NC low win-rate - where is the balance?

Start play for NC on Emerald...

Nope
Im happy to have at least my Char @ Cobalt well equipped to be okay in fight xD
will not start from zero again xD

i start for VS on miller when Werner is out...

Said the person that claims Vanguards are incapable of flanking, and are forced to only come from the most obvious routes

If the NC aren't able to compete, then how come they are winning many more prime-time alerts than the VS for instance? Using your logic: Are the VS even worse off than the NC?

Quite often actually, it comes with the perk of being a good/experienced tanker. We know how to exploit the terrain to our advantage, and generally pick fights where WE have the advantage. I don't feel limited at all when I'm in my Vanguard, but then again, I'm out there flanking like the REAL tankers, not just sitting in the middle of the zerg without an imagination capable of coming up with new strategies

To be fair, in 96+ fights without cover, those couple of Prowlers aren't the most dangerous thing on the field, as infantry-AV in such fights is generally much more dangerous. The only situation those 10 Prowlers are dangerous, is if you are stupid enough to charge straight at them in plain view without cover. That is suicide using any of the MBTs, and that is a fact.

Do you seriously often die from enemies a hex away? I think you need to reevaluate your tanking routines and practices if that is the case. I don't EVER lose tanks to enemies a hex away. I often don't even have to use the Shield in 1v1's, typically reserving it for getting jumped and/or 1v2's.

I agree here, the Shield is by far the strongest ES-ability, because it HAS to be that way. I'm totally in favor of reworking the Vanguard a bit, in turn for making the Shield more fun to play against, but also to use (I doubt many NC-tankers find the Shield to be particularly "fun"). It is by far the most bland/boring ability, and that alone is an issue as well. There is also the issue of the other options not even being actual options for the Vanguard, simply because the Shield is so much better (in 99% of combat situations).

Overkills every 3,75 seconds aren't much better (Magriders reload speed). If combined with the additional slugishness of the Vanguard, then you have a point, but you didn't mention that at all. Looking solely at fire-rates the NC aren't worse off. Also, any of the tanks being "swarmed" by infantry, aren't going to survive thanks to their main cannons alone, but rather a combination of mains + secondary (Halberd) and trying to get to cover.

Really? Feel free to back this up with sound statistical evidence. That shouldn't be a problem right? Just please don't include biased samples only showing part of the picture.

Speak for yourself! I (and plenty others) are still using them to good effect. Just because you have somehow convinced yourself the Vanguard cannot flank at all, and is useless, doesn't make it a fact

How do you explain NC performing perfectly fine during prime-time (the best time for comparisons)? It has already been explained that most of the VS wins are from off-peak hours, meaning where there is the greatest possibility of population-advantages, whereas most of the NC wins are from prime-time. I'd rather be winning the even fights, than winning over-pop fights, but that's just me. Maybe you shouldn't blindly look at the total sum, and actually start thinking/looking critically at the numbers, in order to analyze them. Or just read other peoples comments who have already done it for you.

Yeah, populations can manage themselves somewhat, but there will still be imbalances. Especially during off-peak hours, where 1 faction can have ~40-45% World pop, enabling them to overpop all the continents. Combined with the fact that alerts can happen on the "unpopular" continent, which greatly favors the faction with the highest World pop.

I also don't think any numbers pulled solely from after the update has surfaced yet (I at least haven't seen them), and even still, these times aren't the best for comparisons, due to the implementation of Construction has turned the focus somewhat for a lot of people.

The TR/VS also start with semi-auto snipers on their infiltrators, whilst the NC start with a bolt-action. Not all things are even from the get-go across the factions.

wouldnt call it perfectly fine xD
but i guess to make my point of view more reliable i can post screenshots here from actuall primetime-fights.
Problem there: for all continents? or just the one im playing that time? ^^

look up the one Link i posted in this thread yesterday night, then u will the NC-situation round about every 2 day. Ofc other continents are looking better in this time, but thats not the point. A back and forth is quite funny for new situations and new strategies u can pull out, but the main-subject here is something else. xD

Thats right, like i allready mentioned (in my case about the default-carbine for NC^^ against for example the Trak-5). But Snipers are not crucial for Frontlines. They pick out (if they have some xp and skill) medics/engis, yes, but mostlikely their are just annoying and demotivating, but dont do that big impact on a fight - like HA would do.
But when HA is no option for a beginner there is no dmg-absorb, dmg-output and AV-Support.

