So that's why the VS wins all the alerts.

Agree with OP. This really needs sorting out. Activate character lock once an alert starts. You log in one character, you cannot play another (ON THE SAME SERVER) till the alerts over. You get a 15 minute warning before it happens, plenty of time to switch.

There are a few things I'd like to point out that an unfortunately extreme amount of PS2 players neglect to factor into Alert discussions.

#1) If you're relying on Alert XP for your general source of cert income, you're truly going about it the wrong way.

#2) The more facilities/territories you hold, the more options you have to stir up great fights. Defending is hands down the most efficient cert gain in the game BECAUSE: a) your 5/10/15% XP increase you receive dependent on the base type and b) your faction does not need to rely on a sunderer (which are still entirely too easy to gib), thus providing a significant drop in downtime as infantry.

#3) You are awarded XP relative to time played during the alert after it ends. Example being I logged in at the end of a dominating victory and was only granted 988 XP. Regardless, it's a FREE video game and players will do whatever it is they damn well please. You'll have to accept it at some point, better sooner than later. I gotta say though, the whining about 4th factioners has beaten the dead horse into a skeletal husk. Just clangin' on empty bones now.

#4) Kill stuff. This is your ultimate source of cert gain. Alerts = more people who log in which becomes = more people to murder ruthlessly. Try out a maxed blockade sunderer with 2 furies on it inside a nearly overrun Amp Station. With a non-derp driver you'll rack up 40+ kills in under 3 min. How about a fury harasser when you find that sunderer with evil dots clustered around it? Just grab SOMETHING that others whine about because it's "OP" and enjoy it until SOE removes their pants and promptly keisters whatever it is. I can't even begin to scratch the surface of the rotten tactics I use to cert farm.

#5) The sooner you stop playing to "win" alerts, the more you'll enjoy this game. Relax, take a deep breath if you're losing, and find a 48+ where you're outnumbered and throw yourself at it. Winning alerts and celebrating it is like winning the Special Olympics, you can see where that's going.

In before people make angry comments because I don't view alerts the way they do. This is clearly my opinion. Enjoy the teabag gif.

Although Woodman certainly has population balance problems I don't think mass 4th factioning by outfits during alerts is it. I can't remember the link but someone recently posted the population graphs for Woodman. Alerts were very obvious on the timeline due to the massive VS population spikes, but both other factions saw a more standard population growth at the same time as those spikes (due to the alert coinciding with prime time or whatever).

I don't know why Woodman sees the spikes it does, but don't think character locks would solve the problem. Equally I don't think they would have any negative downsides so think they should be implemented to better control population balance. I just don't think it is the silver bullet solution to the Woodman server problems.

I love it when muppets like the OP blame a specific faction, as if they attract a specific kind of people, and those people are all in league against them and their faction; rather than the idea that people of both NC and VS switch to the winning side at some point, or the losing side just LEAVES the continent, meaning percentages increase for both other factions.

This reminds me of when feminists discovered the percentage of women in workplace related deaths and injuries was going up. They wrote articles in papers, declared their outrage on tv and demanded something be done to stop this inequality! Except men account for something around 96% percent of workplace deaths, and the number of women injured or killed had gone down; what had ACTUALLY happened was that safer working practices had lead to a much greater decrease in male deaths, leading to percentage change appearing to rise for women.

So these ladies had to eat some serious crow.

I love it when muppets like the OP blame a specific faction, as if they attract a specific kind of people, and those people are all in league against them and their faction; rather than the idea that people of both NC and VS switch to the winning side at some point, or the losing side just LEAVES the continent, meaning percentages increase for both other factions.

This reminds me of when feminists discovered the percentage of women in workplace related deaths and injuries was going up. They wrote articles in papers, declared their outrage on tv and demanded something be done to stop this inequality! Except men account for something around 96% percent of workplace deaths, and the number of women injured or killed had gone down; what had ACTUALLY happened was that safer working practices had lead to a much greater decrease in male deaths, leading to percentage change appearing to rise for women.

