This shouldn't happen unless

this has been covered before (a lot)

https://forums.daybreakgames.com/ps...y-makes-me-feel-sick-dbg-youre-idiots.253138/

https://forums.daybreakgames.com/ps...cluding-the-devs-plz-just-delete-them.253093/

https://forums.daybreakgames.com/ps...-remove-it-change-it-but-do-something.250874/

https://forums.daybreakgames.com/ps...-dynamics-comes-with-a-pretty-picture.250812/

https://forums.daybreakgames.com/ps...lert-system-does-not-work-here-is-why.250879/

And I was gentle, I didn't share all the threads lol

for Liewec

________________________________________________________________________________________________

I was very surprised to see that some people would look at this picture and not understand. So here's a series of pointers :

[spoiler]

-> As you can see an Alert is on going and there's about 30 mins left in it. An alert lasts 1h30 so basically we are reaching the end with 1/3 to go.

(that is the subject of my post, Alerts. They are pretty much supposed to be "the big thing" in PS2. They give nice rewards even to losers and happen roughly 3-4 hours after a continent has opened. At the end, the continent is locked and a winner is declared which is why you might say this is the continent's "end game content". )

-> TR is winning the Alert with 56% territory control (the faction with the most territory control wins). You will notice that the regions owned by TR in comparison to the other two factions is almost evenly spread, you could almost draw a line between the North East frontier of TR territroy and the South West frontier at Wokuk Amp Station and Tumas Tech Plant.

This is is the opposite to VS and NC where you can see that the territory owned by these two factions is mostly focused on each other.

-> The population is highest for TR with 35%.

That is more than the other 2 however

a) as a faction dominates, its relative population (I say relative because it could be not that its pop is increasing but that the pop of the other two are decreasing) tends to increase. Although since the latest Alert patches that doesn't happen as much as before.

b) though we do not have gross population figures, you can tell from the lack of orange explosions on the map that the population isn't very high on this continent at this time. (orange explosions indicate big fights). That's important because with regards to pop balance, the lower the overall population, the less population balance actually tends to matter.

c) at any rate if you were to add the NC pop to teh VS pop, you would get 64% pop, almost double TR's. If both NC and VS wished to win and/or wished for TR to lose, they could easily gang bang TR.

-> NC cut off the VS East territory by takijng the Onatha biolab.

Not only that but they are already ghost capping the lane to the East and capping the base to the North. This has cut off 10 bases for VS so strategically, it's a very very important move. Anyone who would care about the alert, any squad, platoon, outfit or "lone wolf" would

a) have done something to prevent this
b) be rushing to capture the biolab back
c) try to work on a workaround by, for example, capping AuraxiCom Substation (which would in turn cut off NC allowing VS to cap the biolab back easily).

However, you can see from the "lack of orange explosions" there is no big fight in any of these reasons. In fact, since I'm hovering my mouse over AuraxiCom Substation, you can see that there are less than 12 VS players there and only slightly more NC.

It wouldn't take a big platoon to take AuraiCom back, or even the Biolab (it doesn't appear on the screenshot cause I can only hover my mouse over one place but there are less than 12 VS players and NC players in that region even though it represents the equivalent of 10 bases..)



But all of this is only an "apéritif", and I could go on about the population numbers on the TR front that show that there are very very low numbers of NC and VS on the TR front, whether they are defending against TR or attacking TR. I can't really speak much about it because the screnshot doesn't show that information.

However, a 10 year old would understand that IF (and thats the point) anyone cared about winning the alert, they would attack the winning faction that has more territory. Instead, and this is my last and final point, they focus on each other and fight in random bases just because there's a fight there.)


-->If you look at the NC warpgate, you will see that the closest base immediately to the East is owned by VS. It has been cut off. For a while even as is illustrated by the timers of teh 2 bases NC is capping after the biolab.

I can't remember its name but it's a 3 point large outpost and such is really hard to capture if it's defended a bit.

Anyway, what I'd like you to notice is trhat BIG ORANGE EXPLOSION LOOKING DOT(s) that appear on the map at this location. They indicate that there is a big fight going on there.

