Somebody please explain why NC is the most pathetic faction right now?

I've been playing Planetside 2 since it's release. And I've been with the NC since the very beginning. My experience has always been that unless NC outnumbers the opposition at least 3 to 1. They don't win anything, nothing, na-da. NC never put up decent fights. On Connery, NC is pretty much the designated punching bag, aka cert farm for everyone else. And from what I've heard, NC isn't doing much better on the other servers either.

I've considered jumping faction MANY MANY times. But due to my initial monetary investment into my NC character I'm pretty much mentally obligated to stick with NC. Needless to say my overall frustration with the faction has been pretty consistently increasing over the years.

So can anybody tell me what the hack is so fundamentally wrong with NC? And please don't throw me the age old incredibly snarky and condescending "every NC players just suck and stay suck" remark. Nor how "NC weapons just have high skill caps" (Let's face it, no matter how high the skill caps, they should be reached by majority of NC players already, after years of practice). Or NC is just disorganized (True, but don't you find it strange how most of organized platoons stick with the other two factions instead of NC?). Or the lack of dedicated NC pilots (Once again, why is it that vast majority of fliers chose the other two factions?).

Since everybody always claim that NC weapons are just as efficient as the other two faction's weapons, and I suppose I personally can handle them okay. Anybody have any freaken clue?

They are?

They have the best CQC Maxes and slugs are just stupid if you can aim, the most varied and probably best overall weapon selection, they have the most noob friendly tank (even if it requires a heavy cert investment), tied for the best ESF with hands down the most versatile ESAI weapon, best voice pack, and best vanity item.

I know you didn't want to hear that it's organization that's holding the NC back... but it's organization because this is what happens when an organized VS outfit plays NC.

http://ps2alerts.com/Alert/4599

Atleast the NC have Ravens..

Poor TR have nothing going for them.

Are NC underperforming? Can it be proven that they are worse on all servers? Im not so sure.

That being said:
There has been alot of theorycrafting over the years as to exactly why, i dont think a definative answer will ever be found.
There is as you have said the belief that all the 'bads' choose NC when they start for unknown reasons, due to the law of averages this simply cannot be the case.

And also as you said, the old 'NC weapons are UP' argument, i can say from experience this is also not the case.

I do however think the skill ceiling argument has some weight, although i dont think there is a big enough gap to account for what your seeing.

Perhaps the flinch imbalance and other problems at release such as van shield bug that plagued the NC is the reason.
Perhaps alot of the experienced vets at launch had a tough time playing NC so either stopped playing and / or switched to another faction because of this (i know serveral X-NC players who now play TR or VS but were NC through and through in PS1). This would mean VS and TR winning the alerts with NC coming last place 90% of the time due to no leadership thats got a clue. In turn the NC 'glory hunter' players will flock to TR & VS for the alert wins leaving NC with even more skewed fresh blood / experience players ratio, perhaps it snowballed from there since NC was left with the 'i dont care' players who 'see through the pointless alert wins'.


TBH tho, NC on Miller win alot of alerts, not all but ive seen us win several prime times over the past few weeks, we even won an Indar one at the weekend which is rare for us.

kiddies love the rock music...

Yes but ability to win a 1v1 with 'the best weapons' does not equate to winning a war or an alert.
Perhaps the NC weapons are good to kill 1 person in a 1v1 but fail miserably when compared to the others at fighting 2v2 or 3v3 or 50v50. Perhaps the van being able to take 2-3 more shells with a full shield actualy equates to nothing when faced with multiple tanks.
Perhaps out ESF being larger than the other 2 does cause the elite pilots to say, 'no im not going NC and giving myself an auto disadvantage'.

Or it could simply be that what happens on Emerald server is in no way related to how the rest of the game plays, and all this UP, OP, unorganised, organised, best / worse weapons is just perceived problems that are created out of frustration from dying and or jubilance of winning.