So these ladies had to eat some serious crow.

Genuinely the best advice I've seen on this forum. As someone who has fun winning on the battlemap than farmpwninnoobs, its gonna be tricky, but I definitely agree with ya Bauce.

Alerts are so frequent, and on Mattherson we haven't had a nonglobal in ages, that they are unavoidable in everyday play. If I log on for a session, there's a good chance there will be an alert, which means VS will go to 4X% world pop, and there are no good fights because everything is around ~4-7 facilities at a time for 3 factions. Cert gain amd resource gain are very low over the extended period because as soon as you push somewhere, you get triple outpopped. 48 v 144, where the 144 has the resources to chainpull tanks and air and MAXes isn't a good way to get certs as the 48, it's a good way to get crushed. Multiple global alerts give you no choice; if you want to play, you play in alerts, and when your faction goes to 2X%, it 's just painful.

Just kill things doesn't work when you can't leave your spawn rooms and nobody on your faction has resources, especially when people just log off to switch factions or simply in disgust. Guaranteed crushing defeat and bad cert gain are no fun for anyone.

to quote a co-worker i hooked onto this game "I hate fighting dos' purple guys"

4th faction strikes again.

The Forth Faction - FF
Empire specific traits:
-No sore loser dropoff
-Increased bad excuses size
-Higher L2P rate

MBT: The MommyLikesMe
ESF: The MyTreeBeatsMeEveryNight
MAX Abillity: Ragequit allowes the player to insta switch to the faction that is about to win

Jokes aside, we really need some changes

Your statements don't line up. If they were switching to the winning side, they'd have been joining NC. I'm also skeptical that disorganized, disloyal players independently switching to alternate lower-level characters for a free reward would so decisively flip all those battles like that.

Plus it's not even great math. 100% participation x 2 bases x 110% pop multiplier > 25% participation x 5 bases x 100% majority pop. It makes sense for those just signing in to join the winners, but literally switching doesn't pay off as much,

Regardless, it's still a concern regardless of any single anecdote. As I recently said in another thread, I'd fix it by reducing the instant reward and making it an accrued one. Every alert puts rewards in a pot for that faction, and at the end of the week/month/season the award is given out based on playtime with that faction. So if you main TR and switch to VS just for the end of an alert, you've hurt the pool you're going to get a lot of and helped the pool you'll get only a tiny fraction of.

Well I will give you a little insight as to what happened that alert on all sides. It was a capture 9 amps alert, and it started pretty ****tily. It was cut evenly between the VS and the NC at 4 amps, and the TR had a lowly 1 (Funny how I don't see any TR go woe is me). The NC was already conquering Amerish so had all the amps, but Sungrey (They were already capping it) locked down, Esamir was evenly split between the factions with Freyr TR, Nott VS, Elli NC. Indar on the other hand the VS controlled both Dahaka, and Zurvan, NC had Paris. In essence it was a bad time for the Amp alert to start because everything was messed up. This is how the command chat went

We were told to hold Zurvan, and then we could win, but as per usual command never looks at the other conts and doesn't notice that Sungrey wasn't even ours anymore and had minutes to flip, but alas we stayed and defended at Zurvan for about 20-30 min. Until low and behold somebody realized that we needed to start taking amps. Slowly we started moving out of Zurvan, and losing ground the whole way. The NC were the main threat so letting it fall to the TR wasn't that big a deal. So most outfits made a big push on Esamir. First was to resecure Nott, then take Elli, then Take Freyr. This would put us in the lead. We had little resistance from the NCs pretty major 37%-39% world pop, and were able to take them all. We were expecting a fight yet we rolled over all three bases and never saw a large contingent of enemies. My outfit was left on Esamir to push out at Elli to put a buffer on it, and most others went to Sungrey, and were able to take it pretty easily as well. Only major fight I was in was Zurvan, and that was against the TR who were outpoped by tenfold.

