I played this game a long ways back, all the way back to beta, some seven years ago. I've seen decisions that I applaud, some I saw as good and bad, and some that I saw as an outright insult to the community. The 'autobalance' feature is one of those insults. Autobalance needs to be removed from the game. Permanently. This single 'feature' of the game influenced my decision to quit more than almost everything else combined. Autobalance flies in the face of the entire concept of coordinated, large-scale battles that planetside is supposed to be known for. Autobalance essentially punishes outfits for working together, all for what? To try to make it more 'fair' for a lone wolf? Autobalance breaks up the cohesion of any group of players, from large, multi-platoon operations to small squads and it frustrates players who just want to log in and join in their outfit's ops but are unable to because the autobalance forces them into timeout in VR Training for sometimes lengthy (1+hour) periods of time. The end result of this are annoyed players who eventually quit playing for other games and eventually forgetting this one. Long ago I would try to get people into playing this game. Today I try to prevent people from trying the game because the game mechanics today have obliterated the original vision of the game and the ability of the single most important entity of the game to develop and support the game. That entity is the outfit. I know this will inevitably fall on deaf ears since I doubt there's many players in the game anymore who were even playing before the idiotic 'autobalance' feature was implemented. This is just food for thought on a game that's had so much potential and has fallen flat on its face.
Are you disabled? The autobalance does nothing to help deal with zerging, all it does is add queue times. This response shows exactly the type of simple minded people that DBG chooses to listen too, and is the reason the game is in such a sorry state. So recap, the person wants to play Planetside, he logs on, gets thrown into a never ending queue because his faction as a few more percent world pop than the others, which means nothing in 99.999999999% of scenarios, (it's one thing to have pop, but you have to know how to use it, and half the time the slightly over-popped faction is being double teamed). And your genius solution is: "well don't play the faction you enjoy playing, play one you don't like, dumba$$!" So now we can't play games to have fun? What kind of narrow-minded "reasoning" is that? His point is entirely valid, it's something many veterans have been complaining about since implementation, and the ones that didn't complain left because of that. It's completely idiotic to implement such a long queue that solves nothing in the end, and takes away from the game's identity.
Out of interest - which 'autobalance' are you talking about ? When I read your post, I assumed this was the system that prevents spawning into an already overpopped fight. However people are replying implicating the queue system preventing people from joining an already overpopped continent.
I think he is talking about the 'Koltyr purgatory' before you can join your friends on the active continent. This part makes me think that: Thread response: I kinda agree, this is what we have 3 factions for, to balance things, but on the other hand it is frustrating as hell not to be able to respond to the enemy because you just simply havent got enough players on your empire to make a difference. Its a difficult problem to solve. TBH i think the game would have benefited from removing the wargate strongholds, and creating a proper global lattice with 3 sanctuaries. But its too late for that now, nowhere near enough population for auraxis wide fights.
The queue only really seemed sort of alright when there were at least 2 continents open, now it's just a relic to annoy people with I guess. I don't see much point in trying to balance the population, there will always be zerging, and always to empty bases and such. People will fight however they want to fight.
Sorry, you are so stupid it breaks every scale. You have no idea of statistics and how a few percent of pop difference changes the game completly. Your response shows who the ******** one is. Your point is completly backwards - why would you not be able to play? I just pointed out - play another faction. Please uninstall life. Btw, veterans have chracters on more than one faction. Only ****ters stick to one.