A non gaming example, strikers in football (soccer to you lot) are always remembered for the time they messed up and got us knocked out the world cup, the same fans who belittle them are all too quick to forget it was the very same striker that scored in the previous round to net us the victory. Winning 1 game means nothing compared to loosing another.
Its all about emotion and emotions cloud judgement, good or bad.

It's mainly a Connery NC problem as far as I know.

Only the log in screen has good music for NC.

On connery the NC are kind of a joke, with the exception of recursion ofc (which doesnt do OPs anymore?) in any case we havent seen a good NC outfit in forever, my outfit of general hooligans that mess around and just have fun with the game tends to cut through the NC with relative ease.

If you think the NC is bad on connery adk looks like gods on emerald XD

I like NC stuff best, but our player base is bad. Overall, that is. Just learn to appreciate the lone wolf/small team experience. Pug toons will just p you off with excessive suckage.

We have Fractures that can be used as "tickle" cannons. Also Pounders that take a decent amount of skill/time to zero in on a moving target and are better used of AI than AV.

After creating a NC Alt, I find the TR AV Max loadouts somewhat disappointing.

Last I heard, Recursion's taking a bit of a Planetside break. That was just TR platoon-level chatter, though, and probably very wishful at that.

All I know is I haven't seen the recursion tag in any sort of organized fashion in months.

Because NC propaganda says "freedom" so it naturaly attracts lonewolfs who are disorganised and unwilling to cooperate. Running public squads in the NC is pretty much impossible, noone's going to obey you anyway...

Furthermore, although no faction is cleary good nor bad the NC still seem to be the good guys. When I first joined I thought
- " oh, look! The NC are the blue freedom fighters with cool hard-hitting railgun (I was so gullible) weaponry, the TR are like soviet russia with old, boring guns and the VS... VS are gay"
No wonder I choose NC...
Also why there's NC kicking other faction's butts on every PS2 picture, for example the one on the loading screen?
Anyways the fact that the NC appears to be the main "good guys" faction makes more people choose NC and that naturaly causes NC to have a higher pop dominated by newbies while most good NC players who like cooperation switch to TR or VS.

IMO

1. NC has poor air support on Connery.

2. Reactive lattice strategy.

Was this a day or two ago on emerald when GOKU did ops with BAX on NC. That was a frustrating alert. i just pretty much stayed on the redeploy screen looking at the map. I thought is was bad on the vs side but tr got obliterated.

I run a (very) small outfit of a few friends. To us, an op is getting 4 people on and running 2 fully kitted AP Vanguards around murdering everything with concentrated fire. I bring this up because I am usually listening in on NC Command chat during alerts.

On Emerald, there is maybe 2-3 outfits that coordinate during alerts, and a couple of smallish outfits that grab pubbers and try to coordinate, but are hamstrung by pubbers not really understanding how rapid redployside has to be to actually work. Time and again, on Emerald at least, I've seen incidents where redployed NC counter-attacking a push will absolutely smash the attackers even when outnumbered 60/40. The problem comes down to organization however, because for every single time that happens, there tends to be one giant zergball somewhere with 30% of our population trying to push into a biolab and playing snipe from spawn instead of say, coordinating a MAX crash at the shield gens. This kind of thing tends to prevent the rapid redployside required to win alerts, and when it does happen it often happens with just enough speed to get to a place as the SCU blows.

We also on Emerald don't really have any of the so-called MLG infantry outfits that I know of; I cannot think of a single outfit that can drop 8-10 BR100's on a point and hold off 4 times their number.

Individual fights though, especially defensive ones, I see the NC absolutely smash opposition over and over and over however.

Basically- Coordination.

Yes, that was the alert I linked, and the TR was totally ineffective against us.

To be fair, unless they have thrown a huge population into a very defensible base, the TR on Emerald tends to be totally ineffective against anything. VS has people who are the same; DaPP comes to mind. PHX on NC can pretty easily fall into the same sphere, but from what I've been seeing on command chat they've been getting better; actually coordinating attacks and such.

Im pretty sure BAX KN1 and AC can hold their own on emerald NC pretty well last I checked.