This is a clear disadvantage. There is an open hole in the Line-up (the missing HA) that must be improvisedget stuck by others.
Mechanized Infantry works when the Infantry got a reliable AV-Possibility (not only AV-Turretsbecause static...). Now they just dont only shrike their targets to death, because normaly Rocketlauncher isnt that good against the non-armored forces. xD
But still the enemy got this combo. AI-AV in one person.
Thats the follow up of a non beginner-friendly default-LMG ^^

Oh man. You guys can't tell me that NC is (was) winning less alerts b/c of their starter weapons (specifically the SAW)?
What percentage of the total faction population you think are totally new players? And I mean new to PS2, not faction twinks of someone who allready has 4 chars at BR120.

Do you really believe that maybe 15 players, who have to use a SAW instead of an orion, out of 250+ per faction have any kind of impact on the result of an alert?
Alerts are not decided by some miniscule different weapons stats for beginner weapons. Faction population, amount of organised outfits, starting conditions and continent bonuses are the major factors.

do u even read?

if so: do u even combine the cause-effect-relation?

when a new player gets frightened for his role which he wants to choose because he cannot learn it fast enough before he gets demotivated, he dont want to play this anymore. the even bigger effect is: there is a huge change to switch the factions, so NC dont get new reinforcements.
The hope for NC is: "Pls, if default-heavy is to hard to learn for u @ beginning, pls change ur main-class to support.classes to learn slowly but steady the mechanics of ur factions and earn enough certs to make it like sandbox-wise to the style u want to."

for the tl;dr - guys: "a hard defaultweapon is a huge turnoff for newones."

The vanguards are the least capable of flanking of the bunch and certainly are not mountain goats. They are not going to jump over mountains to open up options and the flanking prowler unloading in the back is way scarier due to the insane DPS advantage. Can you instagib a lightning with a single salvo of a vanguard? I think not. Also predictably successful flanking is betting on consistent rtardedness of the opponent. What if said 10 prowlers have half a clue, spot for each other, look around from time to time and have flankers on their own, who you meet halfway?

A REAL tanker, huh? Do you smell your own farts too? I have the vanguard and all its primaries auraxed, which I achieved without parking and farming spawns in the middle of mechablobs but I am not a REAL tanker because I don't agree with your opinion on mech play biased by your leetness, do I get this right?
(Well ok, with HE I had to nuthug others because it's outright pathetic in TvT)

How about you leave your MLG bubble for a change to see a whole world outside it. There are meaningful balance problems in the mech meta, full ******* stop. The TR have top tier AND easy mode harassers, the TR have top tier AND easy mode MBTs with/thanks to their unmatched range potential.
The NC have nothing to plug that gaping hole with, there is no ******* lancer to bail them out, which means if there is no very generous cover allowing them to work their way into a close/mid range 1v1 they are simply fked. You simply cannot compete with the TR on plains if they don't feel like half-assing it, not at anything remotely resembling cost parity, which means balance problems because plains = territory too => alerts/win conditions.

Prowlers have longer range than the run of the mill infantry AV. Also if the infantry is busy pewpewing each other, which they often are, the prowlers doing an AV run around the battlefield will be more of a pain that a guy or 2 with a tube, no questions asked.
Also prowlers often do this annoying thing that they come from outside without engaging anybody right off the bat, head to a prime camping spot instead, turn into goddamned starcraft siege tanks at 400m and obliterate everything that moves from near perfect safety given the chaotic circumstances. I'd do the same if i could, but only 1 side having such option is broken in a game. Yeah you can start flanking them alright with your skillcharriot, but they dismantle your whole vehicle column in the mean time, laughing all the way to the bank.

So you are saying that in plains and deserts lacking meaningful cover the prowlers have a significant, inherent advantage? Well yes, I do agree.

I don't have to die from a hex away but when I am blasted from a hex away my eagerness to go anywhere is extinguishedbecause otherwise I am setting myself up for a failure in the first serious encounter. Additional source of damage makes or breaks things and it can easily undo my trump card, the shield, with me having next to no means to manage it.

Capability to lay accurate fire from a hex away severely reduces my maneuvering options, forcing me and others to passive, unenjoyable play because you might be overextending without even knowing it, after all you never know if some ******** won't park on a horizon.

