Something to notice is in the alerts most of NC move over to the continent while about a third of VS will move over and a handful of TR move. That usually gives TR about 40+% pop on Indar which usually results in them holding half of Indar when the alert finishes.
On off hours it's more rewarding to jump to the dominant faction as there's no downside to it if you're not faction loyal. There's no more mechanic in place to prevent people to switch to alts on the same server. Alerts are a good experience when the server's full, but more often than not it turns into a steamroll with dominating victories and easy 10000xp. I don't blame players either for it as it's good min-maxing, but it blows for the opposing force. The same happens on mattherson. Pop spikes to 60%+ on non-Indar.
We need a percentage lock on the continents. If one of the factions reaches a 10% surplus on a continent no more of that faction can join until the lowest factions numbers rise.
We rarely reach anything like 40. It happened yesterday when a bunch of outfits removed the VS cap on Indar, but otherwise it'll tend to be in the 30's, and often not even high 30's. It was mid-30's there when I logged out just now, with something like 10% on the other continents, and we still only made it to the NC warpgate because they had 'platoons' at the crown fighting purples at TI. There are basically not enough TR on Briggs most of the time to do more than one thing simultaneously. The moment they start to split up, both things start failing, and so the people going to an alert largely give up and return to Indar where at least they stand some kind of chance. You'd need to take a very large part of the population and move it all at once in order for the momentum to build in favour of an alert instead of the other way around, which just isn't very realistic. Unless the populations start to even out, or at the very least grow in general enough for us to fill a continent quota more often, alerts can go screw themselves. Being able to play the game without being swarmed with scarce to minimal backup is better than the pitiful reward we'd get for holding a handful of bases on Esamir or Amerish.
I've noticed Esamir alerts pretty much always go this way. With the population imbalance, TR can't stand against the main NC and VS forces, so we have to flank. Esamir is too small and doesn't have enough bases to pull off effective flanks, so we end up being absolutely smashed. It's my big worry about the lattice system - it may highlight population imbalances even more as flanking becomes harder.
There's no point going to alert when you are severely outnumbered. It's not fun and you don't get that much XP for holding couple of hexes. I like the idea behind alerts but unfortunately they seem to unbalance the population even more. Here's the server population during last alert on Briggs:
