[Suggestion] 4th factioning -> how about a timer?

I know loads of people change factions for loads of very different reasons, and though I never do that, I totally respect people's "rights" to play the game as they wish.

I was thinking though, that most of the problems I see with people switching factions all the time are short term ones :

for example :

- small base fight, player x changed faction just to see where the enemy sundy is cause he can't find it (assuming he won't just TK it straight away)
- HIVE hunter changes faction and gets into an ANT just to map all the Silos before they become HIVES
- various sabotage / tk

There's surely others but that's all I can think of right now, that's like "quick change faction and then change back". But to me, they are the worst and totally unfair.

So, couldn't this kind of behaviour be avoided by setting a timer for changing factions? I don't think it would have to be very long, but just long enough to prevent people "quickly changing to do x then change back".


Is there any way this could prejudice "legit" 4th faction players? Way I see it, it's not win - win, but it's win -"no harm" ?

Depends whether the issue is really switching characters or if it is dual boxing.

The problem is players like me, who have a membership with 6 avatars (two of each faction) who like to scroll through all of them with nothing more in mind than to get into fights.

Stopping someone like me from being able to play any of my alts straight away due to cool downs would generate a lot of salt from people who are paying for the ability to play whichever avatar they want, when they want.

The only way to stop most of the ********, is to get away from the free-to-play model. Even a $1/month subscription, or a $5 cost to the game would solve most the team killing and hacking.

actually, sorry about that, it wouldn't work, I totally forgot that whether it's free to play or not you can make more than one account and there's nothing raelly you can do to prevent that (whatever the game)

@Etemaloptimist I never heard of anyone doing that, I get how playing a different faction would be .. different, but other than that?

Most srubs doing shady stuff wouldn't keep buying a game over and over every time they get banned for TKs or sabotaging their faction. So you can't really stop the problem, but you could severely lessen it. I'd bet most of these punks are hackers from 3rd world countries or bratty children, neither of which could afford dumping American dollars on games just to have their accounts banned over and over.

Like with training dogs and other animals: encounragement is better than punishment.

Let people play whatever they want, encourage joining the underpopped faction(s).

so if you play few factions, and you have no time ti wait, you must play only one faction?

Mainly just for the variety, or when you log into say, VS and find nothing doing but there are loads of fights between TR and NC that you fancy a piece of. Or when I am a bit tired or drunk or something and know I'm going to get owned as an attacker and prefere to play defender, so I choose the approriate faction from what is goping on.............stuff like that (or even just "I fancy using something with dakka today")

ah I miss-understood then hah,

still, just in theory, since in practice none of this would work out, but just for the sake of discussion, if you'd have to wait a few minutes, like 5 minutes before changing faction again, would it really be such an issue?

there's timers averywhere in this game

Not so long as I could carry on doing what I was doing (like you can carry on farting about in VR training while you are in the queue to spawn on a continent). Last ime I saw this idea posted the timer was suggested as being 30 minutes or lnger - far too much for me.

Five minutes is no problem. I've sat on a cap point longer than that waiting for it to flip, or for a baddie to come along and try to take it back.

5 minutes for faction with the same pop, 3 for under., 10 for over, and we will be fine

How often during your session do you switch factions.

What i mean is, do you:

1. start off as TR, do some fighting, then switch to VS do some more fighting, then switch to NC, or
2. look at map and decide 'i want to play VS today' and stick to that empire your entire session?

In PS1 the locking system locked you out of empires on the same server, so other servers you were fine to play on any empire.
It also allowed you to log into the game, check out the map, see who is online, etc. but as long as you did it quickly and without moving around too much it wouldnt kick in as you being on that empire, so you were free to switch around this way.
The best feature imo was that it only implemented the lock after you switched empires the first time. So if you say logged on as NC, thought youd tk that TR sundy thats holding your empire up so switched, youd be locked into TR. So you could do that grief move once, but then your stuck on your non preferred empire for 24 hours, a troll to the griefer i think.

I think an in depth lock system like this would be ok, it would allow you to log into each of your characters for daily certs and to see whats going on or who is online, and i would allow you to change your mind once after getting into the fight, but would prevent same account tk switching.

The problem we have, and this imo is the sole reason the devs havent bothered with such a system; anyone can make any number of accounts to play the game, its free. So griefers would simply have a griefing account(s) seperate from their main.
Its a difficult problem to solve.

ah no, the idea is to stop those who quickly change faction to TK or at least spot an enemy sunderer then switch back, if you had to wait a few minutes between swap, it might not stop this kind of thing, but it would reduce I think.

And yeah, I was thinking basically the same as continent swap queue.

But yeh, as I mentioned and stalkish said, since anyone could make lots of accounts for free anyway, it would be easy to bypass the timer.

It worked in PS1. At one point, the timer was like 12 hours per faction switch.
But it only worked because the game was subscription based.

In PS2 you can just make a free account.
Which people who hardcore-grief do anyway, because they think it makes their main account safe.

I'm with Etemal on this one. I'll give you a (common) example.

I like squad play - and play on Cobalt, all three factions and belong to outfits on all.

I logon - select my TR player, find that my only choice is going it alone or joining one of the Russian outfits (Zerg Russ everywhere). As they only speak in Russian and I can't - I change player. (Not having a go at Russians by the way - it's just the reality of the situation).

I think the majority of players who play multiple factions do so to support whatever faction they're currently playing. Sure there will be griefers - but should the majority suffer because of this ?

Would a 5 minute countdown prevent you from doing what you do now or make you suffer?

I often wait a few minutes to go into another continent, it's no biggy..

Again, not that it matters because it's never gonna happen and if it did anyone could just have multiple accounts to switch to.

Well right now when I change character it seems to crash so the 5 mins wouldn't be an issue but let's not go there !

A bit of either depending on what is there. Sometimes fighting for one faction dries up quite quickly so I switch to look for other fights. Sometimes I get on one character and there is battle after battle so I stick with it.

I tend to page through them all to collect the daily certs but sometimes nothing is happening for one or other faction so I move swiftly on.

i usually play 1 night a week, and i'll go through 6 different characters, spread across the 3 factions.
5 minutes wouldn't be invasive or stop me from playing, HOWEVER...

i'm a member, we get 48 certs each day when we log on a character,
this means that once each day we need to log through each character to get our certs.
a timer would massively impact that, to the point that probably none of us would bother.
so i'm against hard timers.

perhaps you could add a "cooldown" timer per character, I.E if you log off a character that is ok, no timers happen,
but if you then log on to a different character, your previous character is unplayable for 5 minutes.
this would prevent people from logging on an alt to spy on enemies and then logging back on their previous char.
ofcourse they could make alts on the same faction, but its a big step in the right direction.

ofcourse a better and far easier solution is to simply remove the 48 cert cap,
then i'd have no problem with a 5 min faction lock.