[Suggestion] Solving Population Issues Once and for All? We Can!

There must be a way to do it, and frankly, I just don't get how or why this is happening with the TR. I remember not too long ago the population for TR was higher than that of the Vanu, which was higher than that of the native wildlife of Auraxis, which in turn was higher than the NC. All of a sudden this 180 happened. Even I can't quite understand what the factor was behind that. It was almost like it happened overnight, at least on Waterson and Mattherson.
IMO, the three factions are more balanced now than at almost any point, but perhaps not different enough. If the three factions don't have their own unique flavors, they don't attract their own loyalties and their own types of players. In the name of "balance" the personality of the factions have been removed. IMO, this has hurt the TR the most, because minus the chaingun and the armistice, they don't really have anything too interesting that reflects their faction's personality.

What I think the TR could use is a new toy or new flavor to pique some interest in the faction. Perhaps it's time for the TR to get an 800 rpm LMG, or the auto scout rifles could have faction variance (buff plz cough cough), or something like that. What's really done isn't the most important thing so long as something is done long term. The worse the population imbalances get, the more people are going to leave on all sides- the more that happens, the more compounded population problems become. So long term, I think introducing faction asymmetry is the way to go. Short term... well, that's what comments on threads are for.

You sure you don't know?

Why solving it ?


If you outnumber the enemy 2 to 1, victory is ensured thus giving you easy points on capture and WDS.
Meanwhile, the underpoped have a +50% bonus and manage to grab a kill every now and then thanks to the sheer ammounts of targets (obviously by camping inside a spawn, why would they give up easy certs)


It's a win-win

NC is highest pop .... TR is highest pop ... NC is highest pop ... TR is highest pop

Lithcorp OG's dont give a damn, VS being the underdog since day one and that has just made the Cobalt VS better.


FOTM factions will allways be in flux while the charge up faction will remain stable, getting the short end of the stick in gear design is both blessing and a curse.

They nerfed hipfire... TR is all about just spraying your targets till they die. This is no longer effective.
If you have to aim, you might as well play NC, as their guns are better at ADS.

I know that is why I stopped paying my TR.
TR was fun to just run around hipfire with my jag or carv.. gone are those days.

Hope that clears it all up for you.

I'm always for making the factions more unique and diverse.

But I also think they should nudge new players towards the underpopulated faction when they sign up. When a new player registers I think the most under-populated faction should be the first visible option and they should offer a small cert incentive to pick that faction.

Population imbalance and spawncamping is the allure of the Planetside.

You can't just "fix" something that makes this game unique and unlike any other FPS.

I still do well with TR hipfire in CQC- even with my loadouts geared towards long range where I also do quite well. The AMC is certainly not the best TR CQC weapon (arguably the worst for that in TR Carbines) but I still win a lot of CQC engagements with it. Unlike with my long range loadouts with NC where I have learned to switch to Commissioner when in those situations, I only switch to the sidearm with TR when I am in an engagement and run through the mag. I agree that the edge goes to NC at long range since there are more of these options and the best among them are, stat wise, the most oriented to that niche- just like I feel similarly about TR in CQC.

True, the changes made long range ADS much more competitive and I think that was necessary and adds depth for everyone from a basic gameplay perspective. I recall several posts from people, like myself, who felt the range compression in PS2 was too restrictive and I think, by and large, those concerns have been addressed in a positive way- I i.e. you really have to be concerned about the battlefield as whole and not just how to get in close (though you still can focus on that and there are still a lot of CQC funnels) and no longer only because of the OHK snipers. I think the changes both balanced the weapons themselves within factions (so that CQC weapons are not hands down the go to best performers) and in the process helped balance across factions since the different traits do result in different relative strengths/weaknesses- though these differences were never as large as some, myself included at times, may have made them out to be.

From someone who played NC through flinch and all the other changes, who now plays a lot of TR (and is having a lot of fun with them) I have not really had to change my play style all that much (mid-long range ADS- Ex. I have 1 scope so far foreach of the weapons I use with regularity (default LMG, default AR, and AMC) and they are all 4x. I will go ADS pretty much automatically (a habit from playing a lot of NC) and almost any time the target is ~20m away. I still aim for head shots and I still land a lot of them. I'm looking forward to saving up for the SABR and some of the other burst oriented weapons (though that may be a little down the road). Of course, I realize that a lot of my positivity is likely to be coming simply from the fact that I played NC for so long and so the newness of TR alone is welcoming- so I take my own feelings/experience with a grain of salt when I read of those in the opposite situation and those long time TR who feel a bit tired of what they have.

It's not that hard to explain. If you have superior weapons people play your faction and feel great. Once they don't have the weapons anymore, they don't get the ego boost cause they suddenly lose since they aren't all that skilled...so they leave the game or switch factions.
You had the Striker...you had the "farm-away on infantry"-prowler and so on. They got nerfed several times(direct and indirect nerfs). Since then NC had the by far best setup(best CQC, best aircraft, best heavy tank, extra damage on guns, best MAX ability)...but that stayed unnoticed for some time cause everyone and his grandmother was complaining about ZOE(as a Vanu I can only laugh about that. Yeah, it was really(maybe too) strong on bursters and it did bring the comets at least on the level of the AV of the other 2 factions, but against infantry it was more or less a kamikaze thing and not as broken as people claimed).