If you've noticed this, then you may also notice that there isn't a single other place on the map where this orange explosion appears. This indicates that there are no big fights anywhere on the map except for this location.

I know its a long post and I know it feels stupid because I'm spelling out obvious things, but let us just say there has been a "demand" for hand holding from our less mentally fortunate and acute friends.

So to sum it up :

1/3 of an Alert left on timer, TR has highest pop but not that much, TR has most of the map and territory is almost evenly spread between VS and NC bases (draw a line from NE to SW), VS biolab is cut off making VS lose 10 bases (solution to that, get it back or cap AuraxiCom shows less than 12 VS players in both cases), but all of this is only part of the picture.

The real deal is that orange explosion in a cut off base warpgating the NC while TR is dominating indicating the one and only big fight in the continent in the one and only base that perhaps matters the least as far as the Alert is concerned.

So what's the problem?

Well there's two cases :

a) you care (players care) about the alert
b) you don't care about the alert.

Case b), not a problem.
Case a), big problem (except for TR, although they might say they aren't having fun cause they aren't getting any good fights cause no one is fighting them) because not only are the VS and NC that do care about the Alert fighting a faction with highest population, but most of the members of their own factions are actively helping TR win..

You can't play football if half of your team doesn't want to play.

So what's the point?

The point is that if the majority of players are not participating in a certain content, that "content" needs to take this into account so that the players who do participate can enjoy themselves. And if that isn't possible, then it is critical to consider changing the "content" all together.

People who don't care about the alert are perfectly entitled to enjoy the game in whatever way they like and to ignore whatever content there is or to farm or whatever the hell they do.

However people who do care about it and wish to play the game as intended by the DEVs who developped that content ARE EQUALLY ENTITLED TO ENJOY THEMSELVES.


Your issue (DB) is that a square is a rectangle, but a rectangle is not a square. The player enjoyment of the game by people who don't care about your content is equally as important as the enjoyment of those who do. However, if the activities and gameplay of players who do care about the content has no or little influence over those who don't, the opposite is not true :


where "players who care" about the Alert can try to win it without their actions having an impact on "players who don't care". The behaviour of "those who don't" has a huge impact over those who do, making it, like in this case, impossible.

In short, people who don't care about the alert are making it impossible for those who do care about the alert ot enjoy the game. And it's not their fault.

[/spoiler]

___________________________________________________________________________

yes, and Demi has repeatedly bought facts and statistics that prove my point.
VS are OP and noone enjoys fighting them.

lol

a) that isn't true, in fact I'm really surprised that you're saying this seriously, seeing as you've played the game long enough. It's what new players say cause they are new and don't know any better.

b) don't matter anyway cause it isn't the topic

c) the only thing Demi brings is huge walls of text that say nothing and mean nothing

bruh.


I play on all factions, have been a part of the game since the second week it launched.


You can't be serious?

I'm not going to say that the VS are OP, I do believe that a couple of their toys are performing above average but overall I think balance between the factions in terms of numbers on paper is pretty damn good.
However, I will put my checkmark in the box labeled "Not fun to fight against". The VS aren't fun to fight against. Something about the faction tends to attract a certain mindset and unfortunately it's the mindset of "late night 12v12 NCvTR fight, come in with scythes and pop the sundies, maybe drop some OSes, maybe a dozen infiltrators in the hills" and it is just frustrating to face.
A game can be fun for both the winner AND the loser but fighting the VS is often not fun, from their perspective they're just more organised, from our perspective they're suicide popping sundies and ending fights. Those two words right there are the important ones by the way. It's not the winning or losing. it's the "ending fights".

It is super cool that the VS are more organised in general, that's great. But it sucks when you're with a bunch of randos defending a base and three purple galaxies cruise in that there's just nothing you can do about. Very tactical yes, very effective yes, not fun for anyone but you though.
So yeah, it's natural that if given the option to fight the TR (Or NC as my TR character) instead of the VS i'm going to take it most of the time and yes, it's natural that such a decision is going to have a ripple effect when multiple people feel like that.

