On cobalt there is a situation where there are only a couple of active outfits for NC. And it is not uncommon that TR and VS are focussing full on NC, while there is almost no battles between them. I notice that VS and TR are organised a lot of the time. While NC.. The main point for me is the focus on 1 faction, while the other 2 factions don't engage on eachother. I can imagine there is a similar situation on different servers where instead of NC, TR or VS are the "victims" of a similar situation. My point is not on faction one is OP and one is not. It is about population in general. Fair is ofcourse very subjective. But I think we can agree on 2 factions focussing on 1 faction and warpgating that faction, while they don't fight eachother is NOT a fair situation. My point of discussion is how can there be more a population balance or an incentive for all the factions to go after both of them. Like a certain % of the battles should be focussed on both factions. And if that % is focussed on 1 faction, that faction is receiving a % bonus or the other faction(s) are receiving a penalty. Or maybe they get so caught up in the fight and chasing the opponent they don't take a look at territory % and start making smart decisions. And in general how can there be an incentive for people to start organizing in an outfit or a have active squads with active command.
this has been a problem ever since PS2 had its huge population decline and isnt likely to be fixed. Hell, emerald VS payers are on par with TR and NC until VS outfits come along and win the alerts. also, you are having an issue of micro vs macro. Players are just gonna shoot whatever and follow a lattice w/o thinking because there are guys to shoot, even if in the macro view, they are actively hurting the faction.
I’d argue the opposite, the one’s trying to win alerts and win continents are the one’s hurting the faction. The gameplay to win alerts and continents promotes zerging, discourages creativity, encourages avoiding a fight and making sure the opposition can’t do anything or doesn’t enjoy themselves and leave. The gameplay centers around NOT engaging with the MMOFPS structure, avoiding it whenever possible. The players actually getting stuck in a fight are the one’s trying to have fun and engage with what the game was designed to do: MMOFPS gameplay. The game would be better off without alerts, continent capture mechanics and outfit resources. A better solution would of course be to change them so they encourage engaging with the MMOFPS aspect. Fighting a tough fight should mean more than fighting an easy one. Instead of instant overpop they should be encouraged to have a small population advantage and work with that.
Unironically yea, it's a massive problem in EU servers. On Miller you have 40%+ overpop off-prime by NC, then during primetime it bounces between VS and TR having the highest winrate. On Cobalt VS stomps because all the ASP2 players log on VS for some reason, with full meta comps even in the morning while NC and TR try to have fun. It's not something without proof either : https://ps2alerts.com/, when you see Cobalt VS having 40%+ winrate no matter the time of day, or NC having 40%+ winrate off-prime then dropping off like a rock because all the zergsurfers transferred to NC. To be more specific about Cobalt NC since the OP focuses on them : I've actively seen NC leadership stick to the biggest fight and not redeploy, also NC doesn't have tryhards off-prime redeploying to every fight or at least very few such players, this makes them seem a lot weaker to VS and even mindlessly zerging TR. I understand tryharding and running minmax comps during outfit wars but the fact this gameplay and mentality bled into live servers is annoying as ****.
i just wish they would scrap the Alert system, or just stop locking continents. let people go where they want to go, fight on the lands they want to fight on. instead of the continent locking, forcing everyone to either go to a land they do not like, or they log out not wanting to go to that land so the sever pop drops....give a 2 minute warning, then rotate the warp gates. the faction that had the most land gets the benefit of what they would have received had they locked the land, but not actually locking the land, like it used to be back in 2012/2013.. maybe have this cycle every 4 or 6 hours on each continent. as the current Alert system is dog crap, i feel that the locking of continents was the first death nail in the coffin of PS2. yes, it felt good at first, but then we had the player pop on all the servers....but people got burned out on the locking a continent, and so left the game i remember the VS and NC main factions on CONNERY, the VS had Future Crew....and the NC had 666 Devil Dogs.....whilst the TR's main outfit was EXE (Execution) they were the good times, then the locking of continents started....and them outfits started to die, then were no more
I remember those days. The elite fits were Recursion, HIVE , and Joke i believe. If we had construction and the infantry arsenal balanced from now I think the game would have been even better back then when we had more players. Awesome battles in between bases and the outfits weren't buffed against solo players with things like ANVILs and Instant cooldown Squad beacons.
