On Emerald, it's very obvious that the Vanu have far more experienced players than TR or NC, therefore making them extremely unfun to fight against. I have no doubt that this is one of the reasons that new players quit since fighting someone who has been playing for almost a decade has got to be a huge turn off. The devs need to add incentives for vets to join the other two factions to help make this game more balanced and therefore more fun for everyone.
Remove the queues. Vets usually go to the underpopped faction to skip queues. Also most good players gravitate towards VS because their directives are slightly more interesting/rewarding, and their weapons in general have more potential. They've got really nice accuracy on most weapons, while maintaining a good balance between damage and fire rate. Also, the fact that they've got no ammo weapons does help remove an issue for those good players.
Once you go easy mode Vanu, why go back to the other factions. Seriously. This podunk company doesn't even give you anything for faction loyalty. Altside 2.
Directive chasing makes vets want to faction hop. As a long time Vanu main and also terrible player I've never understood how VS weapons are supposed to be overpowered. My outfit went to TR for a while and strictly from a medic standpoint my hard KDR tripled when I moved to TR assault rifles. I'm going to hop over to NC as soon as I get a few more VS directives out of the way.
VS is easy mode, its that simple, also, lagging thirdworlders all play VS. There is nothing like fighting ching chong from Japan on US East server, much logic in this game.
VS isn't easy mode, at all. Anyway OP you're partially right, it's a common problem for many servers. On Cobalt, the issue was sort of balanced out because the VS pop was so much lower, so even if they tended to be more experienced, there was a lot less of them. What you might want to ask is why this is happening? (and no, it isn't because VS is OP, although I prefer VS weapons myself and tend to perform better with VS but that's more a matter of taste and fine tuning). ___ Personal theory which over time is something I'm confident is true ___ NC and TR are full of new players. The reason for that is that when a new player first joins the game, he has no idea what weapons are better, how vehicles work or anything like that. So how does he or she choose a faction? According to taste. It could be that they simply like blue or red more than purple. It could be that they like the way TR or NC infantry look, as opposed to VS spendex. It could also be the lore, and how new players would be like : "I want to be a freedom fighter" or "I want to be a rebel" ! Not many of them, some of them, but not many of them will think "I want to be an Alien wearing spendex". That's just the start of the explanation, but the rest is pretty obvious so I won't bother. Just one last thing, I've been playing this game for years, like a lot. (not just 1 hour every 2 months for 5 years, you know what I mean) and coincidence or not, I prefer to play on VS. The gear and weapons are balanced but they are different, but whether they allow you to perform better mostly depends on how you play; do you like huge magazines so you can keep shooting for ever and ever? Or more deadly high rate of fire guns that need to be reloaded every 2 seconds and suck at medium to high range? That'"s the balance, some players will prefer one over the other. I personally feel that VS weapons are more friendly towards experienced players, that could be true. But if I personally prefer to play on VS, it's more to do with the fact that the NC and TR (not everyone, but a lot of them) tend to be so clueless. And that's cause a lot of them are new, it is'nt their fault, but at the end of the day, personally, I prefer to play with more experienced players even if that means being outnumbered.
I joined about a week ago and I can say this is 100% the reason I picked the faction I did. I play on Emerald, too. I was talking about an old MMORPG WildStar with the friend of mine who got me into this game. I played as a member of The Dominion, which is incredibly similar to TR in concept (at least, the empire part), so I instantly went with them because I saw interstellar empire and I went "Yeah. This is familiar territory." I didn't know anything about faction benefits. I didn't even know what kind of bearing my faction selection would even have. For all I knew, it was just what team you were on, and that was it. I assumed that otherwise, all of the stats were basically identical. It was just cosmetic appearance that differed, but the mechanics were more or less identical. My assumption was not entirely true. Now that said, in light of what OP mentioned, I can say that there is a notable skill gap. Generally speaking, VN is either screwing us over completely, or it's a balanced fight. The only time I've had an experience where VN was definitely losing was when they were the minority of the server's population. Most of my fights are with VN in favor of NC because they tend to be far higher energy battles, presumably due to this skill gap, and I find that challenge really fun since it gives me more to do as a medic main. I haven't really had the experience of trying to be offensive in these fights though. I did once or twice and I can say it was very frustrating being seemingly powerless to do anything to them.
I have 3k hours on Steam alone, VS is moron friendly faction. Best infantry weapons in the game, best MBT, best ESF, best default camo. There is no balance in this game, especially since Wrel took over.