I can have a good old /yell chat conversation with some TR while we're shooting eachother's brains out, just chatting about stuff, even complimenting wins and encouraging losses. It's not super common but it happens and people enjoy it. I can't remember the last time I saw that with the VS.

Just as people posit that the NC attracts new players because of the style, I theorise that the VS faction has a similar attractive property to people who are far more serious and perhaps even into milsim. And while that's cool it just isn't fun.

This is TWO/THIRDS of all alerts on Connery:



.

(13% of TR are responsible 50% of all self-Sabotage which lets Vanu win a vast majority of the time)
((just kidding)) ((( sort of ... TR harasser squads actually do do this though...they'll ride over to a VS fight just to farm ONLY the NC at that fight.... it's DUMB AF)))




The SOLUTION to these problems though isn't just "Oh well lets nerf VS infantry".... as much as that is actually warranted, as much as their camo at night is a challenge for casual players (and Cyrious just made a video showing this by the way), and their actual DPS at all ranges (when acc/spread is accounted for) actually exceeds the average NC and TR players ... the REAL issue here is one of Kill-Farming and Directives and how there isn't any self-correcting Mechanism to make it more annoying to farm the factions who have the least territory.

This was ALREADY the case when it came to farming "blueberries" for Certs or farming TR at range for the more annoying directives like ScoutRifles & SemiAutos. But recently the degenerate OutfitWars meta has pushed this crap into TURBO-Sh***y territory mainly because the Tryhard outfits get recurring outfit points on Hexes that are safely locked behind a low-resistance battle front.

^This crap right here would never have happened under planetside 1's supply-logistics designs!^


( ...allow me to propose an Alternative...)
...If Outfits only accrued recurring WAR points for hexes that were Contestable (and had some minimum amount of resistance/opposition local to them), then the Faction that gets ignored the most, (thus ghost caps the most) would actually be getting the shortest spurts of free e-p**n centimeters for this stupid d**k measuring constest, because they would always be "defending" against the least amount of opposition and have the smallest actual "battle Front".


As for solving the larger issue at play here: Well that's where the Devs really need to consider giving up on the whole concept of Bonus-XP for the factions that are Underpop (b/c that's only helping the VS in most cases) and instead change it to granting Hitpoint bonuses to factions with the least territory so that they themselves will be LESS incentivized to try and farm eachother because the longer TKK would prove a hurdle to quick mindless Cert / KD padding and easier Directive point farming.

^ this would literally solve the whole "NAHHH We don't wanna stop fighting eachother, we don't like fighting the Vs, they're ICKY!" complaint

Fine let's talk about VS hahah, no problem

I've got a personal theory, i'ts only speculation, I'm not claiming it to be true, but it makes sense, and in my experience, it fits and seems to be verified empirically.

I won't go through in detail (unless anyone asks), but here's the super simplified version.

___

When new player join the game for the first time, they don't pick VS.

When new players join the game for the first time, they pick a faction according to reasons that have nothing to do with how the faction's gear and weapons performs.

They pick a faction according to how it looks, or according to the lore, that kid of thing.

For example, Russians pick red, French pick blue, but whether it's blue or red, freedom fighters and rebels is much more attractive to a new player than "purple spendex aliens".


(this would explain why, historically, VS has always been under-populated)

Once a new player has gained experience, he might feel like checking out the other factions, which is why by the time they come to VS, they already have experience, or rather, more experience than when they started off with TR or NC.

(this is a matter of trends, of course anyone can say ; "I started with VS and did the opposite", it's a general trend...)

So the VS faction, generally speaking, is composed of players with more experience than the other two factions.

______________________________




bonus -> let's say that this is true. It means that if you were to pull statistics showing for example, that VS guns got more kills, you might assume that it is because the VS guns are better. But you'd be wrong.

I don't think players are responsible. Players play and are as they play and as they are.

The reason I say this is that over the years, this issue has evolved, it's become worse or better depending on what the devs did to the game. That would seem to insinuate that player behaviour isn't the most important factor in all this.

