No fights during primetime...crisis mode reached

woodman was MEDIUM at 18:00 CET yesterday. one week before woodman was veryhigh to high population. and i didnt mention that TR population drops very quickly and this server is starting to be VS/NC server with TR as a bonus on indar

Right now there is, generally speaking, enough population, it is just poorly distributed to allow for competitive fights. Why wouldn't players engage in the mass zerg continent stacking right now. It allows for quick base flipping that gives poor, but easily gained, experience, and gives sufficient resources to be spamming whatever equipment you want. It isn't a compelling gameplay environment and will be harmful to the longevity of the game but all skill levels can gain using this method to get something at least.

The outnumbered factions face little reason to engage this mass zerg because it isn't profitable in terms of experience (both feeling about the game as well as ingame for certs). You lack resources to adequately fight beyond a few times and face an environment where whatever you accomplish is poorly rewarded for the most part. A few changes could portentially promote going up against the odds and potentially promote people fighting. These could be tried together or individually.

1. Modify experience both up and down more dramatically based on server population. I would suggest something like this. If you have over 40% of the server population, every 5% additional population reduces experience gain by 10% for all actions (base caputures, kills, heals/repairs, etc.) . Similarly an outnumbered faction below 25% will gain 10% xp on all actions for every 5% they are under the percentage. For coding purposes say 2% modification to xp for every 1% population above or below the baselines. We can quibble about where they are at, but give nudge to players and outfits to go where they can benefit more or be harmed less.

2. Warp Gates can spawn vehicles or equipment without resource cost when little territory is controlled. This at least gives the warp gate locked low population empires the ability to fight back and potentially breakout and create battles. Once an empire captures an specialized structure (bio, tech, amp) then the resource costs return to the standard rate. This gives the empire the ability to get enough traction to potentially fight from by keeping the equipment flowing. Again we can quibble about the details and amounts, but I am trying to give players an incentive to fight out of a camping situation. This also promotes giving more targets to the camping party giving experience to everyone. There would still be the cooldowns to contend with to limit the spam to some extent.

These potential changes may help smooth out the steamrolling on one continent as people try to maximize their gain. They would have to be adjusted if more contients are added and conttinent locking is enabled, but for the time being, this potenitally could help. Of course it would also promote more vehicle spam but that is often what is needed to push back against superior numbers. At the very least it would help give a more target rich environment for all parties involved on most continents.

This will not promote a knock-down, drag-out massive fight as there remains little interest in defending territory usually due to a combination of factors (indefensible layout/terrain, perception of better xp gain on offense, little defensive zerg). However if we can get populations more evenly distributed, at least the odds of stumbling into a fight go up.

Oh no... You don't.

Arma 2 (vs AI) and Battlefield 2 Project Reality mod (vs Ppl) would like to have a word with you. (Even though they are smaller in comparison with PS2, it is due to the maximum population (leads to population density) they can sustain. <64 in Arma, 128 in BF2>)

Also population density plays a huge role in massive maps.

With more objectives on a huge map, without a huge player base - You result in having less battles and most of the time revolves around moving from Point A to Point B. On the other hand, less objectives on a huge map, results in a *********** lag feast, with the ****** PS2 optimizations more medium/large-scale fights.

1. Flanking on a massive scale requires massive population

2. Calling for backup requires population

3. Hiding isnt too great a feat without a massive population

4. Tactical retreat and running away isnt as awesome without many people to retreat or run away from.


An empty massive map is NOT special if there is no one to shoot at. It not like there are any other activities to do on the map beside shooting at lots of people. The map is a fun playground, but only if there are battles going on.

The maps are designed for many people, their weakness shows when you only have to fight 4-5 enemies.The maps arent interesting enough on a small scale to play cat and mouse with just a few people- not at all compared to other shooters with smaller maps dedicated to the more CQ combat.

so again, this game depends on population to stand out from other shooters. It just doesnt hold up on a smaller scale. I get bored quickly when the pop. is down. You end up spending most of your time staring at a slooowly filling red bar instead of engaging enemies.

agreed

No it doesn't. I mean you can walk around a base - a long way around it. So far around it that you'd walk 2 BF maps sizes.

