Off-Hours PS2

At least on Emerald, off-hours population (12:00AM-8:00AM) usually has a population of less than 200 players. Is there a way to at least lock these players to a single continent? Having 200 players across three factions on two unlocked continents makes for a serious snoozefest. It pretty much means, per continent, there will be 33 people of one faction fighting in what is supposed to be massive fights. Instead, it's a bunch of ghostcappers :\

I totally agree and I have been mentioning this in passing any opportunity I get. I too play on Emerald between those time periods and I totally agree on the snoozefest. I even made a character on Connery but once you get to the latter half of that time range it is dead there too.

One continent would certainly be an easy and quick improvement they really need to make on all of the servers (Briggs already has it) but seem disinterested in doing due to the lack of voice from the late night players. Anytime I have mentioned this I was met with a swift barrage of "join an outfit or platoon to find people" or "I never have any issues finding action."

I would really like them to see specific funneling alerts as well. For example capture Eisa Tech Plant or capture The Crown. Or perhaps the 4 center hexes of Amerish.

However I do not think any of this will happen in 2015 which is unfortunate. Therefore I do not spend money on PS2 and instead use it to buy other games to play during duller hours.

I've considered the same thing of having alerts on off-hours to be specific to a cluster of regions. Whenever it gets to this point in the night, I actually just switch factions to see if the TR/VS have any good fights going on. If they don't, then I just log off entirely and play something else. It really sucks though and wouldn't hurt anyone since mostly everyone would be logged off/sleeping anyways. The game is most of the time quite dead though, something that I want to reassure anyone reading this thread. At least this morning, here is an example of the population:

Connery has the same problem. What makes it worse is that one faction (usually VS) always has a large population advantage, so a lot more people decide they'd rather ghost cap on the "off" continent than fight uphill battles all night.

Yeah noticed that on Connery. But then I myself have little motivation to play. Too little too long. It takes 6 months to get 2 new Ns weapons in the game and 3 re-skins... Meanwhile all the people want is meta and I can only agree
So since January we got peanuts. 6 months is a long time in the gaming industry.

On Emerald? 12 - 5am? Its where I spend 1/2 my time, it's a great time.
Never a shortage of stuff to do or people to fight, actually I'd prefer they open another continent.

ghost capping? well, it's an invitation, to come fight, not log off and post on forums.
All the big fights you love started that way, your the late comer.
'Big things have small beginnings'

server pops seem to be as low as they were last time they were merged, so a merge would be a good idea
could use this for cobalt too!

That is the reason why I don't play after hours. Completely agree with you.

Bump. Lock three continents unless the server pop goes over 300+.. until then, no need to have two continents open.

Also, NO ALERTS on low-pop continents.. yesterday there were some big battles on Esamir.. Amerish was open but kind of dead.. then the Alert comes for Amerish. Say Waaaaht?? Why would you try to get most of your players from the busy continent to abandon their big battles just to go to the low pop continent?

Unless there are at least 400+ ( ??) players on a continent, there should not be an alert.

I rest my case. This is why this issue never gets any attention and a great reminder to me never to spend money on this game. The playerbase is too naive/dumb/blindly optimistic about the game, I assume mostly dumb, for this issue to ever be mechanically addressed.

Players like DK22 are just not smart enough to understand the rebelscum numbers and will always post "it's fine you're just looking in the wrong places" and to "start the battle" when the statistics show there are not even enough people on the entire server to create a 96+ player battle. You would need an overwhelming majority of all 3 faction's online playercount in one hex to even create a 48 count battle.

Just as long as the one open continent isn't Hossin. I would rather play minesweeper than be forced to play a FPS version of Jumanji.

As someone playing from halfway around the world, I'm almost always on during off-hours on Emerald. It's usually 1-7 AM EST which is pretty much the afternoon where I live. So I'm not exaggerating when I say I know off-hours better than most people here.