Here's an easy example : spawns inside a biolab coupled with bugged "join combat" which spawns people in the biolab promotes biolab fights. I mean that's as easy as 1+1=2

Which is EXACTLY the point of my proposed solutions
Most Players only understand what is callled The Path of Least resistance.

This is especially true in MMORPG's! (which this game, I hate point out... is definitely a MMORPG as the main focus isn't super crisp CSGO levels of Netcode, and it's definitely not STRATEGY .... no it's none of those things, it's GRIND first and foremost).

Make the current paths of least resistance (TR and NC only fighting eachother) more of a hassle when it comes to KDR and KPM, and you will solve the entirety of the current issues (yes this will result in a number of other side effects... but this game came into BEING with literally hundreds of side effects and those are pretty much all the Devs have ever been addressing ever since this game was still under the misguided direction of Higby)

Wait, you propose artificially lowering the rewards of TR and NC players when fighting eachother, in order to encourage them to fight the VS? Aside from that being an awful idea in my opinion ( And I mean no offence, I am a fool afterall) it wouldn't work; If nothing changed i'd fight the TR over the VS all the way down to -100% XP.

Edit- I should explain my reasoning; When fighting the TR, we shoot them and they shoot us. We move forward, they move back. They move forward, we move back.
When fighting the VS, they go out of their way to make the fight STOP. Then we move to the next base, where they promptly stop the fight and so on and so forth. It may be simple minded of me but I am here to shoot people, i'll happily follow an order but at the end of the day the game to me is about shooting other players. It isn't about the mathematically most efficient way to destroy all given AMSes at once.

I'm going to ignore the insulting things you adress to me in other posts and go down to the real meat of this post, which for this once was actually intelligently written.

First a few corrections. I am not talking about something different and I did not misinterpret your intentions, we are just talking from our own side of the fence. You talk about how you want everyone to be continent-capture oriented and I talk about why people stick with large fights instead. But regardless of which side of the fence you talk about the core is the exact same: What do people enjoy.

Second there is a persistant myth about why some factions have large populations during alerts they are winning. People like you proclaim it is because that faction is winning that more people join that faction. The truth, when you check for example Fisu during such an alert, is that the population of the winning faction remains virtually the same but that the population of the losing factions drop. These players that drop out do not log on to the winning faction during this time. So while the % of the winning faction increases it's because the players leave the other factions, rather than join the winning one.

The problem you face with the picture you show is one of enjoyment. These players aren't focused on capturing the continent but on finding a fight they'll enjoy. This is why they stick with a sure-fire fight they can enjoy, in this case next to the warpgate while only a small amount of players ghost-caps or is present at other bases to defend or attack. It doesn't matter how many players are on the continent, it doesn't matter what kind of stragetical considerations you have: It is simply not fun to do. And you should know very well why. Winning a battle ends a fight. WIth the exception of a few bases the fight resumes after only a while and often with the previous attackers having the superiority until they reach a large facility. We actually see how capture-oriented gameplay currently works out with outfit resources: Discourage enemies to fight, make them leave, give maximum cheese, outpop them by however much you can throw at them. It doesn't encourage enjoyable fights, it encourages you to make the fight as dull and bad as possible for your opponents.
And you are surprised that players don't want to join this stragetic gameplay?


Let's get back to the most important part of your post:

That last part, that is what is missing. Now you think "ofcourse it's missing for the stragetic-minded players that is why I'm making this post". But the point is that the stragetic-minded players do enjoy it but are missing the majority of players. Why is the majority of players missing for the stragetic part of the game? Because the enjoyment is missing for them.

Would I love it if the stragetical part of the game became enjoyable for the masses and everyone participated in them? Hell yes ofcourse I would!
Now if you are truly invested in giving the stragetic-minded players the enjoyment they deserve just as much as the rest of the players, you have to be making it enjoyable for the majority of players to actually engage in it.

Now you do throw around some misconceptions I again have to get out of the way:
1: It's not the players behaviour, it's what the devs do to the game.

