The Emerald TR and zergfits...

I believe the Emerald TR has far too many oversized zergfits for our small population to handle, and that this is one of the main things keeping the faction down. We have AOD, 382, and ODMN, when all we need is one decent zergfit. Obviously AOD is by far the worst and needs to go, but what about 382 or ODMN? I haven't played with them much. Are they even halfway decent? How much better are they than the completely incompetent AOD? How much do they contribute to the success of the faction? Do they know how to cooperate?

If the Emerald TR is ever going to get good, we are going to need to break up some of the zergfits, because right now we have far too many.

I'm not sure that's the way it works.

Servers merged and only two so-called zergfits still provide the bulk of public platoon services. I thought these complaints would have died out by now; besides, low TR population's a much tighter constraint than the continental cap which might lead you to diss AOD.

382 can be decent when they try and when they have a decent amount of members in their squads that hold everything together. I don't know how ODAM or what ever fraction of them that is still left after all the splits perform any more. I have avoided them like the plague for ages. Ever since some squeaky voiced 12 year old who was one of their leaders ordered an entire platoon to armour up in prowlers and lightnings because we were going to assault a Bio Lab. This was after taking a satellite and he was actually referring to the biolab proper, not the satellites. It went just as badly as you expected and they only managed to feed the enemy quite a bit of XP. I haven't seen that much of them since their glory days on Waterson.

Low pop will cause loses and have a faction claw itself to death. I've seen it on NC. They all start pointing fingers, then trolling and meddling, which only exaggerates the problem. Everyone knows that they are awesome and everyone else sucks. On an Esamir alert, NC was "losing" to the VS. Leader chat was in full derp mode. The reality? The territory control of each faction at the end was within 1 or 2 percent of the continent pop of each faction. Not exactly a loss for anyone in that sense except for the rage quitters that stopped early.

I don't know. I eagerly await the date where we're capable of having zergfit-only server smashes.

Admittedly AOD did have more deaths than any other outfit in PS2 this past week. But all kidding aside I think the trend of AOD bashing that's been going on for a long time now is a bit much.

They've earned it though.

As a former member, I can honestly tell you they haven't been " good " in quite some time.

All they're good for now is sending out mass numbers of zerglings that have zero direction or coordination. While the smaller outfits coordinate and actually take bases on the opposing side of the continent we happen to be on.

It's funny how in platoon chat, the moment our platoon leader sees the AoD zerg going in one direction we always choose to go in a different direction.

So they're known as a Zergfit, it suits them. They have their purpose, they distract the enemy zerg while the coordinated squad/platoons due most of the strategic work.

I mean, let's be honest, PS2 is after all a FTP FPSMMO. We're never going to get rid of the zerglings, they'll always be the bulk of our infantry on every faction.

And that's AoD's niche, good for them! Not for me though .

Seriously I don't know why these post keep coming up?

What options do the TR have over there? Most of the good outfits don't run open recruitment. If you want to fix the problem it would be so easy to recruit competent players from these outfits. If you want to cry about it on the forums ignore my post.

You need 3 PLs to start a new outfit with 3-4 SLs and show them some good gun play. Or beg BWC 903 and some of the others to run recruitment platoons more.

And there I thought it would be more difficult to talk trash about AOD with their outfit's tag plastered all over bases they captured after last patch. Apparently it still doesn't stop people like OP.

Maybe thinking about it a different way will help? Next time you log in, look at the map. Check for AOD tags on bases they captured. Then imagine that those bases were Blue or Purple. Would that be better?

Outfit base capture status is largely irrelevent because if you can pile the most players into a base the logical conclusion is that they would build up the largest total amount of score, even if it is the lowest average per player. If that outfit is using 100 players to cap a base where another outfit could use 20, then there's a large issue there in a server where continent pops are frequently capped.

The problem I see with zergfits is that they mostly don't know what they are doing at all. From what I've seen is that the TR/NC zergfits will always fight each other because VS is to scury for them and end up causing the 2v1 fights that are so frequently seen on Emerald/Matherson. From what I've noticed from watching the map is that ADD has a habit of mainly pushing NC and very rarely pushing VS, and the same could be said for the NC's PHX (which in my opinion is far worse than ADD). PHX is either pushing TR or ghost capping. So there are both of the factions largest zergfits going and taking large swaths of their faction's pop and fighting useless battles instead of fighting the people who are actually beating them (the VS).

The only solution I could see to fix this is to literally gut these zergfits because they are doing little to nothing to help their faction.

What do you mean "get good?". IMHO, us TR Emerald have gotten as good as it is going to get and for goodness sake, nothing good every came of trying to get good when you have all ready peaked at your goodness level.