It's simple, if everybody could lay accurate fire from a hex away then every other armored battle in open spaces would be about 2 lines of monkeys slinging **** ad infinitum. Awesome gameplay and now everybody has to depend on leetzorz like you to be tiebreakers.... but what if there are none in the area?

which means the prowlers rule supreme. I am glad you've managed to notice already that my main beef is with out-of-whack prowlers.
Btw, 0.25s doesn't matter until it does.

oracle of death is your friend. Show me a meaningful factor of performance that doesn't see prowler leaving others in the dust then we'll talk.

Yes they turned too many players into a brainless zombie horde. And then they name it fun.

But on the other hand nobody from Miller NC is willing to stop this on a large scale.

Well, no, not necessarily. This situation is not new, we had the same thing already a LOT of times.
Public platoon leaders, especially the ones that do it daily are very closed to criticism even if it is meant well. And frankly they should be. The amount of **** that everybody is flinging at you while you're trying to lead is just gigantic and it takes a really strong person not to be swayed by that and just keep doing what you were already doing.
If you don't let the negative criticism slide off of you then you will either burn out really fast or be destroyed by it.

A personality to keep doing these public things is one that is very ego centric and convinced of their own ability and convinced that what they do is indeed the only right way. That means you will sound very confident and people will follow you around. And that is the strength of BHO. Their leaders are very confident in what they are doing and they won't take any **** from anyone.

As I said, this isn't the first time. I think the first person on Miller to do this would be Zhukov. He was a great guy, always leading a platoon through ingame voice comms. Convinced that what he did was the only right thing and that randommers were more effective then organized outfits. It took us ages slamming our faces into a wall in order to get him to talk with the outfits and even longer to get him to cooperate. And when that happened, he leading the zerg while we're spearhead made the NC unstoppable when that happened. But he quit not long after release.
Later we got DrHouse3 and Ronaldinho (sorry if I butchered your name). Contrary to Zhukov they formed an outfit that invited everyone. Again also public platoon leading and both very strong personality and completely convinced that what they were doing was the only good way. Even if told by everyone else that their way was the wrong way. After a lot of talks and negociations they both started cooperate and again, with their zerg herding and the organized outfits spear heads the NC was able to crush the enemy.
DrHouse3 later joined WASP for something more organized and less leading and Ronaldinho joined CONZ (afaik). The rest made their own outfit and it all went down hill from there. House eventually quit and Ronal is still with CONZ as far as I know.

So, in other words. The drama has to stop and common ground has to be found on Miller between the new zerg herders and the old veterans in order to get a strong faction again. This will happen, it will just take time. But I'm positive.

So how can someone work with such people if you have total different opinion, how to command?
Fast redeploy - gal drop - win an alert - giving orders via voice chat... all they do is setting a way point and let it
flow for hours, and probably some blah blah at TS3.

They won´t change, BHO is doing such nonsense since Planetside 1.

Switch to VS and look how a mass outfit with daily platoons can look like, I don´t say here copy to 100%.
Creating that would bring more success than debating with stubbornly BHO.

That video is hilarious xD

By finding common ground and building from there. This won't happen over night.

And with a view like that nothing will ever change.

I know how DIG and KotV are (were) doing it. And it is frustratingly effective. But they weren't like that from the start. I can remember people moaning about them quite a lot in the past. How DIG is swallowing all the players and they just mass zerg everything that isn't important. That they just dump 48 people on an even fight and call it 'tactical'.

But the fact of the matter is that you can't outzerg BHO. To be able to do that you need someone with the same personality as the BHO leaders BUT also communicates with the rest. And to be honest, we've been looking for that guy for years now. You can't find him / her.

And while it is incredibly difficult to convince someone as egocentric as a public platoon leader to communicate and listen to the rest, it is not impossible.

This guy gets it.

I started as a headless noob in TR on Connery back when the game released. For a new player I did really well and back then TR is somewhat organized but mostly just zerging since it has the most population in my prime time. My usually get 4-5 kills before I went down.

Soon after I joined the VS outfit and switched to VS and started a new toon. In Connery in my prime time which is 6-9 pm PST VS is outnumbered significantly but platoons are very organized and coordinated. Although the population is low VS was able to hold Indar against both sides through fairly well. My K/D was very similar to when I was on TR which is around 1.2.

Then I started playing as NC. I had the worst experience playing as NC not because of the leaderships and the commanders but the inability of regular players not following orders and doing whatever they want. During my prime time there are a few very good and organized outfit that push and hold the ground but usually get flanks because the other front is unorganized and unable to hold their ground. I also notice a difference in gun and getting less kills in situations when i would have gotten a kill when I am using TR and VS weapons. My average K/D is 0.8 in average. Its harder to get a kill with NC weapons because of its range.

These has been my experiences at least in the early days of PS2. Now I am coming back to try the new update as VS.

Sorry dude, but I can't take you seriously here. You talk like as if the NC is somehow the underpop faction in this game, while quite the opposite is and has been the case. The Cobalt NC prime time pop has dropped from a comfy 37%- 38% to about 35% after the GK was introduced for the TR, I give you that.
But according to your logic we should buff the hell out of the Vanu equipment, since it is the VS that has been struggling with having the lowest prime time population for most of the time on most servers.

A few years ago i was introduced to this game by my friend,he was playing it and in all honesty i didn't know why and how i came to like the NC since he did not tell me any of the lore,or their benefits,well in nutshell he told me the main deal about their weapons.And i went with NC since (i don't really know they just appealed to me) so i was doing what i am best at in general in Team FPS which is support role.So i played like an hour or so and i was having semi of a good time(im pretty new to FPS in general its one of my least played genre of games)

But a few months ago i was intruiged by planetsides updates etc so i looked into it and i was hooked in to get it myself and i did.And i am loyal to my faction in general so i went with NC as i started as them.So i wasn't expecting any amazing things happening to me in general but i was suprised how good i was doing so i grew to love my support classes and eventually my own skills in shooting were improving as i watched videos about various tips and tricks.I pretty much know the distiqued sounds of cloakers and i do menage the recoil the guns have and actually shoot at someone.

Tho i did play some VS and TR and i did certainly realize why are they very popular,i do find myself loving the faster fire rate of their guns and some more coordination.But it was seeming too easy if i got into it too much and plus i feelt like i was shooting rubber bullets and 1 of them was an actuall 0.50 cal but it doesn't change the fact that TR and VS are pretty good factions to get used to shooting.But they are after all keeping their signature theme which is TR -LAARGE RPM ,VS-I actually don't know what is their prime deal,maybe the bullet velocity sinse their shots are seen the easiest (since they are plasma shots and or laser) and NC are Large damage in one shot.

Regarding weaponry,you would be suprised how well i've done with like 15 h of gameplay with HA and Starter SAW and 1 video telling me how to do it,since my logic fortold that foregrip would be a good thing for a LMG and i do carry a reflex sight since i don't tend to go way away,but i do land some nice shots with like 3 or 5 bullet burst.I mean yes weaponry could use an upgrade but you need to use your logic,for instance would a heavy round be shot faster then a smaller one?Would a prowler shoot faster then a vanguard or magrider?Yes because smaller rounds are faster to dish out(magrider would need energy to focus and be released.

NC would need upgrades but its due to the real firearms logic they don't carry faster shots with their guns,because then it would mean physics would be broken.TR and VS shoot smaller rounds that in general 1 mag can kill a soldier,but by the NC construction logic they need less bullets to kill their enemies due to them packing a heavier round.Im not going to talk about prime time and their win rate,since in all honesty it can change faster then TR can empty their own ammo supplies.If you want NC to be balanced and actually compete with TR and VS fairly you will then have to break physics for them and they would then be allowed all kinds of things.(Acception to NC guns having fast velocity then any gun in the game is the Railjack and its functioning on charge up shot and coil tech allowing it to be shot out faster and in the end be superior in that field then any gun in the game)

The NC have what seems to generally be considered the best all around arsenal. The most clear indicator of this is that NC is longer allowed as a faction choice in most of the current server smash events.

Server Smash and live are two different styles of play. The game should be balanced around the THOUSANDS that play on the live servers every day, not the hundreds that play in a handful of organized events every year.

Weapon balance certainly cannot be accomplished using alert wins as measure. There are too many other competing explanations for alert wins, including average player quality, and leadership and cooperation both within and across squads/platoons. The worst weapons can win all alerts in PS2 if these other factors are all dominated by one particular faction.

If you want to use "wins" as a means to balance *weapons*, Server Smash is actually a better place to do it because it better controls for all those other non-weapon-performance factors than does live. But really, individual weapon stats are the best means to balance weapons, because that is a more direct and relevant comparison.