Continent Locking mini-update

I like this. So basically the players can trigger this alert. Little off topic, but any plans to have any other alerts get triggered by player actions?

This was the only one I could answer right away, but we're making it so alerts are continent specific, so each continent can have it's own alert.

I don't believe I have enough words to accurately express exactly how much this small post pumped me up.

Muldoon, I have to say this is the kind of player-SOE interaction that is needed on these forums. People love it, I love it.

I think it would be great if more thread would be about what major things are the devs working on, with some one from SOE interacting with the player base, answering question and all that. This would be great for the player [the players would feel like they matter and that SOE listens], that and the Dev team could get some crucial feed-back, maybe even notice some errors their making in their design(s).

Keep up the good work.

Please keep the standard alerts as well (for non-locked continents) - like tech plant, amp station alerts etc.

My question is what will be the point of locking a continent, what will be the benefit for the faction that locked a continent. Because right now, closing a continent for the sake of closing a continent sounds just like winning the current alert for a little bit of XP.

Getting to lock Indar will be like that episode from South Park (Make love not warcraft).

What do we do when we finally get to lock that POS continent?
We can finally start playing the game!

Amerish or Esamir ain't "vehicle unfriendly" at all, just vehicle-spawncamp-farmer unfriendly. You get much better tank battles going on on both of those continents than ever in Indar.

1.) How will this effect the (poor) game performance?
2.) How we will get the continents back, or there is a timer? Can we get vehicles there( if no timer )?
3.)Whats the point doing this with the unbalanced populations and 4th faction problems? Will you guys put a timer on characters?

Okay, I've read all five pages of posts and I still have no idea what incontinence locking is all about.

Should I like it?

I find it a little bit worrying that I might not be able to deploy on my beloved Indar.

I hate Esamir, it is far too cold for me.

Lol, Esamir and Amerish (and maybe even Hossin) are gonna be locked 24/7. Indarside shall prevail, and I don't mind that at all.

Northern Indar is pretty nice for tank battles. The whole area around Saurva Bio Lab is great, as is the desert around Mao Tech Plant

All I know is that if my faction gets Esamir as a home continent, I'm changing factions

Hope we get rid of your kind of farmers from this game when Inder gets locked.

While continent lock is AMAZING. The words "continent is locked' looks like a really bad photoshop job in this picture which is strange though (different text thickness, and not even on the same exact horizontal line as the rest of the text)

What kind is that?

***ALARM BELLS***

I don't like this implementation of continent locks. I don't like it at all. Maybe it will be different once there is a continental lattice. Maybe we might even get Sanctuaries to make the global lattice actually work. I doubt both of these things.

I don't want a continent to be denied to me completely through game mechanics. I want them to be denied to me by other players. If an empire kicks mine off and locks a continent it should be their responsibility to keep it locked. Sure, there could be a little leeway timer to clear out all the stragglers but after that whether or not I can get back on the continent should be a matter of maintained links and actually capturing bases. The only reason I should stay off the land is because I am being kept off the land by other players.

Generally speaking, the only thing that really gets a continent locked now is a population advantage. No one locks a continent when the pops are 33/33/33 or even 50/25/25. Players that are being steamrolled will just leave until the attacking side has an insurmountable advantage against the few trying to hold their ground. Perhaps two (or three) continents will swap being locked back and forth as unopposed armies sweep across them. Meanwhile the bulk of the server population will still be slugging it out on Indar.

Things have to change before even considering continent locks.

• The three-way setup on each continent has to go. Three close populations on a continent will just rotate territory around a map for hours and hours and hours. If continent ownership is truly going to be contested it needs to be between 2 large empires and maybe a small third. There is no strategy that is going to let you beat twice your population.
• Locking a continent needs to have tangible gameplay rewards. I'm not talking about personal rewards - I'm talking about rewards that make playing even better. Base auto-repair on all vehicles. Decreased cost to deployables. Carrying an additional grenade. Things that make attackers WANT to take the bonus and to make defenders WANT to keep it. People like to ask for direct personal gratification when there are so many other ways to diversify rewards and shake up gameplay. Every week more players reach the point where xp/certs/implants mean nothing to them.
• Improved command tools. Give the players more ways to interact and guide their empire. /orders is nearly useless with it's cooldown. Currently units large and small can coordinate amongst themselves but there is no overarching hierarchy to allow them to work together. Mega-platoons will still exclude players who wouldn't mind helping without being part of something larger.

This game has a ways to go before it can change from "global deathmatch" to "global war."

Well I apologize if you are not one of those vehicle farmers sitting outside of bases farming 24/7, as that's what I got out from your post.

I would really like to know if you are taking any steps to deal with player behaviour, if alerts have prooven anything is that in a free to play game a large number of players will switch sides to whoever is winning. This prolly wasent a problem in PS1 due to its pay to play model, there you would either tough it out or quit if your faction was behind but here you can just switch sides in the press of a button.

Im concerned that if continent locking becomes available that issues with population swings to the winning side will become more severe, specially if capping a continent provides usefull bonuses, and i wanna know what you plan to do to stop or at least mitigate this issue. The bonuses must be worth your time or else nobody gonna care about locking a continent, on the other hand if you make them desirable and dont add any safe measures people will swing back and forth to whoever faction is "winning" the game.

So, Esamir will get locked by the one platoon playing on it. Then Amerish will get locked when they move over there. Then Esamir will get locked again when it opens, then Amerish again shortly thereafter. And the masses will be back and forth on Indar all day long and never notice... as the other two continents get locked back and forth ad infinitum et ad nauseum.

While the locking thing does add some small meaning to the game; there needs to be more depth to it than just that. A resource revamp, and more continents would help. As would some bonus to make it truly worth it (the -10% to purchases is insignificant really) and to make the other factions want to take it away.