Hello DB So this morning we had 44% NC server pop at Cobalt !! Can you explain me how your pop balance works yeah? I mean why the hell you dont close the faction for login to the game and they have to choose 1 of the 2 other factions!! Seriously its not fun playing vs 44% server pop ..
Outside of primetime the pops are all over the place, But if Cobalt VS are complaining about zergs I gotta ask, how does it feel to be the ones getting zerged for a change? Log in at primetime and every base that VS are at, they'll be zerging.
yeah, no, that's not it. Log in at almost any time, and the TR and the NC will be fighting each other and ignoring the VS, but I get why it may look like the VS is zerging !
Cobalt tonight, images taken within a minute of each other... what is the answer to this BS? I'm beginning to think that 3 faction warfare is not the way forward. Something should be done to address this balance, and I think a proper 4th action is the answer.
For those two screenshots; what makes the difference is active outfits and coordinate squads or platoon because they think and fight strategically. This is even more true now when they try harder while the randoms care less (there really are no small mixed squad rewards, there is basically no incentives outside of outfits). So it doesn't depend so much on overall population as it does on which outfits are running ops. Whatever the faction, if they have more outfits (or bigger or better ones), they will dominate the map regardless of pop.. And if a faction only has randoms, they all join combat and end up in fights like the biolab and trust me, none of those 48-96+ gives a flying **** about the map
Vanu just won 3 alerts on the bounce tonight... ended up overrunning Indar pretty much as well. The reality is:- VS don't care whether they fight TR or NC. NC only want to fight TR. TR have no choice but to fight both. The point of the screenshots was to highlight that this is just a ridiculous state of affairs as VS can win even with the lowest percentage of population.
Oh look, another Vs saying they're winning all the alerts because they have better outfits. Strange how on EVERY server they just have better outfits and no other determining factors. None what so ever
Population balance ebbs and flows - VS have historically been underpopped on Cobalt but many returning players (or new players) seem to be picking VS (possibly due to the previous overpop issues ? I've waited forever in an NC queue). Regarding last night - I was on Esamir - TR lost almost all territory while they were playing around in their Bastion fleet carrier. It looked impressive but turns into a concentrated air battle while all the time, VS and NC (without Bastions) just capped base after base with little to no resistance. Incidentally - this was not 'fun'.
The point of my post was to explain to you why population doesn't matter that much. It doesn't matter (that much) how much pop a faction has. What matters is 2 things : 1. outfit activity 2; who fights who; if 20% of your entire faction is in Mani Biolab, and 20% of NC's entire faction is in Mani also, it really does not matter if VS has 3% less population. See?
I've got a personal theory about VS. It's a long shot, and when I share it most people don't get it, or rather, don't believe it, but honestly, I've thought about it a lot, and I'm pretty confident about this. It would be possible to prove, but it would also take time and effort... Basically, my theory is that the VS faction, no matter the continent, is generally composed of players who have more experience. I've followed quite a few players over the years and, especially over the past few months, I've been keeping an eye on BR ranks (yes I know players can play on alts). When new players join the game, and this, imo, has been true for 7 years, they tend to pick NC or TR. Russians like red, French like blue, but no one likes VS "aliens" and colour etc. (which explains the lower population) Most players, once they max out a character, or level it enough decide to go "explore" other factions. VS is often the 2nd or 3rd choice, meaning that by the time players "play" VS, they've already got more experience. Of course this isn't true for everyone, but I believe it's a trend, there could be different ways of verifying this, the simplest and least accurate of which is to press TAB now and then and note the BR levels (which I do regularly). Because at the end of the day, it isn't skill that makes a faction better, it isn't the gear or the weapons that makes a faction better, it's experience. It's whether they will spend 1 hour during an alert in a Biolab or whether they will cut that Biolab off. And this is also something you can check, how TR and NC will fight for hours in a biolab while the surrounding bases have 0-12 players but how VS, more often than not, will cut it off.
@ Rooklie I'm not disagreeing with you about population. In fact, I actually completely agree with you on that point as per my previous stating that VS can have low population and win. I think I made a mistake to post the screenshots here and should have probably started a new thread. But, I guess what I am trying to say is that when you are on Cobalt and you examine where the hotspots are, the trend becomes quite evident. This is something I have noticed for quite a long time now, even since before the returning players and this trend hasn't changed. When I first started out playing PS2 about 6 years ago (I think.. drifted in and out of the game so much) I never saw this as a problem. So I'm not talking so much about server pop as that isn't really a factor to me, but like Rooklie said... who is fighting who. But I do think this goes beyond the Outfits, who just lead the charge. Hence, why I think a proper fourth faction might need to be introduced to the game to stop the constant 2 on 1s. I have heard the 2 on 1 being a problem on Miller as well, so it would be interesting to see if there are any of these problems on the other servers.
Yup, those reasons aren't the only reason, there is one (I feel) really important that we left out, and which would explain why things were "different" some years ago. That's the reason I have that signature Whether it's how the spawn system works, whether it's the new spawns in the biolab, how the game is and how it works, in particular according to what rules defines and channels population in the game. For example, people will click on a green dot. If the green dot isn't available, most people won't bother waiting 15 seconds. This and many other things that come entirely from DBG contribute very strongly to how the game is experienced today by players, and, in this topic, about fight and continent balance.
yeah and add more queues to make people wait hours to play this game. Honestly, can we stop looking at continent pop. Seriously, today NC had 38%, TR 27% and VS 35%. VS were being double teamed, so much they had to leave the TR front to try and delay NC. These TR zerglings were so proud of themselves, commenting how they were beating VS with 27% cont pop. I was trying to explain to them how the cont pop meant nothing, since they had 98% at this base, and VS were losing. They didn't really understand. The nature of the game means factions can double team or spread their population unevenly across fronts. This is the reason there are zergs and unbalanced fights even when the population is 33-33-33. The answer is really simple. Here, we see that VS do have pop, and strangely enough, they are winning the alert. Now, we'll activate our brain cells and examine the situation. What's common between these too situations? TR and NC are having a huge biolab fight, which means all their pop is stuck farming in that bio, with no regard for what VS are doing. Since TR and NC are not fighting VS, they have nothing left to do but ghost cap the whole continent, and try to join the fight. Many times though, one faction will get double teamed, and lose the alert due to this. The population restrictions in fact limit a fair fight. There were always fun a fair fights during beta, and the queues + NS faction didn't exist back then. Honestly, pop don't matter unless it's concentrated in one base. Even then, a well coordinates squad can usually fend off a zergfit.
NC and TR fight each other more often cuz VS is now infested with borderline cheaters. (recoil macro, lag switching etc) Last time it was that bad when half of NCs FACS got banned for hitbox exploits
Pretty sure a lot of this is paranoia. There simply aren't that many cheater in the game, they don't usually last more than a few days, and there's no such thing as a 'cheating faction'. Unless you have substantial proof to back those claims, it's best not to spread rumors about hacking where new players might come across them. As much as people refuse to admit it, hacking really isn't a big problem with this game, it's more of what people perceive as hacking. There's a lot of weird things that can happen in this game, due to poor netcode, bad servers, the clientside nature of the game and then of course the hardcore veterans who have played the game 24/7 since the game's launch. Hackers are an anomaly, they aren't a big presence in the game, and there's not a faction that can be held responsible for attracting the most amount of "hackers".
oh we know what VS are doing, and that is exactly why we aren't bothering with them, because it is simply not fun getting spawn camped by the 80% zerg waves of the cobalt VS TRIDiots. no matter if the continent pops are even, VS will always somehow manage to have a massive zerg at every single base they're at. so yeah, if we want fun, we just avoid VS...
