Q: Why would anyone want to play the underpop faction?

I enjoy choosing the lowest pop faction in any game. However, for VS on Waterson, it's too extreme.
That's where the OP is from.. which is where I am from too.

Playing on an Overpopulated faction sucks just as worse, it's extremely boring. That's the VS Matterson. They're overpopulated which caused me to just delete the character. It was really fun back in the day though(much more fun than VS Waterson).

Being just a few % lower to equal is ideal.. but 15-20% lower than the other two is way out of hand...(which the OP had a SS of during Sunday Primetime.... I know the VS is underpop, I wasn't playing during the time, so I am taking his word for it)

What he said
+ you get extra bonus, it's like free full SOE membership

I absolutely agree with 100% of your post. Anyway, recently Mattherson's VS population has climbed to 45%+. My entire outfit has switched to TR simply because playing an extremely over populated empire just isn't challenging. We gave up our characters, characters that each of us has spent $50+ on. We have nothing now, and it's terrible. The experience of playing an under populated empire with low ranks is endlessly frustrating. We've all worked our way up to BR20-30 and it still feels like we have nothing. I wouldn't expect anyone to suffer though switching to balance in this game. It's hard enough to do in a standard FPS even with team shuffles. Seriously, this is the thanks players get who want balanced teams: you get to have your teeth kicked in and on top of that you have to spend more money to replace what you've given up.

Wow, a lot of l33t Bruce Willis/F4t4L1Ty clones here claiming they like being on the smallest Faction BECAUSE MURDER! I see so much hypocrisy here that I actually sighed. If so many people liked to play the smallest Faction there wouldn't be such huge differences in population. It has its moments, sure. You get to have a few Kills for a total of 5' out of 2 Hrs give or take. That's a lot of FUN right there, AIN'T IT!? /Sarcasm



And I guess the multitude of people going "ZOMG WE PWN U NO WAI WE DON'T PLAY THE ZERG" on Yell are in fact quite eager to jump on the small Faction too, just you know, AFTER the Alert.

On mattherson when I logged: VS @52% world pop, TR @ 20% world pop. I think at one point we had a total of 8 hexes amongst the three continents. Forget about using tanks.

I love the "good fight" at a warpgate. My favorite is Esamir, northwest corner towers at the weight station. A couple of good Engs holding the towers, tankers moving up with Heavy support, Speeders, air assets screamin' in. It's a team effort (by function) though it takes time to build momentum but you'll push'em back Yeah, you can have you're BioLabs. I like to fight in the open!

All of these posts about how people love to play the underpopulated faction, and yet simple statistics prove you wrong. The fact that such massive population imbalances exist on several servers speaks volumes to how little incentive there is to play the underpopulated faction, and how much incentive there is to play the overpopulated faction. Especially if you love flying or tanking, you'll never want to play the underpopulated faction as you will be more likely to find yourself outnumbered and destroyed, and unlikely to have the resources to spawn a new vehicle.

Arguably Waterson has had the worst population imbalance for the longest time, with VS being plagued with incredible under-population for over 6 months. It comes as no surprise that Waterson VS has the worst new player retention in the game... new players log in, get a good laugh about how terribly imbalanced the sides are, and leave. They'll either play one of the other factions or if they really want to play VS they will play on another server. I wonder what the VS population looks like on the only other USEast server........

because you are a boss and you want more targets to kill.

The overpopped faction doesn't run out of tanks when I kill them. I like killing tanks. taaaannnnkks...

I've tried most VS Connery outfits already. That is why I stated what I did above.

A +-5% variance doesn't bother me.

But VS on Waterson are consistently lower than that. I know it is way early in the morning, but we're at 19% right now.

I honestly don't know how the Waterson VS do it. Have to give those folks a lot of respect, in my opinion.

Sometimes it can be fun to be the underdog in a fight. For me, this is especially true on Indar where I find defensive play more rewarding.
The trouble is when the numbers are such that my only role in game is to feed another faction a target to shoot. You don't need me for that. Just make an AI faction and program it to really enjoy catching rounds from eight tanks to the face.

Problem solved.

I actually made my alt on Miller when the overpopulation on woodman for the VS was getting way out of hand. I don't like playing zerg-wise and the overpop on my main faction was seriously standing in the way of good fights.

Lattice system especially does NOT help with that

It depends how badly underpopulated we're talking.
I play all three empires, usually devoting to one for any given day and I usually play the 2nd most populated,
as I don't mind being outnumbered a little.
(I do this not for the extra exp or alerts but to simply try and keep an even fight, uneven fights are just stupid).

