Locking continents makes a fun game boring!

Isn't it brilliant to lock you out of the game you might pay to play except the genius of locking out from where you want to play so you have to play where there is not any fun to be had. Just brilliant absolutely marvelous. I hope these wizards don't actually draw pay for such superior thinking!

Maybe replace player based map rotation with regular mechanical one.

Yes, it's bad design, which frequently results in people logging off when the intense fight they were in is replaced with a choice between two dead continents. Personally I would have them rotate the map far less often - maybe as little as once or twice per 24 hours. It can still be player based, but the threshold for a continent lock should be raised significantly.

All those people move to one of the dead continents and it picks up after a few minutes. Besides, there aren't enough players for 4 continents at once, or even two. Hell, on Connery there sometimes isn't even a big fight on a single continent, and I hear this server is one of the more busy ones.

The theoretical minimum is a few minutes (for someone to get a sunderer to a hostile base and significant numbers on both sides to congregate). In reality it can be far longer, even an hour or more. Many people, including myself, just log off rather than wait around to see if it picks up again or not.

No one's suggesting they increase the numbers of open continents. Just rotate them less often.

You want to start fights on a continent? You should have a plottable method of execution to get onto it in the first place.

I read somewhere they were considering changing the number of cap points from 15 to 20. But part of the original complaint was not being able to play where he wanted to play, longer games might make his situation worse, as it would take longer to get to the continent OP wants. Also, it can already take a couple hours to lock a continent, people want to see a result from their hard work, and the average gamer probably won't spend that amount of time in the game. Just some other thoughts to consider.

That's cool. It might take a week to get from one side to the other, if it ever happens.

Yeah - choice of continent vs population control is a problem to get right.

I don't mind having a choice of just two if it means the chance of a decent fight. Hossin is the only continent I don't like so there is always at least one I can choose, even if it means waiting in the PITA queuing system occasionally.

yeah continent lock sucks,

before the lock you have one full map brimming with fights, and one kinda-sorta-empty map, like a perdition where the overpop are banished too.
when the continent lock kicks in you end up with 2 mostly empty maps.

its like when you're playing a lobby pvp game and a patch/hotfix happens during primetime.
it puts a damper on the nights momentum, the game will pick back after a while up but there is no need to disrupt it to begin with!

On Ceres (PS4 EU) just now Indar locked then Amerish a few minutes later. I went to Esamir to see if there really might be fights developed already after a few minutes. Nope, no fights on the continent at all, as I'd expected. So my choices were spawn at Hossin (which had unlocked seconds previously... and often has no fights even hours after unlocking) or log off. Not a difficult choice.

Don't blame the system. Blame the ones who locked it. Its a PVP game. That means players can have an effect on your session. Either stop them or accept it. If your side is the one locking, take comfort in the fact you beat the tar out of 66% of your server.

This post is advanced stupidity.

Usually I would come straight out and call you a halfwit for creating so many misconceptions and half truths. But then I have to stop remind myself that nobody on the Internet knows if your a dog or not.

Thus if you are a dog that's some pretty good logic.

Please tell me you are a dog.

Locking a continent is an achievement that takes a skilled platoon and decent squad mates a fair deal of organization, planning, and effort to accomplish.

If your empire locks a continent you should be glad, not angry that you need to haul your bottom to the next warp gate immediately and get moving to the bases before the enemy begins flipping them. The fighting only slows as people rush to the next bases, in my experience we generally end up clashing horns with the enemy by the time we're flown out.

Just because other players can have have an effect on your session doesn't mean the system is without blame.

I for one only like two continents indar and esamir, and the later only when the fights are not all stuck in the biolabs as often is the case.

Lock those two continents and i usually log off and play something else instead.

While i get the idea of locking continents to make sure there is enough players on each continent for some bigger fights i'm not sure its the right way to do it since it also causes players like me to log off and fewer players online gives smaller fights so the overall effect is not as big as it might seem at first.

Having a game where you have a ~50% chance of being able to enjoy playing it will cause those players to look for other games where they can enjoy playing all the time so many of them will go from playing on some continents to playing on none which really isn't what this game needs.

So if you don't get your choice map in other multiplayer games, you just quit and do something else?

If all available choices are in my opinion boring yes.

Playing games at least for me is something i do for fun, if it no longer is fun then i do something else that is.

Then maybe games with content you find so offensive it makes them unplayable, aren't for you?

Or i could do the sensible thing and play it when i'm not forced to play on the continents i don't like.
Would me leaving and make the already too low population even lower be an improvement in any way?

All i'm saying is that trying to force people to do something they don't want to doesn't work very well.
Take the autospawn for example that likes to place people in fights they don't want to be in, how many actually use it?
Unlike continents with the autospawn you at least have a choice not to use it.

you forgot that continents can be locked from the "passive house building sim." mini game (aka construction system) now.
there is very little tactics involved, just base building and passively building up to server lock.

it was good when server lock required a skilled platoon to warpgate enemies as in your example though.
but it hasn't been like that for a long while, even before the "house building sim" was added we still had alerts which locked the continent when they ended.