TR is hit hard by population cause you always had a lot of players that did depend on superior weapon performance....Vanu-numbers on the other hand didn't change much cause they have always been underperforming(yeah. No bullet drop as faction trait. Doesn't count for long range weapons(instant kill sniper rifles, crossbow) or rocketlaunchers tho...so for everything where bullet drop would actually matter. I played some TR and NC and I never really noticed any bullet drop with the normal guns at all...just extra power or extra bullets) and as a result people know what they are in for.

Balancing is hard tho. There is some stuff that can be strong and looking OP in skilled hands(like guns that make serious damage but therefor have serious bullet drop....or a magrider that could actually hover fast enough to dodge shots. It does not at the moment...at least not if the enemy got some halfway decent aiming skill too. ZOE was another example...in the hands of a skilled player it did shine...in the hands of a noob it was more like suicide)...and there is stuff like the vanguard shield that can be used by every idiot and the enemy can't do anything about it no matter how skilled he is.
The skilled player obviously want toys that are superior in the hands of skilled players(but they only want that for their own faction...the other faction should not have any superior weapon at all, no matter the skill level). The noobs want "I win" toys(obviously only for their faction too).
Can't satisfy them all...and at the moment especially the noobs are most satisfied with NC(cause they got easy to handle weapons with a lot of firepower) and there are hardly any toys that scale well with skill left in the game(either the power got nerfed...or the challenge to handle them).

I'd rather have a fun battle you have a chance at winning than a pointless XP boost, you'll never get complete balance with populations but I wish there was at least some way to ensure fair fights because I know well enough that players will do anything to get an advantage and cheese their certs.

I don't like playing massively outnumbered and I can assume others don't as well.

Man I love coming across something like this in a long post, it lets me know that I can skip the rest of it.

Who gives a flying monkey turd if the global population, or even planet population, is perfectly balanced when each fight averages 5:1 anyways.

For some of us, cert progression and getting new stuff is only a secondary part of the game. Some of us would like to, oh, I don't know, fight a faction that can compete.

If faction populations are balanced, than theoretically you can win on a large scale by superior strategy. We Waterson NC have spent months getting our **** together, and now we have nobody to fight. It's sad.

Zerging isn't "Superior strategy", it's gaming the game, it's cheesing.

And nobody likes sitting around with their thumb up their butt playing "watch the A bar move forward."

OJ

Make it so underpopulated factions, and even hexes have a spawn time reduction
And overpopulated hexes/factions have a spawn time increase.

The exact numbers can be worked out, obviously.

If you assume everyone will do a 1:1 kill, the overpopped faction will ALWAYS have more players that return to the fight before the underpoped faction can respawn

- It will help the underpopped faction attempt pushes, knowing if they take people out-- it's actually thinning the numbers to their favor. They can play it a bit more aggressively instead of waiting in a spawn.
- The overpopped faction will have to play it more cautiously. They have the numbers but if they die, they can't get back into that fight as quickly. No more acting stupid sitting infront of the enemy spawn trying to get some cheap kills.

The last few times I've played on Waterson the pop seems to have stabilized. NC is still the most pop but I've seen TR get close to 34 35% matching NC at primetime. Vanu has stayed around its 30%.

Only off-prime hours can get ridiculous be I've seen TR get the ridiculous off-prime pops on some days and NC on others, while vanu have it on very rare occasions since PU02.

Overall though I think this is because Waterson is the most balanced of all the servers. We have good outfits on every side and tend to fight hard no matter which side or who you are fighting. Its a tough server and the Waterson community seems to be different from the other servers when I play on them.

Overall pop can be balanced by players and not by devs. Yes balance and new cool items can help a faction but overall that will lead to pop swinging and not fixing itself. I'm not saying that these things should stop just that they are not the best option to fix balance. Also as others have suggested, setting arbitrary caps that limit pop and add queues would only add to frustration instead of fixing the issue.

The best solution I've read so far is to incentivize the under-pop by increasing %xp boost for the Under-pop faction. Bring back the server increase for under-pop factions and add it on top of the continent pop bonus. Then they could add a territory pop bonus on top of that for fighting in under-pop hexes. Again this could help but not solve population problems.

Overall the only way to solve pop problems is to make sure the factions are balanced and each have their certain flavors without making each side becoming flavor of the month. They need to rework each factions look and sound to make each faction BAD@$$, but this would not be enough. They need to make outfits and the community a larger part of the game. They need to incentivize running with an outfit and participating in the community but do it through gameplay systems and not do it outside of the game. One way to help would be to have outfit perks, outfit bases(not only getting to have an outfit logo on a base you capture but a base that an outfit can customize, train at , and use for scrimmages), Outfit recruiting, and ingame mail/newsletter about the and outfit/faction/community. Better communication tools such as outfit pages in the outfit tab that allows the outfit to have a calendar and message board(like a forum in the game) would make things much smoother for more outfits. However lets not forget about the lone wolfs. People who are lone wolfs should also have access to a community page to show what the faction is doing and planning. This can help show and weed out who is the leaders of each outfit and who holds the most respect/power in a faction.

Anyway that is my 2 cents but is only a few observations and solutions I have.

And my advise to you: If that was a long post for you then seriously better stay out of any kind of forum and instead go back to elementary school and midschool to learn fast reading and debating(yeah, that's the stuff where you actually need arguments. Heard about it? Okay, never mind.). You are just wasting your precious time here....
I kept this post short, just for you. ;-)

It's definitely not a win if you don't enjoy getting curb stomped by enemy platoons that heavily out-number you. Even if you do get extra points, there's not much fun involved in getting rolled.

And it's even less fun doing the rolling.