Player behaviour is everything here, and the devs have the tools to use that player behaviour. If you make it easy to spawn in biolabs, yes more players will spawn in biolabs... If the fight there is enjoyable. Early in the game you had almost unlimited freedom in where you spawned, and people would always opt for Biolab and Crown fights because they were enjoyable.

2: Players who care are the only victims.

Players who care about alerts are often the reason why the fights stop for players who don't care about alerts. This was extreme during the HIVE period where just a handful of players could ruin a solid continent fight for everyone else.


The simplest solution to all of your problems and all of your moaning is to align the enjoyment of the masses with capturing the continent, while also promoting players to find as fair and balanced fights as possible rather than the screwball F-You matches that develop with for example the resource system.
If the majority of players can find fun, engaging and above all else continuous balanced fights by trying to capture the continent, no one is going to be complaining and everyone will be doing just what you want.

For this to work we need:

• Proper defensive gameplay flow.
  • Currently most spanwrooms are chokepoints that keep the defenders in rather than help them take the base. Which is especially aggrevating with how the attackers get virtually infinite time to capture a base as long as they can spawn while the defenders get mere minutes to retake it.
  • The moment the points are captured the defenders should have fall-back positions from which they can attempt to retake the base. These positions would then help foster the vehicle battle that is supposed to happen between base captures so that the battle effectively doesn't end even when a base is captured but naturally progresses from the interior of the base, to the surroundings of the base, to the vehicle paths between bases, to the surroundings of the next base to the interior of the next base, with a chance for the defenders to turn the tide at each step.
  • Vehicle spawns are the first to be stopped when enemy vehicles arrive, effectively muting any vehicular response for the defenders. Vehicle spawns should be build into the interior of bases so that infantry can offer protection for spawning vehicles in the tighter corridors/tunnels of the base. It would also foster more coordination between vehicles and infantry to clear out particular area's so either can progress.
• Better rules for population disparities.
  • When outpopped it's not fun to fight. Spawnrooms are to blame but also the lack of viable ways to fight back. Giving players who are outpopped for a certain duration access to perks would help. Perks like lowered nanite cost for their items and vehicles, the ability to spawn in via drop-pod in increasingly large area's so they can assault more accurately and unpredictably, access to vehicle spawns outside of the base through a faction-sponsored ANVIL system etc.

That is the minimum requirement to make this work. You'll probably insult me again or dismiss it (which is equally insulting), but hey there you go.
And again: You actually made an intelligent post here, ignoring the one's that came after.

No, XP rate would be adjusted accordingly to make sure no one is making less XP per hour. If you READ what I typed, I said that the TTK against those players with the least territory, would be lengthened meaning that TR and NC would simply have lower Kills per minute against eachother in the Screenshot example where VS controlled 75% of the territories.

Less kills per minute just means less STAT PADDING. More opportunity for Medics to use the LEFT Click primary of their Medical tool instead of always Right-clicking. It means slower directive progress for Cheesers who should really be fighting EVERYONE if they're already in the "Late Game" phase of planetside's Trophy Grind. It means less Ego and less toxicity among a whole bunch of Casual players but most importantly it means that the SKILLED players among them get fed up with not being able to just one-Magazine every fungo they bump into so instead those players will actually go fight the much more coordinated VS and begin to get even better at the intended "path" designed into the game (as opposed to just Top-fragging in the shallow end of a pub-stompy Solo-players-only Arena)

See, this isn't about punishing anyone. It's about creating a natural system of proper "Matchmaking" within the map itself

I appreciate you taking the time to explain it to me and I apologise for misunderstanding, I did read what wrote but I obviously misinterpreted it. Sorry.

Iler, this is just my experience, or if you prefer, a point of view :

It wasn't always like this.

In the first year or two there was the crown on Indar, the Tech Plant on Esamir and so on, but they fixed that. How?

By understanding that most players, and I'm not saying it's good or bad, it's just how it is; most players don't have a strategic mindset, or at least, not in this game.

