Why my entire outfit logged last night to go play Firefall

So there we were, scrapping it out on Esamir, pretty fun fights really, during a territory control alert. 42% VS global pop when I logged on about half way through. 55% VS pop on Esamir. We fought and fought, and it was good and fun, but in the end, there's nothing you can do against numbers like that. The alert ended, and everybody said "**** this." Except me, I went to Howling Pass on Indar and farmed NC with my Lightning. Whatevs.

Why did my guys call it a night early? Cause they weren't having fun. There was some residual loyalty cause this game, deep down inside, is awesome. There was some TR team spirit, and we didn't want to bail on the alert. But once the alert ended as it inevitably would ... some fellas went to bed, some went to play firefall because there's hardly any point in trying to fight a massively overpopped faction. This is not good, and it's going to get worse as a half dozen good games come out through the fall. Looking at the World Domination Numbers, it's as bad or worse on other servers than it is on Mattherson, and apparently, it's mostly TR that's dominant (Euros are wierd that way.)

So here's my scandal. The devs are working, and they are working hard. But Smed put them on performance, because performance brings new players, and new players are $10-15 easy money. Meanwhile, those of us that are committed have by and large spent our money, so even though Higgles admitted over pop is a huge issue, right now they "think they've got a good core game" - which means **** your under pop faction, **** your ESF update, and **** Hossin. It is what is, they're running a business, driven by the bottom line, and have decided that months and months of pushing players out of the game because of the ****** pops is less important than fixing performance.

What does it mean? Nothing. Nothing at all. But know the environment that you're playing in.

What is this mythical server where the TR are losing? Please, tell me more of this promised land that every other server (save Connery) wishes they were.

100% agreed. My outfit has declined for similar reasons (read: ran out of patience) and those that are left, can maybe tolerate around an hour of playtime before they get frustrated with the same exact issue.

Love this game but as more and more of my core group starts leaving for other options, it's becoming increasingly difficult to find reasons to log in.

The population imbalances/4th faction stuff still makes things irritating along with a host of well known other issues.

I'm optimistic they'll come back if things start to turnaround but with the layoffs and the direction at current, it's a mixed bag.

Mattherson, aka the one server where all the Vanu go.

TBH, TR started the alert with a commanding population lead. Once they were stopped at Jaeger, they started to jump ship.

Lol I am also looking for such mythical server. On every server I looked (except Ceres maybe?) the TR is extremely overpopulated.

Anyway, welcome to the club. I was playing on Miller, where the TR overpopulation was so extreme that every single friend I was playing with left the game completely. In the last couple of weeks I was usually only one from my outfit who was online. I guess that players have just decided to pack their bags and leave, since SOE promised that they will not be forcing the population balance.

I thought maybe it was because they were a bunch of bears. I still hold that FF would be a far better game if it had even a 5th of the pvp we have here. But no, they insist on doing that arena crap.

Be prepared for more of this to come. Us Vanu have been breathed new life from wanting to perform well in the WDS.

But yeah, I agree with your issues. I was watching the population during the alert last night and realizing that we had enough people to field advances on both the NC and TR lines which were of equal strength to what the entirety of both the NC and TR could throw at us. There was almost no way we could lose, as we simply had the luxury of bodies to throw at all of the lanes at the same time without being spread too thin.

I haven't spent money on this game in awhile, except for my current 3-month subscription... which is potentially on the chopping block right now. When they come out with a super special event that encourages your faction to perform well and win glory and prizes... but you have absolutely no way of winning because all but ~2 of the servers participating in the event have a massive bias towards one faction... that **** just isn't even fun to play.

It's disheartening. It really is. People can say what they want about how you shouldn't worry about the pop balances, and you should just have fun and do what you can... but the core of this game is a team play experience. You want your team to win. When your team has no conceivable way of winning, you don't have fun. Unless, of course, you jump ship to the constantly-winning team... in which case you get to stand around shooting at spawn rooms for hours. Yay...

I think the reason I've kept up with this game and largely enjoyed it with no problems until recently is because on Mattherson we've always had a pretty balanced and competitive server. But this World Domination Series is bringing to light problems that many people never fully realized existed before.