Most of the fighting is already concentrated on one continent. This is the result of a circular chain reaction: One sees the biggest fight online at the moment, moves to that fight, and draws more people away from other fights. This aggregates the population into the 48-96 fights that are common during off-hours. And for the record, it's almost never on Hossin.

That being said, locking 3 continents is not a bad idea, since it would force players to join bigger, better fights. But from what I see, it is a redundant solution to a minor problem. Most players are already on one continent to begin with, and the other one is usually filled by ghost cappers who have no life.

This is the biggest reason why I'm against the idea. Hossin is already massively unpopular. You will see that if there is an alert on Hossin during off-hours, ghost cappers win it. No one wants to go there.

This, on the other hand, is a massive issue. On Emerald's off-hours, VS has double the population of NC and TR, occasionally combined. Needless to say, whoever happens to have the massive population advantage will steamroll. The pattern holds true for both peak and off-hours, and this is what makes the game nearly unplayable. If you play during off-hours on a faction with low pop, you have to accept the fact that you will be losing bases almost all the time.

There's players like Ryker and me who hop on factions with lower pop to help them out a bit. We are in the minority. A lot of people simply do not play because they see the massive outpop on the loading screen, and the fact that most players play one faction exclusively does not help this at all.

Enforcing a faction population cap at 40% could help, but it could also restrict players because of the aforementioned reasons. Besides, if two factions have 40% each, then the third faction is outnumbered 2:1 to both factions.

I have no feasible solution to propose to anyone here. I've thought through this again and again, and can't seem to come up with anything.

Conquest Mode: For all your Dying server needs .


Ofc since that mode seems to be going to have a strict pop % cap ( Ie: You can't have the 60 VS, 51 NC and 80 TR from the above example ) it will mean people having to play another faction to even get in the mode or have even bigger pop imbalances on LIVE.

We're gonna need battle islands soon because there won't be enough players for continents.

Really? and that was necessary, there are plenty of large fights at 3am,
Seen 3 of them going just this morning, and lots of smaller ones too.
I don’t think you play too much after hours, but thanks for commenting on something you seem to know absolutely nothing about.
Your sooo smart.

I really am speechless to respond to this, what do you tell someone who insists the sky is green and grass is blue and then attacks you when you say otherwise?

The concurrent user information is literally publicly available on rebelscum and it shows the population dips below a combined 130 players total on a daily basis. This means it is virtually impossible to have a 96+ battle at that hour and even the bracket below that is highly unlikely since it would require a 3 faction battle in one hex.

You're trolling and it is not very good. As n0pax stated, all the data is available publicly which invalidates anything you are saying. 'Large fights' are impossible when there aren't even more than 200 people logged in the server. The piechart I posted in this thread is just from one of those instances. If you want to see more data, you can find it here.

I'd really like to see Connery get locked to a single continent during non primetime hours as well. Having a nearly empty continent being ghostcapped doesn't do anything for the game and we might as well get those few players to actually apply themselves to real fights.

It only promotes two factions ganging up on a lesser faction which then migrates to the nearly empty continent to ghostcap. This won't eliminate lopsided fights but at least it won't give people the option to completely avoid resistance as that seems to make all 3 factions log off in frustration. Steamrolling is almost as boring as being inclined to cap empty bases out of frustration.

You aren't even on Briggs man. If we actually get a fight with 48+ during the off hours, people will fly Gals to bases opposite their warpgate, in territory not even connected to them, just to get some action. That may be a bit of an exaggeration, but trust me, on fights that big, lots of ESFs fly over to get some of the kicks. And there are only ever 1 or 2 people not of the fighting factions not fighting. Generally those are the ones that like to avoid very large fights and prefer smaller skirmishes.

In the off hours, people consider a 12-24 vs 12-24 a large fight. Ghost caps are a natural part of the system. Although on Briggs we only ever have 1 continent unlocked.

What is really annoying is in the off hour when I fight does finally start you get some hero kill the sunderer which then spreads the population out again