ALERTS -> once they start, fighting them is pointless

So this is how Planetside 2 dies. Damn shame.

Losing factions get a lesser amount of ISO4. The faction that comes second gets more than the last place faction. Your personal contribution also determines your reward. So far, my drops for staying the whole 30 minutes and fighting have been:

• Win - 300 ISO plus decal (done that twice)
• Second place - 100 ISO
• Third place - 36 ISO

No one is forcing you to do anything. Fight whoever you want. But for me, the alert system is producing some of the largest and most determined fights I've seen for quite some time, which is far from pointless.

That depends..........I've been in four alerts now and there was certainly one where the winning side was streets ahead when the alert triggered and a couple where it would probably have needed the other two factions to team up in order to break the alert.

But there was one where it was close due to all three factions having mined the right amount of cortium and very little difference in territory when the alert popped (IIRC we won that alert by grimly holding on to 1% advantage of territory). I also had to leave one where my faction had triggered the alert but was being hammered by both the others and probably set to lose.

Been in a few and the principle is very sound. Sound enough that when it works it does exactly as the developers stated it should. Really just one little problem. Humans control the characters. And humans tend to make dumb decisions based on emotion and habit instead of logic and facts. Logic says that whoever triggers the alert needs to become the priority for both other factions, especially when they have a large population advantage. Human tendency however is to keep doing what one has always done until something upsets you enough to force a change.

Case in point. TR triggered an alert with around 45% territory and around 40% population. Almost immediately the NC command chat fills with orders to drop the VS front and hit the TR with everything. The NC players followed that almost entirely with only a few squads doing clean-up for ghost hacks along the VS front. VS? Well apparently they never got the memo about needing to fight the guys who triggered the alert. Instead of concentrating on the TR they moved their zergs to attack the NC and kept that up the entire time. The result was the TR winning due to the having to only fight the NC who lacked the raw population to make headway and had to divide that already limited population against 2 sides.

I actually was so puzzled by the sheer strategic incompetence demonstrated (the VS rather loudly complained about the TR winning) that I hopped onto my VS character on the server and asked a number of people from outfits I remembered from PS1 days why they didn't attack the TR instead of the NC. The response?

"We were told to."

Pretty telling if you ask me.

On the plus side, there were several alerts yesterday that were "foiled" by opposition- I know TR and VS both did it at least once (on Emerald) this Sunday.

I have noticed that the factions are starting to learn to NOT mine the cordium until they have a huge lead on the map- say at least 50%... With this kind of lead, I have noticed during high population times (3 maps are open) that each faction just goes to it's own map. And I agree with the OP- with a large lead to start, it is almost impossible to change the outcome. There were a couple of alerts that the faction didn't farm the cordium until they had an 80% lead (NC did this on Hossin)...

I think the only way to fix this is to sadly take out the Hive requirement completely and just make it 41% territory control. This will prevent factions from padding their lead. I don't know how to make Hives relevant in this scenario- but they would definitely need to be incorporated somehow to keep the builders happy.

I already presented on an other thread something that, I think, could make builder happy :
-Alert start at 41% territory control (refined cortium are refined)
-Once the alert start, PMB non-deploy zone are removed for every faction and you can build PMB INSIDE permanent base to change them into strongpoint that are hard to capture. (PMB non-deploy zone are removed only during the alert so you won't see impossible to break PMB often : it's up to enemy to harasser PMB builder during the construction phase)
-Silo can be build inside permanent bases but can only be used to store cortium in prevision of an alert.
-HIVE no longer refill cortium, them now should be build near enemy PMB to detonate them. (faster than an orbital striker but more risky since enemy can counter it easily)

Update - NC or TR just foiled an alert triggered by VS on Miller when they had 50% territory, so not pointless (OK, then VS triggered it again and won after NC and TR fell to fighting each other). How? VS cortium stocks were depleted to 20,000 the first time and they had to build them up again to trigger another alert.

The team is currently looking into ways to alter the pacing of these alerts and how they play out, so the feedback is definitely appreciated.

When these people you asked said "We were told to" about attacking NC instead of TR, did you ask them who told them that?
I for one would be curious about who would said it and why.

As for the rest of your story, I play exclusively as VS and have noticed the exact same thing with NC when TR triggers an alert, instead of attacking TR they just continue to fight us

What normaly goes in an alert is... The triggering faction gets double teamed and lose by a ridiculous amount, or one of the factions doesn't respond to the alert and the third faction gets massacrated by the triggering, continent gets locked.
Hard to have a good balanced fight... Also hard to balance 96+ zergs redeploying around to cap my massive overpop. Usually those guys only focus on one latice at a time, making that lattice a bad experience to the oposing faction.

As I can tell, it was a mix of whoever was leading their platoons and outfit leaders. In other words the "leadership" for TR.

