New Alerts - Your thoughts

With all the fuzz about the new resource "revamp" thingy, the new alerts have passed mostly unspoken.

I personally played 3 new alerts on Woodman today.
I'd like to know who thought that a triggered alert where a faction must fight 2vs1 for one hour was a good idea.

I still reserve my final opinion for after the Woodman - Miller merge, but as of now, I'm rather disappointed with the new alert system. Having to constantly hopelessy defend against overwhelming forces is everything but fun. And if (IF) you manage to defend a base, you open the map to discover that you lost 4 elsewhere simply because you don't have the pop to defend every front.

You might start with a 75% continent and population advantage, but soon as the alert start, you find yourself fighting against two faction hordes of at least 60% continent pop.

BTW, 2 draws out of 3 alerts and the one we won, we won because the NCs where a no-show too busy trying to capture Hossin while we were defending amerish.

Seriously. WHY?! Didn't we had enough zergs already?



What's your thoughs on the new alerts system?

Good thread. Especially since you explained in detail what these new alerts are all about.

No alerts on Connery. No one could trigger one.

I'm glad that they no longer randomly pop up and are now player initiated, however, I'm not sure the 75% threshold and the 2v1 setup are great ideas.

Yep. They are not.
Alerts now are hours of ghostcap untill one faction manage to get the 75%, then same faction get harassed to pulp by the other two factions combined forces.

I won't shout "can we have the old alerts back" like any forumsider, but it's requiring all my jedi self-control not to do so.

can we have the old alerts back?

Hey, I did not shout!

So.

TL;DR: I don't despise these new alerts PER-SE, I despise the fact that now they are THE ONLY alerts available. Why not having these AND the old alerts at the same time? So we could have different gameplay than just territory control AND a decent continent rotation so we are not back to INDARSIDE all over again?



Couple of examples to make my point:



Yesterday during prime time nobody on Woodman was able to trigger any Alert, so basically we went on playing without any. I like alerts and I dislike the facts that there is the POSSIBILITY that NONE is triggered during prime time.
At around 23.30 (11.30 pm for those of twelve hours clocks) VS after almost 2 hours of ghostcapping, managed to trigger Amerish. As you can see, far into the alert, the VS managed to gain control of the continent thanks to overpop and TR no-show.

TRs were too busy fighting Indarside.





In the morning, situation reversed:



As you can see, far into the alert, both VS and TR didn't show up. Once again too busy fighting Indarside:







To sum it up, alerts with this system:

- might NOT trigger during prime time when is the best and funniest moment to have an alert
- are impossible to play in case of low server population or in early/late hours
- they incentive zergs both in defence and in offence situation
- they are triggered after mostly hours of ghostcapping
- elimitate the "continent rotation" that was finally preventing the hated indarside.
- are designed to be challenging but ends up in being almost impossible to achieve when triggered in high pop situations

So, do we only get continent capture alerts now? What about capture and hold all Biolabs/Tech Plants/AMP Stations? Have they gone?

I hate the new alerts. The territorial control ones we had before were much more fun and the 2hr time was just right (allowing for tactical moves, push and counter-push etc).

I would like to see the old alerts back, including the odd facility capture one popping up every now and then.

Also, while they're at it, the terrible new resource system needs to revert back to the old one. Or at the very least, resources need to be linked to territory. At the moment all they have done is remove another tactical layer by making territory count for nothing. After all, why both taking anything if your resources are always full? Why not just sit at the crown, or wherever, 24hrs a day shooting stuff?

I understand their reasoning but I greatly dislike them to be honest. There's no change in locked continents; no change in who's got benefits because the new alerts simply ensure status quo rather than ensure dynamic change of what's open and what side got what locks. The only time the locks will work is going to be the ghost cap crews and pray that they don't get Hossin locked for too long. Previously you had constantly rotating continents open along with constantly rotating starting positions to go with it...

This.
Exactly my point.

i kind of liked the random objective alerts. Do they plan on bringing them back at all?

Having to capture the most bio labs across all continents was fun IMO.

I do hope they plan on adding more creative alerts and not just territory control alerts.


One thing i liked about the old system was that it happened often enough to where it felt like a good session when i logged on. Maybe they didnt like the sudden mass exodus after an alert in the old system, but i liked it. It gave everyone a defined break after a tough alert.

The prevous alerts were by no way the best solution but at least they gave us a chance to escape Indar from time to time. Now its basicly back to beta when we had 2 continents and all the action on Indar. Sucks alot. Now with the EU servers merging there is even a LESSER chance of seeing amerish or esamir since no more choice

I've only seen one alert since the update. Normally I would have seen 10 in the same amount of time played.
I like alerts, so I'm not a fan of this new system.

Another thing I've noticed is continents stay locked much much longer. (because there are so few alerts)
Except Indar off course, so we are back like it was before the Amerish update. Indarside.

I would love to be able to play on more than two continents for the whole day. The previous system was actually better because it almost guaranteed a map rotation.

Come on people, apart from the resource/territory pointlessness issue, the alerts are the most important thing.

Surely other people must have comments?

I might be wrong here, but the empire who reaches 75% territory control doesn't auto-win do they? They must own at least 75% when the alert timer finishes, right? Yesterday my empire already (or was really close) owned 75% when the alert started but slowly lost territory as the hour went along. The outcome was no empire winning the alert and nothing happening at all...

3-way fights in PS 1 typically resulted in stalemates. This is also true in PS2. The problem with PS2 is there's almost always a 3-way because of empire footholds.

That's going to be the problem until they bring in old/new alerts. Continents at 33/33/33 don't see the sort of territory dominance it takes to trigger the new alerts, so you're probably going to see the unpopular continents lock back and forth for whoever has overpop on the server or (like Connery) the pop stays even so long you just don't see any continent lock alerts.

If/when they introduce alerts that are either timer based, or can otherwise actually be triggered we'll get a nice rotation again.

It looks like the TR are about to trigger Indar in that shot. If you could get the NC to just leave Indar long enough...

Haven't seen a new alert yet,
but what REALLY caught my eye is how they work AFTER they start.
Basically there will be 2 factions getting a message:
"Hey theres someone taking yo bases. Team up and take him down"
And the third one get this one:
"You're winning! We can't have that, so we just sent an offer to your enemies with a nice bonus if they kick your ***. Sucks to be you"

Getting to 75% triggers the alert; the empire with 75% land need to get to 85% while the other two empires need to keep the winning empire below 85% and individually hit 30 or 35% (can't recall which one) to win it (winning in this case only give exp for the two empires defending and not locking the continent, only the empire at 75% can lock it by getting to 85%). Any other outcome is a draw.

But when I pressed TAB the details of the alert said "Maintain at least 75%"... That's what is throwing me off here... It didn't say anything about this 85% or 35% stuff...