4th Faction = 1% of Population

Congratulations, you are the 1% of cool cats that take part in this behavior.

Why not? Think of it this way; over the course of several hours one faction is seeing a consistent number of people logging in and staying to win the alert. The other factions see their faction losing and outpopped, so they log off shortly after signing in. This stacks, because outfit leadership is most tied into the results of the alert; a rage quitting PL can basically end up in an entire platoon logging off for the day. By the end, when it's clear that you aren't going to get much of anything for the alert (even and especially if you switch, you get less points for not being on the whole time), more people are logging off. As a result, fewer people stay signed on. It's a nasty positive feedback cycle, but I don't think alerts are a driving force behind people playing other factions on their server.

EDIT: Oh god, theory already explained. Tried to 'splain the whole thing, but someone did it first earlier too. Good job forumside.

That number is 1%

The faction losing the alert logs off, while the faction winning the alert stays logged on. Faction switching during an alert is only done by about 1% of players.

Yes, this is getting ridiculous. There is no way 4th faction doesn't exist. Before this WDS started the NC on Connery almost always had pop during Central prime time. Alerts were almost always VS vs NC as TRs pop always seems to fluctuate from 20-25%. During the beginning of said WDS, the NC were leading for the first day with the VS trailing ever so slightly. Pop %'s stayed roughly the same. Day two we the VS pull ahead and by the end of the day are ahead by around 8-10k. A lot. The days following (up until this posting) we have seen huge VS numbers during prime time and during Alerts. Couple that with a zero defence incentive for the Series, and you get extremely boring gameplay almost reminiscent of the Beta days.

I play Vanu on Connery and this is very frustrating. I love this game to death but I've seen only a few decent Alerts lately. For instance, the last Alert as of this writing, was a control Amerish Alert. The VS had 26% territory control when the alert popped, NC having roughly close to 50. Tr was almost warpgated. Within 25 minutes the outfit I'm in (Canadian/American (yes we play late)), completely steamrolled the continent and by the 50% territory control mark, VS pop had skyrocketed to something absurd like 85%. We literally were having flash races right outside enemy warpgates poking fun and the WGs were ghost towns. This needs to be addressed as this perpetuates mind-numbing gameplay.

You could fix this issue by allowing an account to have characters across multiple factions, just set a cool down timer for faction hopping to say, 2 hours. For instance the moment you log onto your NC character you can no longer log onto your OTHER faction characters for 2 hours. Obviously it could use a little tuning but just do something, anything. Don't tell us 4th faction isn't happening when players since beta and launch are noticing a complete 360 in the way we are experiencing gameplay without altering schedules or times.

Well, maybe the 4th faction doesn't exist but that doesn't mean there isn't a problem.
Maybe the problem is that people on the 2 losing factions have no reason to stick around and lose so they all leave. Because it's either that or 4th faction causing most alerts and off peak hours to have 50% of 1 faction.
Also, the spike in NC after the last patch is clearly 4th faction and clearly more than 1%.....it may not be 1% in any given day but over the last 2 months there has been a large change.....or so I would perceive it as being, maybe it's just NC doing better and the other factions quitting like NC used to.

I've been using that site to follow population trends on Woodman. During Alerts, we tend to get a massive influx of VS, while TR and NC stay roughly the same. This is probably Outfits responding to an Alert on mass. I assume these people do not count as 4th faction.

This hardly qualifies as "research", but its what I am assuming from the figures

They need to go back to the lock outs during planetside 1!

And that is your opinion.

I think we have been looking at this the wrong way. I too found the 1% statistic rather eye opening myself, and as others have already stated, how can that be when they can see massive shifts in faction populations real time, in game. The fact that some people will log off in frustration due to a constant "negative" gameplay experience will account for some but not all the pop swings. I suspect it has more to do with how today's MMO participants have been conditioned to experience the content available to them in the games they play.

The mistake is in assuming that todays gamer's motivations are the same as the ones who played the original Planetside. In the original PS1, people did change sides, often in the middle of a large battle, to enjoy being the victor. Today, I think the population swings are motivated by the player's desire to level a character as quickly as possible to BR100 for all factions. They will make a conscientious choice to play the faction that is currently the easiest to acquire XP with, winning is simply a bye product. This could be due to new content, warp gate location, unbalanced weapons or perceived bias driven by social media (Forumside) etcetera. In other words the 4th faction switches sides every major game update NOT every alert cycle!

Take for example, SWTOR, that has content spread across two major factions for the player to experience. People will level characters to max level for both, the difference is that this does not fundamentally break the game like it does in Planetside2. They can switch sides at will because the majority of the game is PvE, not 100% PvP. Massive population swings do not interfere with the player experience. Unfortunetly the problem may actually accelerate, as we go through the faction hopping cycles, people will hit the "sweet" spot of unlocking enough certifications on each character to not feel gimped playing that alt. This will completely remove any negative de motivation to switch sides. The player base does not realize they are their own worst enemy and are simply doing what they have been conditioned to do in every proceeding MMO they have played.

The real question is how is SOE going to deal with the underlying issue of motivating people to keep the sides balanced when the players are the content and the best player experience is when you are winning!

I think many people are just manufacturing an issue where there is none.
Time for them to find something else to blame.

Problem remains even if the 4th faction is 1% (which i dont think it is). Population needs to addressed

Refer to my above post please. There clearly is an issue. I have highly active outfit members only logging on Fridays now due to this issue. Steamrolling a low pop continent is worse than beating your head against a wall, try to run platoons everyday with this issue. Continent locking and Hossin better show up soon.

That being said I'm confident SOE are hard at work fixing any problem they perceive as game changing.

I as well am confident in them.

If I have already accepted that the 4th faction comprises an incredibly low amount of the player population, then I would posit there would be some confounding variable as to your experiences, that your method of recording data would be inaccurate, far be it from me to suggest what that might be, feeble minded as I am.

Who mentioned anything about being feeble minded? You seem capable.

I'm sure any PL or outfit leader would follow up with some sort of accordance with my post. Generally anyone who looks at world/continent pop every 15 minutes will notice that paterns begin to emerge and frankly, some people just don't even bother to play anymore once Alerts pop up. These are VS mind you, when WDS is already in the bag and Alerts have never been easier.

When a resounding number of people create threads, podcasts and produce videos all reporting the same issue across the board - it's generally unadvised to tout it as fictitious. Sure, SOE has released some interesting data that clearly shows they're positive it's not the problem, they also go ahead and mention they still have more to research, more data to mine and more variables to look at. It's great they're keeping us up to date but even if they determine it's not 4th faction that's causing these lopsided Alerts and Vanu WDS sweeps across all servers, they still clearly have an issue on hand.

Why don't you complain some more about how much people complain on these forums?

Since we're discussing it more here, I'll put my post from the announcement thread up too...

As already pointed out by Rhino, the number of people logging into all characters just for membership certs is unlikely to be insignificant either, taking further weight from the 'people only switch during alerts' idea.

As (I think it was) Wyrd said, there's some argument that we're ignoring the effect of people simply logging in to the most overpop faction at the time, and that would be an interesting set of numbers to have too, however that would require a different behaviour to start a 'landslide' during alerts first... Either people on the 'losing' factions logging out more than people on the 'winning' faction, or significant numbers logging on purely for the alert, having not previously been in game (as in the outfit suggestion above).

So come on SOE. Get me da statssssss.

Umm no it's not. Reread what I wrote and what Malorn wrote.

He states:"We looked the timeline trend of players who change characters on the same account, and found them to be about 1% of the population across all servers on a given day."

Again 1% of the total population across ALL servers over a 24 hour period, there was no mention of alert's in Malorn's post. I asked for stats on the average number of the switchers during a specific slice of time (an alert) vs server population.

