getting anyways? I'm not looking for exp at this point, I'm looking for good fights. Thing is, as a VS, you can find good fights anywhere, you don't have to follow an alert.

Eventually, when we do lose the Indar cap, it won't matter which continent we'll be fighting on. We may even split evenly on all three and have alert percentage bonus everywhere we fight.

On a side note, I still don't understand why SOE did not give dumpfire capability to the striker, but gave it to the fractures to the max, making it an anti-everything weapon (and a very effective one too).

TR has been consistently rising on Miller. This can be attributed to three factors:

• Less TR leaving the game
• More TR joining the game
• More people switching to TR from other factions

My guess is that it's a combination of the first and second. TR in general has a certain appeal in EU that is not shared with the US. It's probably a combination of a warhammer lookalike faction with the evil empire SW looks. That and the more numerous faction attracting more people, because, lets face it, it's easier to fight against anyone when you outnumber them, especially as a new player. Which is why I said that I fear the day the VS regain a balanced population, because it'll mean that the current VS veterans will be joined with people looking for a challenge.

One faction at X % over the last place faction ? Put people logging in that faction on a queue (priority members first in queue of course!).

But only, when your characters are on the same server.
I play all three factions too, but i'm not a 4th faction guy. I play what i want, because i don't want to play one faction all the time.

For the past month now NC/VS have been getting pasted on Miller, it's now reached the point that in the last week our outfit has a ratio of 1 cap to 5 defenses.

A timer should be added to each server to prevent faction switching local to that server, it's just impossible to fight those kind of numbers and get something from it. Either make a successful defense worth more XP, or have the population bonuses increased. I don't mind facing off being outnumbered 4:1 (Which is the current ratio) if I'm getting true equivalence in XP for the holes I'm poking in the tide.

If not, it's just not worth my time grinding against a wall of switchers I can't deal with.

It's also a problem on miller that large groups of major publications are adding players.

TR have the support of PC Gamer magazine and Goons, both of which have large external pull.

VS have RPS, who field large numbers quite often.

NC do have large outfits, but WASP/ SYND are pretty much game only, with little external pull.

It seems the only way to keep VS players numbers high is endless buffing... look what happened i the previous few patches and VS numbers sky rocketed... They took over TR on woodman who were originally the highest pop and now became the lowest. Overall from a day to day basis it seems we have a decent balance on woodman. However we still only see large scale fighting on one continent at a time

Certs offer the least balance changes possible... A level 1 cert is much more effective then its rank 5 counter part. In some cases each rank is identical and the only factor involved is cost.

A good example off the top of my head is Rank 4 in Extended magazine for the Vulcan allows you to take out a tank from the rear as long as you are close range. rank 5 adds i think 3 or 4 more bullets... This is pointless in theory since it is not even enough bullets to take out a person

Nano weave grants bigger advantages at lower levels. Yes each rank adds the same amount of health however only certain ranks are meaningful the others may help with surviving splash damage but will not provide an extra bullet.

The way they did the certs is yes they grant minor advantages by specializing the character, However due to the low price of the first couple of ranks any player can quickly get these and only the final ranks really grant an advantage however this is a tiny advantage and it basically separates the constant long time players from the now and then players by giving them maybe an extra 0.2 seconds of shield recharge time.

given the quick time to kill in the game it comes down to whether or not someone catches you without being seen. Given the large numbers in the game this happens an awful lot.

first off: tl;dr.

My suggestion:

Penalties for switching characters of AT LEAST an hour. (maybe more.) You won't see players who switch to grief, you won't see people who switch to win an alert. (as much) It will be more pleasant in general.

cheers.

Wait, how do the goon brigade have large external pull? We are not related to something awful goons if that is what your referring to.

This was when a lot of people were still at work and is not representative of the general population on Miller. The population inballance is not due to the 4th faction, the TR on Miller are for the most part beta or even planetside 1 TR veterans, mosts are loyalists to their faction and at the end of beta it was declared that "miller will be the new werner". Which resulted in lots of TR settling in Miller. Is it our fault NC and VS can't muster the same numbers? not at all. And I highly doubt a lot of the TR on Miller would considder jumping ship like the 4th faction.

loyalty untill death, good outfits and all that.

More faction "role playing" (like what you are doing with player missions) and greater incentives for sticking with your faction, for a long time or at all.

No one ever said it was.

But its hard to have missed (and its why I'm suprised you have) that TR have consistently held the larger population for about a month now if not two.