My Question is, what was going on on the other side? I mean you guys had the pop for the most part, but you let it slip through your fingers. Not defending some bases, over committing at others, making pushes but pulling back as soon as you have some resistance. Sounds like you command channel was a mess. I will admit that pop shifted our way, and I can't explain that, but we were winning long before it did.

The odd part about all of this that as a NC player I find it never happens in reverse.. Meaning that technically those people who logged should of joined the NC who was winning right ? they didn't, they joined the vs just to ruin the hard work NC had put into that win.. and I see this type of odd kinda hatred against the nc.. were not allowed to win 1 out of 10 alerts.

You guys are funny. No, really.
Remember the prime time alert on Woodman we won with 33% world pop opposing TR's 39%? Remember that we won it with ~8k xp?
But yeah, all VS are zergers.
Tbh, on some days I observe the same phenomenon: vs pop increasing suddenly 90 minutes in the alert. Most of my TR buddies log off, and do NOT log on their vanu chars. This ain't 4th factioning, this is a ragequit issue.
Facing highly organized forces as a faction with zero organization yourself can, in fact, be a frustrating experience.
But no, I forgot, it's ZOE

Brilliant idea. So I come home from work, just log in with my alt to get the daily certs and bam I cannot log in with my main anymore. GG, good night. Where do we get a 15 minutes warning?

Sadly, all the Factions do this half way through the alert, they switch to the leading Faction if the lead is large enough.

The VS do it, the TR do it, the NC do it... the NC and VS are notorious for doing it on Mattherson, since the biggest VS outfits are the same people who are the biggest NC outfits. Sometimes, it's coordinated through Team Speak, etc, since when you're on Team Speak you can still talk to people who are playing opposing factions, etc.

Genudine: NC overpop, VS mid pop and well organized, TR severely, like punch your monitor under populated but the most organized of the three.

Helios: NC overpop, TR mid pop and not quite as organized as the few TR that played on Genudine, VS underpopped.

Connery: Connery is anyone's game! \o/

Also I would like to thank my local neighborhood JENK platoon, those dudes put in a lot of effort during alerts.

They've done what they can to discourage this, you get less experience if you've been fighting in the alert for less time one that character. Not to mention if you just want to go change it up and play with friends and there just happens to be an alert, which happens.

Making people unable to log into a different character during an alert would be extremely annoying to anyone logging in just to get their passives. It's a problem though so I'd say if you have one character that's been in the alert already, you can't get experience for changing factions.

Honestly, as far as my month or so on Connery is concerned, NC leadership has ZERO tactical decision making. I ran with A Different Kind for a while, and the dudes with mics were good players with zero mind for tactics. We ran up on a VS controlled tech station with a frikin horde of lightnings and MBT's, and we got routed, hard. "Push the generator room" is not a viable tactic when the damn thing is covered in ZOE's and heavies. Meanwhile, the cap point was totally unguarded and was ignored, because apparently infils and LA's are useless.

I left that outfit, obviously.

Just finished an Amerish alert. VS has ~60% population the entire Alert and ended up getting a dominating victory. Fix your ******* game SOE and balance the VS already. Both TR and NC are bleeding players to the VS everyday because of how OP they are, and as a result the VS win 95% of alerts across every server now. Its pathetic that it has taken you over 6 months to address this issue yet. Before long it's going to be nothing but VS playing this game because every other faction either switched or just got frustrated and stopped playing.

They just need to disable alt's shared on the same server as your main while an alert is happening. Your "main" being which ever character you are logged into at the start of the alert. Love this game but this problem has been around for so long it boggles my mind how they haven't fixed it completely yet. The diminished rewards was a good idea but some people don't faction swap just for points, but rather just to spite the winning faction. As the op said, it's bad sportsmanship. Simple as that.

If you want certs, switch to MAX and hit f to activate ZOE.
Run with the other 8-10 you see and it should be pretty easy.