SOE Thank you for allowing multiple factions per server

Pretty sure that would be considered "Griefing" which I believe is a bannable offense.

Again you are polarising the issue. It isnt as simple as yes and no, there are measures that could be taken to make this work well and prevent the issues that you are describing.

Why would they need to do that when they can just log out and switch to which ever side is winning? I don't think you understand the mentality of the childish people who play games now. I talking about people who ask what the most op faction class is in any game and then go roll it.
These people want to win all the time they don'y want a challenge they want the easiest road they can take. This is going to crush any bit of population balance that was left.

END OF STORY.

Edit I'm glad a few AU people don't have to make a choice faction wise or be bothered with making another account at the expense of all the other servers GG.

I have to agree that this is not a good change. I'm very much against it.

1. Allows much easier ability to spy on enemies and report exact locations of forces and distribution of forces. This is most impactful on those outfits that actually employ tactics. Granted, the same occurs when someone makes a different account, but now spying is much easier.

2. Faction population imbalance. Fair weather players will flip to the dominant faction just to farm certs and "feel like a winner".

3. Eliminates faction loyalty. Granted, many don't care or identify at all with their characters, but having one character per server encourages loyalty to your faction and a sense of competitiveness with other factions. That's going to go away.

If they opened a server where you could only have one character, I'd be there.

Not sure if this "feature" was the cause or not, but Vanu is drastically outnumbered on Connery now. We were slightly under-popped for a while, but with the latest patch the issue has grown a lot worse. NC have 38%, TR have 34% and Vanu have a meager 28% of the server population.

Stupid and ignorant?

If I was an AU player I'd be saying that about you right now. Why should they not be allowed to have a consolidated account especially when things like membership and SC bank are to be considered?

Maybe they could lock this feature to just the AU server... but I still think you're blowing this whole faction hopping thing out of proportion.

People make claims that it's "easier" to spy and grief with a consolidated account... it only makes tracking them easier. Exiting and logging in on a second account is childs play and hardly a deterrent.

People who want to exploit it will anyways. People who would use it honestly are less apt to want to deal with a second account.

Show me to the server where you can roll only 1 faction and I will piss on my current toons.

I'll save this statement and come back in a couple weeks to see how this has worked out.
I couldn't care less about the griefers I'm talking a bout the fair weather faction hoppers that will kill the spirit of the game and will want to "win" at any cost. If you don't think that is a large number of people you are sorely mistaken.

The problem with this is there is no way you as a player can tell if that guy who 'accidentally' dropped a nade in the middle of a heated defensive choke and blasted most of them back to the spawn which lost the choke is someone who accidentally dropped a nade due to a wrong keypress or did it on purpose.

Now I'm all for having multiple characters on a single server but there needs to be some sort of cooldown between switching out so you can't hop back and forth with all the greifing potential that has.

And you know it will be abused especially cert farming by having half your squad spawn as expendable fodder for the other half to wipe out over and over and over.

So you are clarifying that people do this anyway by swapping accounts. For starters this supports the theory that this change doesnt bring anything new to the table in terms of people playing unethically.

What this change does is give people who have legitimate reasons to have more than one faction per server a way of doing this. A way that can be monitored. People who abuse this feature using a consolidated account are going to get reported pretty quick smart. Anyone who persists using multiple accounts will be unaffected one way or another by this change.

I recognise that it is a bad thing to allow instant faction switches because of fair weather players and population stability, but with any of the suggested alterations to the current system there exists an oppertunity to give players less incentive to roll with multiple accounts and more incentive to have a consolidated account for their characters on one server. This providing SOE more power to monitor players and their behaviour, and I believe it will result in less people using multiple accounts because having consolidated accounts is more convenient. With changes I think this could be a lot better than the old restriction and result in a better managed server population.

Anyone who plays that way is also looking at 3x the XP grind (which is certainly significant in PS2).

They'd actually be gimping themselves.

I do by playing all factions on diff servers anyways. Honestly I see little difference. I have logged in, checked the map, sighed with disappointment, and logged out to go play an alt.

Sometimes your main fact is doing some hairbrained BS and you just got no desire to put up with it. What matter what server the alt is on? People will be logging out of that faction on that server from annoyance either way, and pop caps prevent any 1 empire from exceeding a max.

horrible idea just horrible soe.

Wrong now people like me that will try and fight the odds will get gimped by people like you just switching sides instead of switching servers. Is that hard for you to wrap your mind around?

Swapping accounts is a clumsy way to do it in the heat of battle as it takes forever for the client to shutdown and restart unless you have a fairly new rig with lots of memory.

For the average player still rolling on 5+ year old c2d and whatever budget gfx card was popular at the time its a pretty lengthy process.

Now with this change you just logout to the character screen and log back in in under 30 seconds even if you have a crappy computer barely able to play the game.

Terrible change. I guess I can create a TR, stream snipe The Enclave and go grief BuzzcutPysco. That is essentially what this change allows now, just going to allow more griefing...SoE giving into the whiners it sounds like and not paying attention to the huge negatives this will entail.

Also, going to give way to the 4th faction once again. All the n00bs who are losing a fight will just switch factions and join the winning side thus making a snowball effect...bad.

I understand why they did it.

I'm not for it.
One faction, one account, one server.
You want to play a different faction? Go to another server, or reroll.
Faction hopping never helped anyone and will ultimately ruin this game.

EVE capitalizes on this kind of gameplay, but EVE is about economics and not shooting people in the head in a competitive way.

actually having your alternate faction characters on the same account prevents this as grief affects all characters on your account

it was easier before with a separate account than it is now using the same account

great change.... i log on to see my sides population outnumbered. I log off and play something else.

take into account before this change most sides were for the most part balanced pop wise

No need to be insulting, I created the thread to discuss how we could mitigate the issues that you and others have brought up without reverting to the 1 faction per server restriction. So far you have reiterated the issues but have not talked about how it could be fixed without a binary switch back to the old system. I think there is a way that both sides can be serviced.

As for your statement regarding picking a side and playing it:

1) It would be helpful if I had more than one server to play on so I could try them and make an informed decision, something I have been unable to do until now without deleting a character or making another account.

2) as I have mentioned I have groups of friends who play different factions. I am playing this game with my friends not adhering to an artificial loyalty to an ingame faction.

Whatever. In my experience team swappers are usually easy fodder anyways. If anything you'll just get more XP even faster.

That's just my way of looking at it.

People team-swap in every game. Considering time investment to upgrade everything, that's a really bad idea is PS2.

I really wanted to play all 3 but I've been playing the others less and less just cause it's such a grind. And it's nothing about team swapping, it's simple variety.

And as mentioned, they can always add restrictions to the same account xfaction on 1 server if it does become an issue, whereas with multiple accounts there'll still be none.