I picked Vanu back in beta because it was the lowest pop. I have always played the lowest pop faction in games because I like having more enemies. Of course in beta it was more like a 5% difference, not that bad.

The outfit I joined in beta happened to go to Waterson and stay VS so I get to experience some serious imba now. It sucks, but we make do with what we have. I think most people playing Vanu on Waterson like fighting against the odds so we work together pretty well and don't take each other for granted. It would be hard to imagine fighting against them.

IMO the most realistic way for SOE to address pop imbalances would be:

1) Allow cert / SC refunds for high pop factions that switch to low-pop factions

2) Provide bonus SC for switching to underpop factions, but switching to high-pop factions is disallowed

3) Prevent new characters on highest pop factions as long as low pop is below 25%

4) Institute a 60 minute faction switch lockout.

For the purposes of the above, populations would NOT be calculated in real time but on a one or two week rolling basis.

Well, yeah. I love VS on Waterson, but I'll admit we're a rare breed who actually enjoy it. My outfit is mostly of the same opinion though, we take pride in being small but highly effective. We almost always succumb to the zergs (last night it was two at once, we held an amp station for an hour or two in a sandwich between TR and NC zergs), but we get epic amounts of certs making them pay for each territory.

Of course if everyone felt that way, we wouldn't be able to find a underpop server to play on. I'm glad that not everyone feels that way. Someone new joins VS on Waterson, realizes the imbalance, and then go joins TR. The only people who stay are the ones who are game for a real fight. And I'm fine with that, those are the folks I'd prefer to game with anyway.

I'm not talking about the kind of underpopulated where your world population is 31% and your foe's population is 34%. That kind of underpopulation means more enemy targets to shoot at. The population is still at a level where you can find a nice fight. and the 5-10% more soldiers your opponent has distributed across a 3 continent 3-way is mostly inconsequential.

I'm talking about the bone-crushing population imbalance where you are regularly outnumbered by 50% or more by both opposing factions, including during primetime. A population imbalance which has existed for over 6 months, and an imbalance which shows no signs of improving.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy playing Waterson VS. I relish in the opportunity to slaughter hoards of lemming NC & TR on a regular basis. But the simple fact is that I see the population imbalance growing steadily, as there is more incentives to play the overpopulated faction(s) than there is to play the underpopulated faction(s). The entire resource and alert system directly encourages and rewards overpopulated factions.

Other than a few cases, old players don't want to switch factions or servers to start from scratch, and new players don't want to make up the difference either. Waterson was recently the recommended server. At first, VS population started to rise a bit, as new players saw the 50% bonus XP as a boon. But the steep learning curve in this game is worsened by being badly underpopulated. VS players came and left, while (on average) NC and TR players were more likely to stay as they were more likely to find even fights or ones where they were at a population advantage. The population disparity is worse now than it was before Waterson's brief stint as the recommended server.

I also play on Waterson and I've given up on playing my VS (for now) because being outnumbered 2:1 by TR was unbearable for me.
I've been playing a lot of NC lately because of it. The sad thing is that TR was originally my main with no plans to even play the other sides, back when the game launched. Now I largely resent the Waterson TR, though I will still play my TR when I feel like it (which is rarely).

P.S In full disclosure... I got in a heated /yell as my TR vs VS warpgating us on Indar a few days ago. VS actually had the most Indar pop, 40%+, because alert was going on another continent... yet the VS had ZERO fighting with the NC along the mid-east and were so busy ******** about how TR "usually" has more pop and gleefully warpgating us to realize they had a real chance to take Indar. The TR didn't even have the continent bonus as justification to keep all Vanu warpgating us, I don't think we even had it prior to being warpgated.

To summarize, there be stupid people on all sides and even though I hate a lot of the Waterson TR, too many players on NC & VS are blinded by their hatred and can do many of the stupid things the TR do.

I think this is one of the reasons that Mattherson VS has become huge. Those that actually liked VS, but hated the imbalance, went to Mattherson... whereas those who liked NC/TR stayed on Waterson. Thus it actually is hurting both servers at the same time. Same with Matherson TR, if they truly like the TR, they might try out Waterson... and stay there.

Newer players also have less incentive to stay on a losing side. Especially with a sharp learning curve.... a newbie that gets annihilated by 3-1 odds all day, will be less likely to have a good view of the game as a whole. (so imbalance hurts the whole game, not just one faction on one server)

That's one of the reason's I've started an alt on Waterson VS. It's slow going though... it's hard to get motivated when you are used to having everything, to start with very little... and the resource issues are making it worse.