Finding a fight in Planetside 2

I will use my experience as of 15min ago to illustrate my point here. I am VS on Connery.

Looking through instant action, my options:

-Hot drop into an outpost defense with "Enemy platoon detected" with the capture bar halfway to completion. Clearly there are no VS here defending and if I dropped in i'd just get spawncamped.
-Hot drop into Eisa Tech Plant, a battle which I can for some reason drop into when it's a battle between NC and TR. If I dropped in here, i'd fight for a bit then die and be unable to respawn anywhere.
-Another outpost hot drop, this time into a TR held outpost with "enemies detected." Less than a squad of TR are there. That's not a battle, and there's no indication if we even have a sunderer up or anything. Why would I ever drop there?
-Another outpost hot drop, "enemies detected," this time a defense. Again, this could be from 1-12 enemies.
There's no way for me to tell if this is actually a small scale battle or just the map being ambigious.
-Another outpost hot drop, this time on a continent that is 64% NC, with "enemy platoons detected." Clearly this is just a zerg of NC taking undefended bases on an empty continent.

So that's hot drops out of the picture, clearly not gonna get anything there. So I look at the map, scroll over individual hexes, etc.

Indar: 55% TR, both NC and VS are warpgated. No good fights here clearly.
Esamir: Aside from the aforementioned NC vs TR fight at Eisa, no hex has more than "Enemies detected," and i'm not going to go around checking random outposts to see if there is actually a fight there.
Amerish: 64% NC, aside from their big zerg that no one seems to want to defend against, no other hex has more than "enemies detected."

You know what I do at this point? I just log off. Finding battles in this game is too much effort and the player is not given enough information (IE: Is the SCU up? Do we have any of the satellite bases? Is there a Sunderer nearby? How many friendly players are in this hex?) to help them find one.

This is ignoring the fact that yes, most people seem to avoid battles and just capture undefended bases, which is something seperate that needs to be fixed as well. But I need more information to help me find an actual fight where I can kill enemy men, please.

Going back to beta and cycling through one cont and "forcing" cont rotations once one side beat everyone into their WG might be interesting...it would push pop density per server (which already isn't great) and impose a little variety (and take The Crown out of the game for a couple of hours at least)

As of right now all west coast servers show low for pops. Maybe try Waterson?

I play on 3 servers all in different locations, this is a recurring theme across all of them.

Really surprised that this isn't an issue for more people because it's my #1 problem with the game. If I could login and immediately be in a battle it would actually be a decent/good game.

Dunno. I do VS on Mattherson, TR on Jaeger, and NC on Waterson. I've spent more than five minutes looking for a fun battle only a few times. Always grab an ESF at the warpgate and go check areas wih that instead of hot-dropping, works for me as I can check the entire border of my faction in minutes at most.

If you are not playing in a squad already, hit insert and spawn on the squad - usually they're over somewhere fighting.

Sorry man but i'm not really buying that. For example I am posting about this issue and my character is BR21 with 1d 10h played
http://www.planetside-universe.com/character.php?stats=lashermaster
While you are saying you have no trouble finding a battle, while your character has similar amounts of exp gained and much longer time played.
http://www.planetside-universe.com/character.php?stats=TheAppl3

Note i'm not insulting your stats and I know the leaderboards haven't updated in a few days but I think you're just not being entirely truthful. If i'm having trouble finding battles yet clearly I seem to be in more battles than someone who says they have no trouble, then wtf is going on? I'm pretty sure you're doing your fair share of undefended base capturing, while I log off when I have to resort to that.

And yes, I did used to fly around looking for battles until I realized how fruitless this was.

I can get low XP and still be in a battle. For example, i can fly my liberator and my gunner is getting tons of assists but few kills. Gunner assists get me no XP and I always get nominated to drive/fly everything.

For example, someone playing medic at a tech plant gets far more xp/hr than someone playing AA MAX. I happen to play AA MAX a good bit and here are times when I am just hanging around getting no XP as I cover uour positions against possible airborne threats. My playtime is also inflated because I spend plenty of time waiting at the gate for slow friends to show up and get in the game, time spent driving a sunderer in circles waiting for the six people who simultaneously had to brb, et cetera.

No insult taken.

