Unbalanced population during off-hours is nothing new. Most likely there aren't many players online so if you have like 4 vs 5 nc and 10 tr this is normal. Here you can see real numbers http://ps2.fisu.pw/online/ Right now it's 212 VS, 162 NC and 221 TR which isn't anywhere near percentages in your picture.
That's at 3 AM PST. China Prime Time. Just builds hives as VS and win. Cause this game is about Hivecrafting. Not fighting. (And Everquest Next was about Minecrafting not dungeons and orcs and adventure) <-- yes I never tire of stating that snafu. Because it keeps being repeated, causing development to focus from core to tra-la-la-la.
Yeah, I left the game till Critical Mass rolls out. If that update doesn't even out the pops and limit zerging then I'll continue not playing or spending money on PS2.
Given the obvious language in that screen shot, and that I was present at that time to see the 51% and what the makeup of fights were, I would say that just maybe you're part of the problem. Connery is fine US prime time. Sometimes its the TR with a 5% edge, sometimes is the VS, and even the NC get a few times to enjoy things - often within the same day at that. Its when the Asians flood the server in the morning that everything goes to hell. That is when the population becomes 40% + for one faction (usually TR) (and this is with multiple 96+ TR fights going on so its not a low population), all the squads are Chinese/ Korean/ Japanese with zero communication, the sole "tactic" is to rush in a zerg up one lattice line no matter what, and you can forget any form of communication that isn't spam. Oh and did I mention that that also seems to be when the server lags worse than US prime time in the middle of a 96+ vs 96+ at the old biolabs and a whole lot of very shifty happenings that involve what might be termed cheating happen? Ironically at the same time Emerald doesn't have the problems. Sure population around then isn't great but its usually balances itself out on a continent level after an hour or so. What is the difference? Emerald seems to have relatively few players based in Asia in its ranks. Coincidence? Unlikely given that its the same day to day. Maybe the fix is to move the Emerald server to a central location, forcibly migrate the non-Asia players from Connery to Emerald, and leave the Asians to cheat and zerg each other until they get bored and find some new shiny free toy to occupy their attention. They and the Russians already forced their own server to get nuked due to something besides lack of numbers so its only time before it happens to Connery anyway.
I think most people accept that non-peak hours are plagued by population imbalance issues. But that's also saying PS2 is: 1) only reliably playable a handful of hours each week 2) prone to being a garbage experience most the rest of the time PS2 Devs have failed to make the game more reliably playable during off hours.
Living in New Zealand and playing in Connery, I was surprised that there was a massive influx of TR players in my usual playing time in the last few days. Normally it would be VS/FPSK making up 2/5ths of the server. Honestly, I'm fine with this. Getting roflmao stopmed by FPSK got boring. Getting roflmao stomped by YLBT is something new I guess
They used to only flock to Vanu, but now join either other faction if things aren't looking good for their home team. Less NC, but they'll over-pop them too. There's just no reason to play this game till pops are balanced and zerging is limited.
There needs to be some damn good incentives to play on the underpopulated factions, and make it clear what the reward is. I bet most people wont even look at the XP bonus unless they get a message saying "Switch to NC now for XP boost!" As for people who main only one faction or character, the incentive to switch anyway could give them cross-faction rewards, like iso-4/certs/DBC for all characters or something.