There could be any number of reasons for that, we can talk about it if you want but I'll skip this bit so the post isn't too long.

The devs (the ones that were working on PS2 more or less up until SOE changed name) understood this, and channelled the players so that everyone was happy. It might be that it was a fluke and that they never intended to, but in any case, that's how it was.

The (recent, I dunno about Rogue Games) devs, instead of guiding the players in a way that suited everyone, catered to what they thought the biggest playerbase wanted ; fights period.

That's the core of the issue.

But think for a second, what does everyone do, and I mean everyone, during friday night ops? They try to take bases, they try to win alerts. There's a demand for this type of game play, there always has been.

It's precisely where the competitive (without being a tournament on TV) aspect of the game develops.

Basically, as it stands, and as it's been standing for a couple years now (some of those threads I wrote and shared above date back to 2018), you've got the outfits, when they are actively playing together, and then you've got everyone else. "back in the day" (like an old man would say), most players behaved in game as if they were running ops. Whether they were solo or small squad, whatever.

There was tons of public squads available all day, all night, and those squads and platoons would do all they could to conquer territory, and that was the heart of the game.

But it's not the people that changed, it's the game that changed, it's the way the game is organised, structured

And that's the main reason, since 2017/2018, I've been so angry at DBG, because I blame them for changing the core of the game, for turning a precious unique yet unpolished gem into a cheap FPS shooter where nothing means anything.

With the recent changes in DBG and Escalation, I'm not sure which direction they will take, but at the end of the day, it isn't hard to make everyone happy in this case, as was evident some years ago.

I mean yes, I was there for that too... been playing since launch. But the VS usually hovered around 19% of all pop back then too so it wasn't felt as much in the day-to-day. I'm not gonna say that anyone should be FORCED to only go fight a bunch of tryhards and aim-snappers. But you can't tell me that a 3 - faction system where one faction is as "Stacked" as the Outfit-wars have shown, while the other two gave up 5 out of every 7 days is "healthy" either. Are you saying there shouldn't be any efforts made at the mechanics Design level?

Because it kinda looks like it due to how meandering and un-condensed your writing style is? That's usually called "Waffling" which is associated with Fence-sitting and only results in giving up even MORE ground to the side that's already pulling way ahead

Well it depends what we're talking about. I'm guessing you didn't read the rest of the post cause we actually agree. (dw, I do that too)

Anyway;

If we're talking about how most players will sometimes / often ignore any strategic element of the game and instead will spend all their time in a cut off biolab that they have no chance in capping (or defending), then yeah, there should be an effort made at the mechanics on the design leve. That's the point of this thread in the first place.

If we're talking about VS being overpowered, and assuming that what I believe is right (that they aren't, it's just that newbs don't pick VS, so that faction tends to have more experienced players) then as a matter of design, it's more a question of psychology than anything else, since it would be (for example) "how to make purple aliens wearing spendex more attractive to new players".

I've no idea what waffling is but looked it up and have even less an idea of why you'd say that. As to fence sitting, I'd never heard of that either but I can tell you, I've chosen a "side" since I started discussing this issue in 2018.

As a matter of fact, for a very long time, I was the only one to try and raise this issue, and I know no one will read those threads, who would? But if you did, it would be a proof.

If the VS attracts all the veteran players we would see that in the numbers. Someone who's a veteran would have superior skills with the basic weapons available to everyone. So weapons like the NS small-arms, rocketlaunchers, shotguns, snipers, Lightning weapons, Liberators etc would show superior performance for the VS than the other two factions.

The truth ofcourse is that the VS has scientifically insignificant differences in performance with the other two factions. Many have the virtually the same spread of kills/destructions and simply swap who's the best faction for the day. It is only when we look at ES weapons that the VS starts having superiorities such as their absolutely magnificent Magrider. And before anyone says it, the Magrider is the only vehicle on the VS that shows more gunners than the other factions. It is because of the Magrider and not any magical teamplay skills that it has more gunners. If it was magical teamplay skills then we would see more gunners on all vehicles not just the Magrider.