Just want to comment on the 903rd thing briefly. I think I'm one of our few PL's who really enjoys running public ops, and I've been away for six weeks for my coursework. Now that I'm playing again, I'll probably be running public ops a little bit more frequently (I had a small one going yesterday, for example); however, when we run public platoons we do it as a service to the community. We're generally just as effective--if not moreso--with 2-3 squads of 903rd than we are with 48 people with public players mixed in, unless we happen to get a really awesome group of publics, which does happen. They're definitely fun, and tend to be a little more relaxed so we don't scare people away, but we're not actively recruiting right now in-game for a number of reasons, so they won't be recruitment platoons. The primary reason is that we're training for CC, so we're really working on hammering out our own individual and teamwork skills, which we can't really do as well when doing public operations. The second reason is that even though we're not actively recruiting, we do consider applications from anyone who's interested in the community, and so even though we haven't done a recruiting platoon in ages, we're still pretty happy with our recruiting rate.

Even when we did public platoons in late winter/spring, most of the time they were filled with people from other TR outfits, which was obnoxious. In our platoons, I always saw a number of tags that could have definitely been running their own public platoons/squads, and that remains one of TR's big problems. There's a lot of really good people who won't move outfits, even if they don't play with their outfit very much, and instead primarily play in public groups. That was an issue even when I ran ARID, which was a long, long time ago at this point. I don't see much point in us or BWC running open platoons for recruiting purposes when half or more of those "public" players already have tags. That's not us failing to do our part, it's those outfits who aren't running their own platoons (public or otherwise) to keep those guys organized instead of in the big zergy platoons, and in doing so tie up a number of good players who would be better off in some of our better medium-sized outfits.

Great points,

First it's always a pleasure to fight 903.

Second, in VCO if people run with us often enough they can join or be removed. I do t like being used because some ****lord wants to stay in his inactive outfit. They can get a taste and then make their choice. But someone has to do something over there. I want a good fight from the TR AOD and the rest are fun to farm etc but the challenge is always welcomed, thanks for bringing it.

We have like three zergfits with thousands of members and only like five or six smaller and more coordinated outfits. If we broke up AOD into more of those smaller 300-400 member outfits we'd be much better off.

By "get good" I mean being able to smash the VS, which we currently struggle with. There is plenty we can do to get better, such as creating more smaller and more organized outfits and cannibalizing AOD for members. The more smaller outfits we have the better off we will be.

Likewise--I wish our bigger outfits were a bit more like VCO--you guys have managed to do a lot and utilize your numbers pretty well, and also have the sense to split them up a bit better (and provide some pretty good fights as well!). One thing that AOD (I haven't played much with the others yet) doesn't really do is split up their forces. There are a lot of times that they could split their platoons up and provide a lot more support, but their leaders tend not to be as comfortable doing it. That's not to say I haven't seen them do some solid plays and use their numbers well--I have--, but they need a few more leaders who are comfortable doing it (and I'd assume the same for the rest of the big outfits). Honestly, I've never thought to just kick outfitted people running with us, mostly because we've actually recruited a bunch of people from other outfits through doing so. It may be worth trying out though.

What TR really lacks, and has for a long time, is a bunch of solid medium-sized outfits like the other factions (especially VS) possess. Back before ARID collapsed (which was a combination of poor management from the founding members and me being absent for two months for work during June/July/August of 2013 after leading most of our platoons or squads most nights a week for three months), we managed to do that pretty well. HNYB did as well when they were more active (though I've been seeing more of them lately), as did VG before they started doing fewer ops in PS2. 903 has undergone a lot off changes even in the six months or so I've been with them, but we're one of the few older mid-sized TR outfits that is still very active and going strong, and that's why we're well-known. Waterson brought a few over, but it seems like it's mostly the smaller 1-squad outfits and the big zergfits that are really active, leaving a big QRF-shaped hole in our faction. I'm hoping some of the smaller ones start to grow, and that some of the older outfits will start coming back with the big changes we've seen to the game recently.

Most people don't understand that it takes a lot of time and stress to be an outfit of note. Even Harding to do that with a larger outfit. It's easy to Zerg here or there but not so easy to make it tactical with so many people and find good SLs.

Again it's a full time job with no money. People lack the dedication and the vision to do something inspiring.

I think you hit the nail on the head Aeflic. That's definitely a significant contributing factor!

It doesn't help however, when outfits ( /cough AoD /cough ) promote platoon leaders with blatant learning disabilities that can be recognized simply by the person speaking.

AOD and the others have some decent and prob good players. There is little stopping anyone from pulling those members. I never recruit from outfits that coordinate with me. But outfits that are that large or don't want to coordinate. I'd gladly pull players from them to save them. And it's not hard going from nothing to something. Look at it as a holding pattern until they go somewhere else.