GU12 Still Doesn't Address Population Balance

GU12 included a small change:

Now, many of you may think that this will help even population balance. It won't.

Everyone remembers the times when their server became the recommended server. Ah, the glorious flood of low-BR lemmings just waiting to be farmed. Free certs, free certs everywhere! Times that were cherished by high level players across all 3 factions. The new players may get killed by experienced players often, but they will still be facing against new players on the other factions and can thus still get plenty of kills.

Now, with the new changes being implemented, possibly only a single faction on your server will receive these new players. What does this mean? Farming party for the other two factions. New players join the game, get farmed, experience the absurdly bad population balance, and leave.

There is a reason why Waterson VS has the worst new player retention across all factions and servers. That's what happens when SOE leaves a fire burning for over 6 months with no sign of relief.

This change won't help at all, and will instead just result in decreased new player retention across the board. New players don't want to play on the badly underpopulated team any more than the current players do.

SOE really created this issue on themselves. They shouldn't have allowed multiple characters on same server of different faction. If they create a barrier that prevents players from joining (x) faction on (y) server people will cry. If they put cooldowns in place so people can't switch accounts people will cry. Basically anything that will prove effective at addressing pop balance people will be up in arms about.

ya this is not gonna help the population issue on mattherson at all.

There is a stead new stream of people coming into the game.

These people are now not directed to a specific server, but to a side on a server.

And from my experience of the various servers in game, the choices for all three make perfect sense at the moment.

remeber to a new player, they pick the fraction first.

'Farming' a you put it may or may not be an issue. But with a more intuitive hud and tutorial almost double the size, peoples initial entrance into the game and the 'what the ****' phase should be significantly shorter. Given a lot of the large scale zerging combat they'll be involved in at the start (and instant action seems to have improved as well). The issue of farming should largely be irrelevant, bar the off chance a zerg runs into an organised outfit running at about platoon strength.

Its far too early to say what will happen, however the issue of servers just getting 'more people' (as miller did recently) and pop imbalances largely persisting should hopefully be gone now.

I also don't think SoE consider this problem solved. Population imbalances of some sort are here to stay given inforced team balancing is simply impractical for a number of reasons. This hopefully with shave it out a bit and de-incentivise completely new people from picking an overpoped side simply due to lack of information.

Ultimately the game needs mechanics that make being the overpoped side disadvantageous in certain ways.

I think the pop balance will be fixed pretty quick by this

I like this change. It will help high population factions will not get so many new soldiers as the underpoped ones.
It's a move in the right direction.

And as much as people would like to see members of the dominate faction population wise, punished for having the gall to join an overpopulated faction (For the most part, prior to it being an overpopulated faction)... This is a hilariously bad idea.

Look, I get that if you have had to deal with overpoped factions beating you for long enough the idea of you getting stronger while your enemy gets weaker is nice... it stimulates that part of your brain that makes you happy when something bad happens to someone you don't like... but here is the thing: You are then openly antagonizing the majority, and your not correcting things by encouraging movement, your correcting things by just getting rid of people... because that is what will happen, it wont bring people into underpopulated factions, it'll just drive players away from overpopulated factions... and likely it wont drive them to the underpopulated ones, it'll just drive them from the game.

Currently, player retention is Low. I mean from what I have seen, I've heard numbers that hover around 50%. MANY people are checking out the game though, so what keeps everything in balance, is that there is constantly new blood being fed in. New blood that has no clue what they are dealing with. They will be funneled into the underpopped groups, while the groups who are overpopped will be starved of that talent. The fact that the number of people coming into the game keeps the pop stable around 15-20 thousand, with 50% retention is insane.

This is undeniably a long term solution, so it'll be a little bit before it shows a significant effect, but look at Miller... the population there is what it is, Because of the recommended system.

Out of everything on the update, this is probably the one thing I am happy about.

It bothers me alot to see people as clueless as this one posting here.... The reason why none of what u just suggest is done has nothing to do with people crying about it, the reason is it wouldnt change anything.

