population imbalance isn't caused only by people swapping to whatever faction is winning

And a good way of checking this, is by keeping your eye on the population as you play when there is only one continent available.

See we used to say "oh, X faction has 40% pop, fock this I'm changing continent", and when this happened, it was easy to note that rapidly the more appealing continent would see it's % population grow (ie if NC were getting their *** kicked in Esamir and Indar was open, you would more often than not see Indar having a NC overpop).

More and more however, the number of players in PS2 are going down. Add to that the more "restrictive" parameters concerning continent locking and opening and what you get is more and more time with only one continent.

Where before having one continent only available was rare and happened at hours in which very few players played, now we are spending much more time in one continent than before.

And that was the intention, and it makes sense, better to have one populated continent than 2 continents where one of them is almost empty.

Thing is, I'm not sure this little question had / has been taken into account :

When players who were fed up with the state of the continent they were playing in started to feel like ragequitting, they would go check out another continent before giving up, giving the game "another chance". Now that is less and less of an option, the other solution is to swap factions.

There are quite a few however, like myself, who for different reasons, don't like and don't want to swap factions, and to that group of people, having a messed up continent with messed up map and messed up population basically means logging off when you've had enough.

Now, much more than before, population imbalance isn't caused only by people swapping factions but to people just leaving the game.

There is therefore a lot more pressure on the dev team now to try and limit this, because failing to do so, is quite literally kicking (some) players out of the game. And basically, the reason I'm posting this, is because I believe that the new ALERT system along with some other changes that have been implemented over the past few months have made this worse than it was before.






Too Long Didn't (or To) Read :

-> The amount of time where more than one continent is available has decreased and is decreasing.

-> During that time, if the pop and map goes haywire, not having another continent available seriously limits the options of players.

-> Ragequitting the game when this happens is common, more common now than before.

--> Having players log off because they are fed up with population balance and/or territory control basically means reducing the gametime of the playerbase or reducing the playerbase.

--> Therefore the devs should really put in an extra effort to prevent this. In short, a balanced population on a continent is healthy for the game, keeping the game healthy is what allows DB to make money. This is more important now than before because

a) the game is older (and it's already done really well)
b) the recent changes to the game have made this situation worse (in my opinion).






This little rant / wall of text was inspired by the continent I was fighting on earlier. Please not that it is to be taken with a grain of salt as the screenshot was probably taken at one of the hours in the night where the population is at it's lowest.

Still, it served as an inspiration for what I wrote which I believe applies nonetheless, and serves also as a nice little illustration !

That map is a daily sight on Connery. My problem with a second continent is that it's always a free win for the faction that's over-pop. As some who's spend hundreds of dollars and bought a year long membership, I don't have a single implant at rank 5 and I don't have half of the ones I want. ISO disparity is a real problem, and it's creating a snowball effect on my server. Letting the over-pop faction continue to knock out free wins isn't the answer. But Purgatory isn't the answer either. The time has come to punish over-pop with nanite reductions and respawn penalties, and buff under-pop with a nanite generation boost, and up their XP bonus. This map also shows how players have to be forced in to competitive fights. So apply those earlier mentioned bonuses/penalties to local populations as well.

As a side note, if this was Connery, the only way to fix that map is to make locking rewards almost even, as that map was a result of Chinese outfits taking turns throwing alerts for their alt outfit on the other faction. Not too much one can do about that in a free game. But Daybreak needs to tackle this ****, because the game won't survive for long the way things are.

In short, I'd be more than fine with a second continent if populations were balanced and fights weren't so lopsided.

Every faction since 2012 on Lithcorp has had it's time in the sun, where it has the most numbers.

Reasons for this truth are many, varied and mostly unprovable.

That said, people leaving the game helps no one.

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So, they do some thing to stop population imbalance. You're now not able to play the toon you put £xx,xx into cuz your faction is A) winning an alert. B) Is having its time in the sun. C) Your factions prime time. D) Etc.

You're not going to be impressed are you.

Ignoring the possibility that your chosen faction is such because you perceive it to be OP. Taking on board that at some point everyone will walk away from a toon they've spent £xx,xx on.

Play the other bloody factions!

Be part of the solution not the problem

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P.S. This is why my TR toon is the way he is. TR are and have rarely been the under pop on Lithcorp during my hours of play....

You will gain nothing by adding more (restrictive) rules. The more rules you have in a system the less are followed and people will say "**** this nonsense I quit".

Just realize the time you could play endlessly day and night with your toon, your squad and outfit are long gone and if you want to keep the game alive have characters on separate factions/servers and switch as needed to keep fights alive.