I believe it has been going on for longer than that, but faction loyalists shouldn't be punnished in the way some gus on this thread are suggesting. A que to be able to log in on your favourite faction if that faction holds a pop advantage? that does not make any sense at all and would be unfair to the players of said faction. A timer to switch factions could come in handy but then again, what if I just wanna collect my NC and VS toon's certs? nope, you cannot log in to your TR character because you are cert hungry.

It must be the new commisar hat thats making us looking like space badasses . [BLAM] heresy its just the tr looking generaly awsome in red.

But srsly ever since they let us tr out of the Se warpgate on indar The pop skyrocketed while the nc's dropped
like a rock.

And yes tr allways had a pop advantage on miller but its never been this big before. It used to be becuse of the tr outfits that came from ps1 to miller (Oc Brtd Bmc Rnx exc exc...) brought alot of ppl with them ever since the start of ps2.
Now its alot of 4th factioneer kiddys that swap just swap char when they feel Up.

Sidenote i dont understand why the vs got so low pop got a vanu on Cerese and i absolutly love those weps and the magrider + scythe are pretty cool aswell (guess its the spandex ).

Hard to see how anything couldn't. bar the first thing, everything i've suggested here would hurt you.

https://twitter.com/LerdMumbungo/status/334219677574242304

Yet I can't see what other options we have at this stage. NC and VS pops are going to suffer even more if the only gameplay experience we can expect is being ground down. End of the day, either the TR are hurt, NC and VS benefit and Miller as a whole benefits. Or Tr stay as they are or the trend continues, NC and VS are frustrated away from the server and Miller as a whole is irreparably harmed.

Think you guys might have to take one for the team, sorry.

I'm not sure how much that one will impact it. I always thought multiple chars on one server was a bad idea. But its the reality we live in.

Now I'd rather the situation was more fluid, fungible and people have incentives to switch away from the 40% pop winning side to the 28% or 22% loosing sides.

They are consistently higher the whole year, this year (with the exception of content update dates). It's just that this last month they are consistently above 38%

Thing is, all factions at the server started on about equal footing. At roughly the time of CU2, VS started losing progressively more people (until we stabilise at roughly 26%), part of which moved to TR and part to NC. From that point on NC started losing people as well, but never going less than 31% with the exception of this last month.

In any case, I feel that the reasons for the population shift is not as important as the simple question of whether the server in its current lopsided state is fun to play for all parties. I realise that we are not the only server that has this issue and this is hardly the first game with imbalanced factions. So what we need to look at is for solutions that will improve the population balance, but they will also be universal and not dependent on factions, exactly because each server has different issues.

Its a fair way of looking at it.

As I remember it the months the TR were 34%-36% most nights and the Nc 30-33%. We are least found a plethora of intresting engaging fights. Being outnumbered a tiny imperceptible amount is not after all the issue. we did however find ourselves fighting the TR 90% of the time, as they were by far the biggest threat, in virtue of the VS's underpop.

I suppose we never were totally overwhelmed in at least part due to the fact they were also engaging the VS most night,s where days when we'd dip into the high 20'ies and still be able to fight, we largely would disengage the VS, simply because we were not being pushed in that direction.

The issue now is the TR seem to be able to commit roughly equal and numerically superior forces, at least on an alert continent against both of us.

More TR should give it a try, roll a Nc toon or Vs and play for and hour or so on prime time on an alert continent, to really get a grasp of the frustrating nature of it.

More than anything else, what I'm upset about is how it feels just frustrating to loose, there is no space for tragic defence in this game being fun. A big game design ask, but still. Its not being outnumbered, I mind, its not being defeated I mind. I enjoyed plenty of fights against BRTD, OCB, Goon, even INI where the numbers have been roughly equal and we just got bested. Thats fun.

Coming up against the unstoppable tide of humanity that is red across the entire horizon and being ground back, until we run into some geographical features thats hugely defensible or knowing they have withdraw briefly to fight the VS. Just is not fun.

Moreover, we are about to get a system, which though yes coming hand in hand with more defensible base map designs. Is also focusing on concentrating players into less and less space, and thus, I worry the imbalance is going to feel even more acute, when the Tr have little/no backcaps and ghostcaps to worry about. Only surging forward.


Its something about passing a certain threshold around the 36-38% mark. When you just have a least another platoon at the two major battles against Nc/VS. Thats when we get into frustration land.

Speaking of The NCTO what the balls happend to all the nc outfits hardly see any nc doing ops except the conz and the jnj hardly see wasp or the 252v anymore?