Let me show u a scenario in both suggestions are complete useless: this is a free game people can make as many accounts as they please so lets say i make 3 accounts and join a different faction on the same server. BAM all our suggestions means jack, cooldowns wont affect the 3 different accounts, blocking 1 account from joining more than 1 faction wont stop me or anyone else having more than 1 char in every faction per server. All u managed to do is force those people to make new accounts with take like 3m.

Populations imbalances need fixing no question about it, but simplistic solutions like the ones u mentioned wouldnt change anything and thats why nothing has being done on that particular direction.

I agree completely. This will allow a balanced server to stay balanced. It will not correct an imbalance.

How do you expect to balance it without putting more new players on the underpopulated faction? You want them to put in bots?

I've proposed an alternative solution to fix the population issues in a separate thread: https://forums.station.sony.com/ps2...r-attacking-the-overpopulated-faction.140065/

My idea give more experience for attacking the overpopulated faction rather than having the two underpopulated factions fight each other.

Its been like an hour? Could you at least wait like a week to see if it does anything to population? Its not going to happen instantly.

This is not a PSA

Yea, someone, I think it was higby that saidthey were doing somthing about pop imbalance this patch. Well, guess this is "somthing" but at best its half *****. And knowing SOE its not going to work.

Hey mattherson guys, how much do you wanna bet our server is gonna be recommended for vanu to join ROTFL. Im gonna test that theory actually

I think on servers where vanu is over pop they should go back to being purple...That is what discouraged people from playing right SOE? right???

Also, no faction swap penalties? So 4th factioners are gonna swap to vanu every 2 hours for all that alert XP (vanu have won 99% of th alerts on mattherson in the last 2 months).

This game is a joke.

It's a step in the right direction.

Really no way to "penalize" faction swapping in the free-to-play model, as they can just make a new account to create a new character. But I agree, they should add in a cool down timer for faction swapping, like they had in PS1, though it will really only apply to those with premium memberships as others will just create a new free account.

This is not going to fix the ridiculous imbalance on some servers (I play Matherson). I've opened the game, seen VS with 50%+ pop, and just exit the game (which then crashes, of course), as I'd rather do something else. It's not fun for anyone, including the VS I'd imagine.

I don't believe the suggestion to be as clueless as you indicate. While it is true that being a free game, any amount of restrictions and penalties SOE decides to implement to combat faction hopping could be circumvented by multiple, free accounts, the inconvenience of such a necessity by those loyal to no faction might actually curb the behavior some.

First and most apparent is the small but noticeable hassle of signing out entirely and signing in with 3 different maintained accounts; an act that alone might dissuade some lazier players. More importantly however would be the fact that these 3 accounts would be wholly independent from one another; SC balances, SC purchases, and membership perks would not be shared across these three accounts, furthering the sting of trying to sidestep the restrictions. All downsides that could have been avoided if the player would just place their 3 characters on 3 separate servers.

To think that SOE's attempts to curb faction hopping would kill the issue entirely is indeed delusional, but so too is insisting that the measure would have little to no impact at all just because free accounts are available for creation. Personally, I'm hopeful that once server transfers are a thing, SOE mandates that it is one faction per server, allowing free transfers for a short period of time to allow for the player base to comply.

These two posts sum up my feelings pretty well. A change like this may be useful for correcting a very minor population imbalance on a server.

But the huge population imbalances we currently have on multiple servers will never be corrected by a change like this. New players logging into Waterson VS will just laugh at the absurdity and leave.

In fact, this is exactly what was seen when Waterson was the recommended server previously... for a short while, Waterson VS population rose a bit. It never hit even, but it did rise further than it had in months. But only a week later, our population cratered even harder than it had previously, as new players with no time invested in their characters unsurprisingly saw no reason to continue fighting against terrible odds.

It pains me that I am financially bound to the NC. I'd love to pick up the torch for Waterson VS. Really wish VS had won out in my group's initial 'Who should we play now that beta is over?' vote.

The change will likely take more than a month to effect things because it depends on the turnover and new players.

The nice thing is, this plan will almost certainly improve things in the long run.