Alerts - Tacit collusion

If one empire owns let's say 40% of the map, there is absolutely no point for the other empires in fighting each other. Yet we see it again and again and again.

Right now it is happening on Miller. VS has 50% of Amerish while NC and TR are fighting each other.

Cuz fighting VS = no fun.
TR and NC wannah have fun. VS wannah zerg. It's called "faction diversity"

Fighting the VS is very annoying because the magrider can driver over hills at will and falls in your back and you have to admit while the TR is at least trying to fight the VS the NC totaly gave up.

+ the dig is zerging the highby out of the map

See the devs didn't want issues with player populations in a 1 vs 1 faction game so they brilliantly thought of a way of doing exactly that with 3 factions while thinking to two weaker factions would always fight the stronger one.

Players take the path of easiest farm and what better way to do that then strong faction 1 and 2 beating thestuffing out of low gobal population weak faction 3.

Nobody likes to fight 0.75x ADS Orion/Battlegoose spam. Hopefully the upcoming lmg changes will help to alleviate this problem.

TL;DR summary: It's the players more than anything. ALL of the factions need some serious blood transfusion so that the VS are less tryhardy and the TR/NC act less stupid all the time when it comes to choosing hexes to fight over. Nerfing things doesn't really fix that directly

Adding on to this: the PPA nerf did wonders here, but there's still a ways to go when it comes to explicitly fighting VS Infantry. To be fair though... Each faction has it's "Hate b/c" list. At the top of Hating TR, is their still broken Harasser that shreds our A2G esf's faster than a Skyguard does while taking even longer to kill. Then there's us NC Maxes who can walk right up to any other max with our single default Shotgun arm and just *click click click click click* it's DEAD.... It surprised the hell out of me the first time I did this when in the past I used to just hang back and try to carefully Duel them with a Falcon or duel Ravens. NOPE...just click it in the face spamming the button and they're out 450 nanites instantly. Works wonders against C4 fairies too.

But VS are still the absolute worst on Connery b/c of outfits like HIVE, JpG & its inexplicable Korean / Chinese me-toos., S3X1, PCYS, even FCRW to some extent still ...the only thing TR have that comes close to those is CIK, SOLX, & TRG. ...but atleast CIK is fun to fight against. None of those others I listed are fun to fight. They don't take chances, they don't mix it up, they don't ever durp around. They're only on to farm DIRECTIVES. They ruin good small fights and spent way too much money on all their Rigs so they never lag once in Big fights either. Some of them also run Chams / Tracelines so you can never catch them off-guard and if you got away with flanking them it's only b/c they were too distracted to look to their left.

Not sure enough players actually care about alerts anymore. VS seem to have the most players who are willing to redeploy/move around the map to win though.

We need to see some variety in the alerts before I decide to bother with the outcome. Personally I'd like alerts to be 1 hour long instead of 2 so I can actually sit down and play through it, indeed, it would actually instill some kind of urgency to conquering territory. But yeah, more variety, please.

More varied alerts, resource revamp, LMG changes implimented = good times.

LOL
At first VS was dominant b/c of the Magrider. The Mag got nurfed hard, the VS still dominated.
Then the VS was winning just because of ZOE. SOE heard the NC and TR QQ and nerfed ZOE so hard into the ground, that it popped back out somewhere in china. Still no hint of VS getting weaker.
Then it was the PPA ... nurfhammer again ... nothing changed.
Now its the 0.75 ADS. DBG is going to remove it, most VS players are like "Meh, what ever."
You see where this going?

At this rate DBG will end up nerfing the beamer and the VS will still bi.tchslap TR and NC across auraxis.

That is NOT the reaction coming from VS. Whenever 0.75x ads lmgs were brought up as an issue in the past, the standard response was "get good" or "it doesnt matter". Now with the outcry from VS it does seem to really matter to you guys...

ZOE and PPA were legitimately game-breaking and their toning down was completely justified, as were items from TR - like the Banshee.

Actually, I distinctly remember the VS imploding on themselves after every nerf. Usually they'd be replaced by TR ruling all the servers, using something that had been buffed or released during the VS' reign but had gone unnoticed until there was a power void to fill.

Then the VS will get a new toy or something buffed because they're underperforming relative to the TR. Then the TR get nerfed into the ground and the VS suddenly "discover" the thing that had been given to them during the TR's reign. Then the cycle repeats.

I've been here long enough to witness the dominant faction changing hands between VS and TR about four or five times, and each changing of the guard happened shortly after one of those factions got re-balanced in some way or another. Usually there'd be several small tweaks leading up to it, and then SOE/DBG would drop a massive, sweeping balance change that collapses one faction and/or propels the other into supremacy.

Meanwhile, the NC sits here watching the ceaseless complaints about the Vanguard's shield and their MAX, while never actually getting anything game-breaking enough to let them rule servers with an iron fist the way the other two factions have. Except for Phoenix Week. That should be a national holiday in the NC or something.

Unless you'd prefer to theorize that all the top-tier players actually aren't human but rather a sapient species of migratory birds, who instinctively migrate between red and purple surroundings based on a biological clock tuned to the seasonal cycles of their home planet. Unfortunately blue, being the color of the most vicious apex predator on their home planet, is utterly terrifying to them and they avoid it like the plague.

But I believe the idea that these cycles are macro-scale reactions to changes in game balance is more reasonable.

Speaking as a person with a character on all 3 factions on 2 servers... nope.

What generally happens is that no one really pays attention to territory ownership % for the first hour of the alert, but at the halfway mark whoever is in the lead will get double teamed.

This. I have 0 fun fighting VS, aside from certain conditions. TR is a fun, evenly matched battle with even pop, but VS are an uphill battle. They are unbalanced. Why would I fight an uphill battle when I can have fun fighting against TR? Alerts are largely meaningless anyway, so I just play where I'm the most effective.

Let me state a simple fact:
in every alert a faction gets double teamed but there aren't any reason to think it's the strongest , the weakest or so on.
Players flow towards the fights they think they give most fun.

12-14 hrs ago or so I played an alert on Amerish: TR got most territory control and after a while most pop too , while VS started with 50% pop, never had most territory % and were doubleteamed, even when the TR got the most pop.
The TR-NC border was a desert with like 5-10 people per faction fighting, while the fights along the VS borders were from 24-48 and more.

The real reason is there's no incentive to play an alert to win, because the +30% XP bonus compensate the lesser sum at the end if losers.
The only bonus is the 50% off to the various nanites' costs, which is not a great one.

And STOP BLAMING THE PLAYERS for a defect in the game design and the lack of good mechanics.

http://ps2alerts.com/

Look at the numbers they are kind of strange

Not so strange: VS has more organization and it seems they attract more disciplined people.

On all Servers?

Partly yes. It's also a combination of overpop (meaning the actual pop playing the alert) and some unbalance in the VS weaponry.

Anyway this also shows that alerts are poorly thought.

I was leading a platoon of almost all BR100s for that Alert, and we actually got double teamed pretty hard for the last 30 minutes. It just didn't matter because we were so far ahead already. We had all three Tech Plants on Amerish and had sunderers guarding the A point on both the vulnerable Tech Plants. Our platoon (VoGu/VIB/UBAD/UMVS/VC/IP/IVRI/etc) held Tumas Tech Plant for the last 20 or so minutes of the Alert against a massive TR zerg with 96+ people and about 60% overpop. TR were fighting you for most of the Alert because every time they tried to re-take Tumas they hit a brick wall.

Some... lololol