If I remember right there's an Outfit with an absolutely unreal server pop, or there was, called Angels of Death. If I remember right, they were often regarded as the largest (or one of the largest) Zerg Outfits in existence at the time. I can literally count the number of times their blind rushes into enemy bases have been successful on my hands. I remember defending against them on an Alt account years ago. We'd be overwhelmed 3 to 1, and yet they'd have literally no chance of beating us, whether it was a Bio dome, or a simple outpost territory. Planetside 2, if people ever forgot, is a WAR simulator. Remember the last time the US had their marines Rush B when facing Canadian Soldiers? Oh that's right, they lost easily because using tactics is instantly 50x better than using none. It's an identical scenario in Planetside 2. Any Outfit with a good rep for taking territories and maybe even stopping stalemate battles will be using tactics, strategy and mid-battle planning. 50 extra people to fight against isn't going to mean anything if they're just random pops doing whatever they want. 50 extra people lead by someone who knows how to coordinate people appropriately to get a victory isn't unfair either, even if they show up to defend a location, and you're there alone. This is a game where you die in 1-5 hits from mostly all weapons, or it should be if it isn't. Don't like it? Play Heavy and get a good reaction time, or play MAX, and when that's on cooldown, be a support like Engineer or Medic. STill don't like it? Play a different game. I took a break from the game because AVAST kept blocking the game from connecting to servers properly, which I'll add, ONLY happened after Daybreak took over. It's honestly pathetic to know that this happened. Call of Duty is floundering, and Team Fortress 2 never has ever made moments that massive 200+ pop battles that last for hours, make in this game. Don't copy ideas from them, it's an objectively stupid idea from a design perspective. The game, from what I remember 6 years back, doesn't and didn't need an autobalance feature. It needed better faction balance, the fact TR had numerous faction-specific weapons that were just "really fast pea shooter that feels like a watergun" and meanwhile you look at Vanu, and they've got multiple rifles that are all good, it's embarrassing because you had so many guns on one side that were just all blatantly worse. It's not like Call of Duty's 7 slightly identical weapons design, because each weapon at least has a mostly different set of attachments that makes them all significantly different. Better Objective design that wasn't just a prelude to "take this bio dome" or "take this [insert special territory type here that gives powers globally across a continent]" I remember that fighting Bio domes was fun and engaging for a while, but then I started to experience open field wars that'd last for a few hours just simply along territory borders, one of those "Whoever breaks, loses a few territories for sure" types of fights. Sometimes in territories with verticality to their layout, or certain geometrical features like an abundance of crags, or straight-up walls in really good places for defense. Now I bet if I booted up the game, I'd see a ton of weapons like the Commissioner and PDW SMG running around, removing any idea of "hey, each faction is different outside of the vehicles everyone mostly uses which are identical" further, and Bio Dome fights would still be some of the longest fights to happen often, and still as boring as watching molasses slide down a 60 degree incline. Meanwhile weapon balance is still probably all kinds of embarrassingly bad with TR getting the short end of the stick because "Well TR also has more people" meanwhile, I can count the number of guns over all that are good on one literal hand, and meanwhile the other factions just get all kinds of good guns. Count me out, I'd rather play Starcraft 2 and get screwed by 50 similar kinds of "Hey, we want [X meaningless pursuit] so let's change our design philosophy!" Reminder that a game doesn't have to be fair to be fun. Look at Soulsborne games, Roguelikes, hell, even some Strategy games, and ofcourse look at every Card Game ever made in all of existence. A game should be balanced, if it isn't fun to watch, that's when you invite people to play instead or add features to help people get invested which don't result in people playing getting screwed over. And above all... The devs should never attempt to chase the casual crowd. Diablo 3 did this and it's the only example of a vague success with this idea. The casual crowd will flock to whatever is easy. Diablo 3 is badly deigned and an insult to the series and genre it occupies only barely. Dawn of War 3 also tried to chase the general audience, and it also failed even more so by trying to turn a base building RTS game into a MoBA with RTS base building mechanics that barely mean anything. Autobalancing isn't needed, and nobody is capable of arguing that it is, simply because any line of logic to support such a feature, isn't reasonable at all and will be blatantly ignoring or obviously missing some key bits of information. Simply put, I've been in battles where me, and 12-ish other people fended off an attack from over 30 other people for a good ten minutes. Tactics, if used effectively enough and with good enough communication, can be good enough to overcome literally any population deficit. Autobalancing is a lazy band-aid attempt to fix people whining about one-sided pop battles. Don't like to be swarmed? Pick a different territory, oh wait, I forgot one important aspect about the game that's probly still a thing. You can't just freely choose a territory to spawn in that your faction owns, even if nothing is happening there. That's right. What a great game that offers freedom of warfare, but limits you on what warfare you can create or join in on!
Imho it's just another bad attempt to sell subs. If it does anything it: 1. Damages the game pop, noone sane is gonna wait in a long queue to play an old game... 2. Damages balance, here on Cobalt NC used to get by by having a higher pop, VS would roll over bases with massive zergfits, and TR would focus NC too (because noone enjoys fighting VS) So we'd have NC getting zerged on both fronts, but it was OK because we had the pop to handle it, not now though, Now we'll have maybe 37% "overpop", getting zerged by the other 63% , getting warpgated from both sides and we can't bring in any reinforcements because we have 1-2% more players than the other factions... Happened a few nights ago primetime, I just logged out... I've made threads on this before, but like every terrible change that DBG make to the game, any criticism is simply ignored.
Lol man why are you even replying to this idiot xD. And although we all have alts, we still have our fav faction, and they're characters, not chracters or whatever he said loooool
If you would care, explain, in detail, how faction autobalance is more helpful to the game than not. Thus far you haven't.