Any undefended base capping was done at 4am where I presume finding a major battle on *any* server in my time zone would be a challenge. Sure I've done it, but either at odd times or because I chose to do so instead of participating in the battle three hexes over.

I agree the Hot zone info is very lacking .. Dropped into a " Hot " zone before and it's been 3 people ( one of which was myself ) so was more a luke warm zone.
Be nice if we got a rough estimate on player numbers rather than a very misleading % count

Less and less people are playing, as such, most wont move to another server to lose all they have gained, the game is designed so that it takes a massive amount of hours to progress, so once somone is fed up there is no other option than to just stop playing, and thats what over half the population of ps2 has done

Don't believe in the instant action red marker. It doesn't work well. I've dropped into a red hot zone only to find that there was a huge battle going on between two factions... except I wasn't one of the two factions fighting. I did a /who and found only 2 others of my faction there. So the game somehow equated two enemy factions fighting and 2 of our NC guys as a "big battle".

Best way to find action is by taking some time to know your server. Each server is different, each servers have different hot contested zones, with different facilities & routes that usually see action. What I do when I login is to usually hop into a plane, like an ESF. Since I don't fly much, I don't care if I die. I fly around to look for other planes buzzing about fighting. When you find a bunch of Liberators and ESF hovering about, that's when you know you've found the action. Another good way to find action is by joining a squad. Since squads are likely where the action is, you could ask squad members where the action is at.

Of course none of this helps a brand new player, new to the game, to find action. So SOE most definitely need to improve on new player experience. Finding action is very important, people login to this game to find action to find people to fight with & against. Hot dropping someone into a hot zone is fine upon entry, but after that many new players just have no clue where to go. And the instant action markers are often wrong.

See, that's the problem with the Magrider zerg, it obliterates everything so fast its impossible to locate and find the big fight.

Agree with the inaccurate map readings. Say you're a platoon leader or a outfit leader and you have control of a sizeable amount of people. You want to lead them to the right places. But you can't, because the map is misleading. I've seen platoon leaders order a squad to a hex that was meant to have "enemy platoons", that's a plural. Turns out to be 5 TR/NC.

While I fully realise that if you had enough people you could get a small handful of people to either scout out areas or just sit and guard them. But this is sort of ridiculous when you're on a continent where your faction has a far lower population than the other factions do. Sending people to the right areas matters a lot.

You're clearly doing it wrong. I also play on Connery anywhere from 9pm-1 am. I always find the fights at any borderline between factions. Don't understand how you can not find the fights?

Funny because as you post this, all 3 factions are on 1 continent each with over 50% pop. Meanwhile, unrelated to this, the game still doesn't give you any important information that you need to actually make an informed decision of where to go. Stop pretending it's perfect.

Who's saying it's perfect?
Who's saying the population control should be at where it currently stands?
Do you always make up stuff as you go, is it a hobby of yours or just trolling?

I was talking about finding the fights on one map that I always play on since we share the same server not on specific fights on different continents, servers what have you. Just by current stats that we have right now. Don't get so ******** just because someone disagrees with you. Sheesh.

Pretty sure you came here, cherry picked 5 words out of my post and posted a snarky 1 line response, when the main point was that the map doesn't provide enough information. You have no idea what "trolling" is but that's expected from some guy with a le funny internet meme signature.

I'd enjoy a better way of finding the fight as well. Right now, I just open the map, find a blinky hex group, set a personal waypoint and hope it's something fun by the time I get there.

Good intel from those battles would allow me to make a better choice on where and from what direction to approach with my AA tank.

"Signature" now? lol Wha?
All this rage eh? Let it all out now sonny.

Ahhhh the solo kill snob .. looking for a good ambush spot to pad his KD. I never .. ever...ever have to look for a fight.

Step 1 - pop up the squad join screen
Step 2 - filter for my outfit only
Step 3 - join squad
Step 4 - drop pod onto Squad leader
Kill VS and kill TR battle after battle as the outfit spearheads moving the map.

I am sorry, if my opening statement seems crude. This is not BF.. or COD. If you got with a group (form your own!) then YOU could pull the sundy... fly the Gal, or lead a swam of air Cav. PS/PS2 is about the PLAYERS making the battles.. YOU must create the fight. There is no lack of info. There is only your dependence on others to create the fight.