Wonder if I got counted in there for logging in to each character for passives daily. Usually just log in to the one I'm actually going to play last.

I was coming to argue that this was the most probable reason for the huge shifts in population balance during alerts (people staying longer than intended in the faction that's more likely to win), good to know my intuition was correct

The funny thing is that it actually works as a self-fulfilling prophecy and what makes X faction win many times is people in all 3 factions believing that X faction will win

I don't think there is one solution. It's going to have to be a bunch of small ones. Motivations are hard to pinpoint. There are as many reasons to stay/leave as there are people. Just a few off the top of my head:

1) For those that focus totally on rewards? Bump up XP bonuses based on population differences. (will only help those who chase certs) The actual reward difference between "winning" an alert with 60% territory and "losing" an alert with 40% is really a small amount of XP if you actually break it down. 2000 XP can be gained in a good 20-30 minute fight (a couple vehicle kills, or a good run of infantry kills... a base cap or two, etc.) Maybe if players got and knew they got X amount of XP for playing while underpop, they would stick around. Maybe a recap screen of the alert performance showing the amount of XP gained during the alert, the rewards from the alert and the underpop bonus you received. If they saw it laid out and were able to see the tangible number gained, it would motivate them to stick around for upcoming alerts.


2) For those that focus on K/D and good infantry fights? Make sure the Major bases have multiple ways to defend and attack without being camped well. (Multiple exits from spawn, multiple points to hold, less lockdown ability of vehicles within the base, etc), maybe increase spawn options based on population. Let the underpopped faction able to jump from fight to fight easier, whereas the overpop faction has to stay more in lattice lanes or use vehicles to jump (And show these extra spawns due to underpop bonus!) Consider making respawn timers faster (AND show that it's faster due to underpop bonus!)

3) For those that focus on faction ability to win alerts? Look at ways to balance alerts based on population... Maybe rather than simple majority of bases for win, weigh the win conditions on population... IE, if a faction has 40% pop on the server, they need 80% territory to "win" whereas if a faction has 20% population, they only need to keep 45% territory to "win".... (IE, very rough idea, everything would have to be worked on... but changing win conditions based on pop might be an option....)

4) For the PL/SL/Outfits.... give them tools that make cooporation and easier coordination... enhance squad / platoon tools to make it more fun to lead. It is hard work to run a squad/platoon... it's 10x harder when the faction is underpopped... give tools to make it easier and not as annoying. These are guys that directly impact whether 11-44 other guys are having fun... make their job easier.


5) Work on the perception of rewards: The problem is made worse when the "perception" of being competitive is not there. When a faction gets the defeatist attitude that there is no way to win based on population... The key in any changes is to make sure that the average player is aware of those underpop bonuses or balancing features. If all they see is the population #'s... then they'll think that is the most important thing. Same with K/D numbers.. if that is prominently featured, then players will think that's the most important thing. If all they see are the End-alert XP bonus... then they'll think that is the end-all be-all goal. Show them how much XP they made while playing the alert and how much of a underpop bonus they received. Make it easy for them to realize that fighting at a base... getting X amount of kills... with an X % bonus, netted them Y amount of XP.

TL;DR: Perception is key... make the players realize the gains they get from alerts by just participating... even on the losing side. Show them how much they gained compared to the "end reward", while also attempting to make alerts more Fun to participate in.

Finally SOE data supports my own findings. I could see there was no proof in the population charts people post as almost always they pointed at a triple dip to see 'see look' but thats looking at the wrong thing, youd need to see 2 sides falling at the same time as 1 side is rising directly after an alert start and apart from a small difference (1% according to SOE) the lines almost always go the same way.

Now SOE have spoken on the issue if someone still doesnt believe it lets see the charts. Theres now 3 population trackers so if 4F are so prevalent lets see the swings, remember one going up while the others go down, and not just one occasion I want to see a pattern.