That isn't true. I was already on Esamir before the alert warning even came up. The moment the alert read "Esamir Conquest" we Vanu already owned 50% of the continent, and had ~55% population. The population certainly evened out a bit as people rushed to Esamir to participate, but obviously not enough people from the NC and TR were present, as we held a roughly 50% population by the alert's end.

You killed me twice yesterday.

Fourth faction. Happens all the time. It's even worse for the NC than it is for TR.

Yeah, it's like I didn't acknowledge that TR overpop is a huge problem on other servers in my OP or something.

You haven't been reading the months of TR tears from Mattherson regarding VS overpop have you? (I am a Mattherson TR btw).

I have been reading a lot of boohoo on these boards about the WDS and the overpop problems that are exacerbated by a territory control based contest. I think these concerns are VALID - but please everyone - the reason this is a pre-season and the reason that SOE is doing this without pop modifiers is that they need to figure out a baseline for how this competition will work.

They have already said on FNO and through twitter/reddit/interviews that they are going to be using the data collected on population and how it correlates to points in order to make sure that the "regular season" gives all factions a more fair chance at competing. It may not be perfect, but I expect them to make adjustments as this process evolves.

I am more interested in where WDS goes from here. The preseason victory parameters are rather bland and they do nothing to really "change" the way most of us play the game. We just keep fighting as usual and somewhere there is a website keeping score.

On the subject of population, I think we are approaching the point where SOE might have enough data and time to quantify the impact of the changes to "recommended server". My guess - it helped but not enough. TR on Mattherson have more numbers during the day, and primetime seems pretty close to even - but around 2200-0800, the VS completely stomp the server and win all the cookies. It gets so bad that since it is later in the night, most of us just log off and call it a night - the longer you play the more your KDR tanks as the odds against you stack. From what I read here, the TR overpop issues are pretty rampant on several other servers and the recommended server mechanic isn't enough to combat that.

I think the next reasonable step is to offer free server transfers ONLY for players who are in an overpopped faction on their server, to move to a server where they are less populated (an example would be Mattherson VS can go to Waterson VS for free). To prevent an over-compensation, just limit the # of transfers based on the numbers needed to achieve balance (only let the first 200 Mattherson VS transfer to waterson, or allow transfers until a certain ratio is achieved). My guess is that this will lead to a very small migration of more experienced players who want a bit more of a challenge. I don't expect that this would "solve" the problem either, but I share the concern of SOE that making drastic changes could break the game on some servers and balance is best achieved in smaller, calculated steps.

Well, when I joined, TR had a population lead and was attempting to move up. They did go somewhere.

Aren't gamers supposed to be nerds? Aren't nerds supposed to be smart? Aren't smart people supposed to be successful? Aren't successful people supposed to be rich!? Why can't a rich fan of planetside bank roll the team so they don't have to worry about "making the bottom line" and just make the game fun and hire more people to work on separate projects!? Why oh why?!

Nah, TR is rocking 35-42% population here, VS is around 22-32%, NC is between 28-34% depending on your time of day (mornings unbalanced as ****), mostly TR overpop with VS shortage though.

'aren't gamers supposed to be nerds'
no, games are pretty accepted in society nowadays, everyone plays games, might it be on their pc, console, tablet or even phone.

The NC would have stuck that alert out longer if the TR didn't immediately beeline for Ymir with multiple platoons and crushed our eastern flank. Once the Vanu piled everything they had into Saerro Listening Outpost, the NC was forced to draw everything it had there and it wasn't enough, so people just started logging or swapping back to Indar. I know I did.

I like how for the past three months people have been pointing out that if TR and NC just stopped fighting each other so much in alerts (almost exclusively sometimes) VS wouldn't be doing as well, and then they wouldn't have a reason to mass log off but nope.

I'm new.. I'm in the VS. I just found these VS surges you're talking about.

They're really fun, everyone's shooting guns up in the air, shooting each other, jumping up and down on each other's tanks, hitching rides by jumping from vehicle to vehicle.

It's like a big party.. maybe you should just put a character in VS for the surge, since, as you said, fighting us is useless. I mean, you have no one to blame but yourself for not accepting Vanu into your life. If you don't want to accept that we evolve through technology, you can go paint hieroglyphs or something.

I wonder if there's some mastermind person somewhere who figured out how to waste your butt that way.

People don't like fighting against known and suspected aimbotters/wallhackers and in-game bug/glitch exploiters. More at 11.