And perhaps you aren't playing on Emerald or are practicing selective memory. Because it is a running joke on the server that the VS and TR would rather lose an alert and continent (old or new) than shift a single platoon from fighting the NC to the other guy. Doesn't matter how many times the NC point out that one side has a 10 point lead (under the new system) and is going to win or how much manpower we shift to fight the side in the lead. The TR and VS routinely have 3 to 6 platoons (at prime time) and all but one of those will be focused entirely on the NC no matter what. Note this isn't "gut instinct" - this is literally sitting at the map with paper in hand and tallying up the number of people in each area over a full month. Nor is it just a few stubborn zergs that won't move - these are AODR, Recursion, GOTR, and other outfit-lead or outfit-only platoons that don't move off a lattice despite the clear need to react.

In other words this is a deliberate decision to lose an alert to the other side rather than stop fighting the NC even after said NC have clearly pulled all the organized units from the shared front. You can say what you want, but the history of such behavior speaks far louder.

As I said, its not pointless. No more than a public platoon trying (and succeeding) to stop an "unstoppable" zerg short of a warpgate. Difficult and requires leaders who can put some steel back in peoples spine when others are saying give up, but not impossible. Impossible is when one side with equal or greater population triggers an alert, one faction reacts by shifting everything to that front, but ends up getting focused by the last faction who do nothing against the first one.

Personally I wish the developers would remove the reward for second place so people don't go "oh well, lets not try to win and just make sure to come in second". Maybe that would give the bottom-feeders incentive to actually contribute. That or do something nasty that hurts people's egos in such a way that they would rather face the "challenge" of fighting the alert leader than go for the easy points.

I just want to reiterate:

Please remove the cordium/hive requirement from alerts. Factions are padding their lead up to 50% or more before starting the alert (by intentionally not starting the cordium requirement until they have an insurmountable lead).

Personally I've been in about 3 alerts. Not once did I realize an alert had even started. Only when the continent changed did I realize the alert had been taking place, so for all I know it could have been 50. THIS might be one reason why nobody switches to attack the alert starter.

There needs to be some audio or visual cue to announce alerts. Is there one already? I haven't noticed. Or really anything to catch players' attentions. If there already is something, it not enough and often lost in the already overwhelming and chaotic UI.

As for the "waiting to refine cortium" problem. Just make it so the activating faction cannot loose 6 or more percent of territory once activated. eg if activating at 41% territory a loss is registered at 35% or below... at 65% territory a loss would happen at 59% or below. This makes waiting more of a gamble because you're more likely to have more territory open to attack via the lattice.

Logged on, picked smallest faction, VS @ 31%, TR @ 34%, NC @ 33%.

VS is on the back foot but responds and pushes back, pop evens out..... NC starts to drop off and is folding badly....

Alert starts and within ten mins VS has 34%, is +4% points above the others and is cruising to a win.

Not at all satisfying!

Once a Hive is destroyed, the team that owned it should lose all the Cortium it had refined, thus dropping them below the required Cortium to count as a win condition. They still have until the end of the alert to get it back up again of course. The 'win' condition for minimum Cortium should be set somewhere below the maximum allowed; something like you need at least 25K to trigger and win an alert, but you can have up to 30K banked - making high efficiency hives a higher priority target.

Well something like that. Just as before Cortium is irrevocable, once you have it its permanent till a continent lock. If its a victory condition, there needs to be a mechanism to remove some of it from an opposing team - just as you can 'remove' territory percentage.

Or, as I think someone else mentioned, have Cortium refined, count as something towards a total score. E.g. every 1000 refined, is 1 point, added to your territory % for a total 'score'. Any side gets over a set point limit (say 60?), triggers an alert, and you can either remove territory and/or Cortium to stop them. (I'd probably up the efficiencies in some areas of the map to make it not too hard to get this back up though)

The main thing I find lacking about PMB's is no one ever comes to defend them (except maybe the squad that built it). An attack on a lattice linked base can evoke a powerful response; but on a hive, no one cares - as it's loss often means nothing either way.

In another direction, on the whole matter of..

"World Winning Plan: Take 50% land, build a bucket of hives, lock cortium, gain win."

It seems redundant that we want hives to be important, but that the whole step is almost an after-thought. If we want cortium to mean something, it has to change. Someone I talked to had the idea of "increased territory capture rate based upon cortium stock". While that might work if the default rate is slightly reduced, it doesn't fully grasp the problem because it means, once cortium is full, nothing can be done about it.

But, then the problem is that there is no cortium decay. Which, honestly, might be the simplest way to make that mean something. Have it so that cortium itself is volatile, and that stocks will decay overtime, quickly if there is none coming in. With this, you can even have a faction lose an alert if too much of their cortium decays, maybe even increasing cortium decay if there is too more enemy corium gain than allied gain. At that point, you can sorta use the cortium buff idea, if that's where people wanted to go or whatever.

Although, viably, this is only meaning something if the idea is to keep the cortium victory requirement thing around. Removing that would make the above not as essential.

I actually do play on Emerald and I play as VS, however I have played only for a couple years and then not consistently so dont know any specifics about that..
However I have noticed that when an alert happens that people keep on fighting wherever they were fighting and seemingly ignore the alert.

What I dont understand though is the reasoning behind it.

I've always felt that HIVES being tied to continent alerts felt a bit out of place. They'd make more sense if nanite production was tied to them so your faction could pull more vehicles, maxes, etc. With the exponential nature of refining efficiency, owning the center of the map and protecting the HIVES there would be very valuable.