These sorts of games NEED a community to thrive. Forcing those small and dwindling communities apart isn't the solution.

Do you mean Outfits? The entire server? Everyone with an account or every active playing account? Or just forum members?

Most outfits have decayed to a shell of their former selves. The players who are trying to group up and keep coordination going shouldn't be forced to swap factions and separate. They'll just leave. Servers are full of zergfits and communication is rare, Daybreak can't keep splitting up teams that actually want to group up.

Some say that there is a "faction balance". but they are misunderstanding.
This problem is not a simple story that it is advantageous because there are a lot of players.
It is also a problem that the number of players of faction drastically decreases.
They attack all the factions whose population has decreased, all at once, and take all their territory.
In this case the third faction is ignored, but its faction is impossible to win the alert.

So, you're saying we're stuck. The player base shouldn't change factions as that breaks up teams. Daybreak can't force caps as that would break up teams.

Personally, I'm not worried about players changing factions..

I don't like it but it's fine with me.

What I'm worried about is the players who log off instead.

We have enough players that would happily switch factions for extra certs or ISO, we should incentivise those individuals to switch instead of punish players who want to group up with friends.

What we need is to entice new players to join the game. 2018's focus on Outfits, the New Player Experience, and Objective play should help, but ultimately we'll need to focus heavily on optimizations and bug fixes, so the game can appear competitive against new releases.

Too late for that to be honest, this alert system with rewards will ruin the game.

A new player with little knowledge of whats going on with the game after his first char and getting farmed will spot a constant, that is, that one faction is constantly winning them and so like every other sheep he will join that bandwagon and the snowball will get bigger and bigger until it all comes crashing down.

Prime time Emerald, TR has lowest population, hmm, I wonder why......

Play other factions ? It takes years to max 1 char. The level of grinding even with boosts has put me off from actively playing other factions. I do play everyday, but I rarely play my alts other than during weekends when I have more time and practically never on double xp weekend.
People say this grind HAS to be this horrible for the game to make money. But 2/3 of the store content might as well not exists since the grind is too much for me to regularly play more than 1 faction.

Game used to be a lot better and less ragequit inducing imo back in the hex and separate resource days. Now you face a zerg. A new player has 1 chance to throw a tank at the zerg. (which is easily destroyed by experienced players) and then has no option but to get farmed for 10 minutes. Where in the old days they could try out wildly different force multipliers when 1 type doesn't work.
New players don't have the chances to learn the different game mechanics with this restrictive resource system so they just think there is no option and plain quit.
They can't go to other continents nor other bases because lattice. And the current alert system killed off most of PMB fights as well. Plain no options, but to throw yourself at a meatgrinder.

Old PMBs were rarely good fights though, just 1v1 infiltrator duels in some crevice of some mountain on the side of the map, or a max crash out of nowhere with zero chance of defense. The meat grinder is real, and often times I log off because out of all three of my characters on all three factions there isn't a fight that isn't 10:1. And I can't stand being on the winning or losing side of that. This game needs a way to strike the flanks of zergs and not mash heads with them on a point.

I flat out refuse to play anything but my TR guy and as such I accept I have to take the bad with the good. And no, I don't play just as TR because I perceive it to be the OP faction. I play it because of the dakka. Guns that fire the most bullets. Chain guns that I sometimes fire for no reason just to hear the sound. And for a chainsaw power knife.

Plus have you even tried NC? The country music is unbearable. I lasted 20 minutes before I lost my mind and started murdering my own team. That's why that happens over there. Mystery solved.

Play the open continent OP.

Normalizing ISO rewards might help. I still think it should scale per how long you participated in the alert, but winning factions should only get the extra cosmetic.

Another change could be making the general purpose implants unlockable via certs or ISO, while adding more "specialized" implants to the RNG crates to make up for it.

I can't remember who it was but they had the best idea yet I think. Give a loyalty bonus after the alert is completed. +100% if you played that faction for the hour leading up to the alert.

Here's what I'd suggest adding. I propose bumping it to +200% for the 2 hour mark. Then cut the alert win down to 150 ISO, so winners that played the hour up to the alert would get the same 300 ISO, and you'd get 450 ISO if you had played 2 hours before the alert. Meanwhile, a loss for a loyalist would still give you up to 150 ISO. Maybe change the loss amount to 75, so the rewards would be either 75, 150, or 225.

So we're back to where I started, play the other factions

Thing is, 4th factioning is not only dumb when you look at it from a progression point of view, but heavily looked down upon by the community that feels you should be loyal to only one faction per server, of which I'm part of.