Yeah well, I'm not gona debate that, cause it's endless, and then at one point someone will pull a ******* spreadsheet to prove whatever even though that's not the point. Especially as it proves nothing anyway because no matter how many kills a weapon has, it's not that weapon that wins alerts. Not to mention that if the whole faction is more experienced to start with (which it is) then whatever weapons they use (VS weapons) will have higher stats...) The point of this whole thread is that more VS has more experienced players (in general, there are exceptions, you're an exception, I hope it makes you feel good ). And, we all know that VS, generally (again) and no matter what the server, tends to perform better. It would make sense if they indeed have more experiened players. The weapons are irrelevant because you give a ******* overpowered weapon to a noob and he will die and won't kill with it. Not to mention that's it's experience above all that wins alerts because it's experience that determines choices like : "attack this base" or "attack that base" or "just stay here cause this is FUN (biolab)" or "zerg is pushng a lane, go fight it? run away? or cut it off?" That kind of thing. Not to mention how and when to kill spawns such as routers, beacons, and sundies. It takes experience to get that kind of stuff, so if VS has more experienced players, which it has, then that's what explains their performance. The game isn't perfectly balanced, but it is balanced, at least with regards to infantry and infantry weapons. If all of a sudden, you gave TR or NC spendex, called them aliens, bam, they'd win alerts most of the time.
PS. not to pull my epeen out or anything, but i got 2k hours on one account. 840 hours on another 2k hours on another 1.5k on another 1.2k on another 800 on another the one I'm currently playing has 330, that doesn't even include the backup alts I made but bring a pre total of 8.7k hours. You made me curious, so I checked, and since I checked, I thought I might as well..
Don't make me laugh. Have you ever played VS for a decent length of time? If you don't know how to take advantage of Magrider mobility and flanking, you get bodied hard by Vanguards and Prowlers, especially since they have on-demand resistance and firing rate increases, respectively, while Magriders only have Fire Suppression as their mid-combat advantage trick. On top of that, TR have objectively the best ES top gun in the game (the Vulcan), the best A2G tool (Banshee), and the best AA and AV tool (Striker). Meanwhile the NC can kill ground vehicles from total safety (Phoenix) and have the best SMGs in the game (Blitz, Gladius). VS may get some cool/fun stuff (Beetlejuice, Obelisk) but it's not overpowered in the slightest.
The "vets" are already on the other factions. They play all 3 typically. There is one VS outfit on Emerald that catches a lot of griping and hackusations that actually started as TR but transitioned to VS because they are the underpop faction. This makes them easier to play on (shorter queues), have the desired harder underpop fights, and it helps out the server better than the alternative. What you're asking for is for folks like this to now switch to one of the higher pop factions. Imagine what that will be like for VS.
It's not overpowered, and in terms of overpowered weapons I agree TR have it best with Vulcan and Banshee: NC got some nice SMGs, that's true, but they are not really over the top in terms of performance afaik, and the Pheonix is only useful when applied in squads or to unattended targets (can be nice to make some tank drivers reconsider their placement choices though, so that's something I guess). VS weapons are (in my admittedly limited) experience simply more comfortable and accomodating, especially those with the heat machanic because you don't need to worry about uninterrubtable animations for reloading. THis doesn't make any of them superior in temrs of performance, but it makes them feel like they are.
TR also get hands down the best sidearm in the game as their default (Repeater). I rarely go up against a TR packing anything else even though good NS options exist (Commissioner etc). It's almost on par with CQC primaries.
How to prevent this? Easy, make the faction pop balancing not based on headcount but matckmaking rating So it's not 100 pro player against 50 noobs + 50 pros but instead it became 100 pro against 60 pro+ 80 noobs, basically u get the concept Either that or aggregate the matchmaking rating and make it a buff of tactical sectors (this is what I recomend) 100 pros in vanu against 50 noobs+50 pros in NC? NC now only needs 2 minute to cap a normally 3 minute base and gets nannite cost reduction by 40%, which scales based on matchmaking rating gap. So in case NC is filled with all noobs while a vanu elite outfit have an ops? Get ready for unlimited grenade and ghostcap that flips point in 30 second and need 5 minute to flip back It's just so easy to get matchmaking rating, just aggregate every single data of each player (HSR, SPM, ACC, KDA, IVI, etc) that updates every 15 minutes or something Now the incentive goes more into tactical play and teamwork instead of the "Just aim better" argument when losing against vets because lets face it, most of those vets just drop a platoon flipping every single push just with brute force in the last 1 minute of cap If factions are indeed balanced, this won't cause any problems anyway
Personally, I don't have a sense of weapon unbalance (with the exception of magrider). But for some reason, situations where I am killed before the enemy appears on the screen only happen to VS. I have never seen this from the TR side, although players with good ping should be in all factions. The same applies to players with a lot of experience. Cobalt. This is usually Betelgeuse 54-A, sometimes combined with a suspiciously low BR (less than 50). At the same time, there are what I call "normal VS", most of them, and in this case, the fights are not a problem. I doubt it's the effect of player experience, organization, and weapon balance.