Population on a new game will always drop, they may have lost a fair few due to very poor new player experience and some of their decisions but I for one still find big fights during all times of the day apart from maybe after 1am. They prob will have to merge servers, I love the massive maps just sadly it fails if there's not enough players to fill it.

However I'm tired of today's spoilt little gaming nerds who cry over everything and do a dozen game will die or is dead posts unless they change it to exactly the way I want it. I will play and support this game as long as I'm having fun, when that stops ill move on quietly to something else.

It's a good guess that the majority of population uses Steam. Obviously the people not using steam (like me) are the margin of error, but it seems accurate if you take into account the server load last night when I looked it up (low/down + 3 medium + 1 high)
Currently its 7k players with 2 medium the rest low/down.

I will try to track the population (at least on steam) over the next week at 3 datapoint intervals (early morning, peak, after hours) and that should at least give you a representation/trend.

Merge servers. It needs to happen.

Poor "new player" experience? I've been playing wwiionline since 2001, and PS1 since 2004. MMOFPS are the only MMO's that interest me.

I'm bored attacking empty bases all the time. I'm bored "attacking". And for the 100th time, the only thing that will remedy this situation are the PS1 cloaked AMS, PS1 style mines, spitfires and motion detectors (defensive tools that get players defending). The only other alternative is wwiionline style "Attack Objectives", and trust me you guys don't want that.

They probably just opened a few too many servers when they saw the initial wave of people joining up.
Obviously, you rarely ever gain people after launch. Many people quit due to not liking the game/having problems running it at acceptable fps/a multitude of other reasons.

As I play on Woodman I don't really have these complaints myself, it's a pretty populated server. But I could imagine it being worse on many other servers. Some merging would help out no doubt.

Overall population is ok .. It's the population distribution that needs fixing

Change ownership rewards
Make resource gain global
Increase the + XP% for under pop'd faction's
Slow Down the effect of a zerg by Changing the base layouts to be more infantry friendly ( tank battles should take place between bases not in them )
Change the goddamn fk'd up Defense rewards ( could get X amount of XP per minute while it's flagged as a hot zone )
Rotate warp gate placement ( so people see more than the same few hexes )
Lock each cont at a max 40% pop if needed

I remember this game called Brink....It was supposed to be awesome, the next gen of lobby shooters setting a new standard. It sucked and died in less than 60 days. I must have Mayan heritage.

Hey guys. Finals week for the entire population that attends college. There are a alot of 18-24 year olds on this game and finals take up a 3 weeks span (some people had theirs a week ago, some this week, some next week)

1. There were plenty of fights going on on Mattherson last night. I won't disagree it was slow around that time, but it picked back up shortly after. There was a pretty massive fight going on between NC and VS on Esamir to prevent the VS from capping the continent for a good two hours. Far as I know it kept going, I eventually logged to sleep.
2. Finals week.
3. Hawken just hit open beta last night, which will attract quite a few of the same playerbase.

I wouldn't declare doom yet, but I will say that the player count has felt like it's getting smaller overall. That's sort of bound to happen, but I'd wait until after the holidays to really get a feel. Holidays are always slow on every MMO ever.

I found plenty of fights last night on Mattherson.

They will need to do a server merge. This isn't a bad thing, it's just how it is going to be. Even the biggest MMOs like Guild Wars 2, ToR, RIFT and whatnot all need server merges shortly after launch. The failure to do that ends up harming the game pretty fast (see ToR).

Now that the initial "wow" has worn off, a lot of people are going to move onto other things as that's how gamers are today. They don't pick one game and stick to it. With 2-3 games coming out every week, there is no point to just play one game. Also many gamers won't be playing PS2 as their primary game. Most will stick to the one they've been playing forever. That's just how it is.

I've been trying to find a match for the last two days on Hawken. Is ANYONE playing it at all?

Lots of people are trying to. There have been serious problems with their matchmaking system since closed beta. For a while the only games it would ever link you to were servers hosted in BFEistan and you got the fun of seeing how poorly the game handles pings over 100ms.

Overall the game is kinda meh. Fun briefly, but horribly pay to win.

I have noticed a 50 person outfit moving continents can swing the population balance by 10-20%. I'm sure others switch with them so it's hard to say for sure how large the server population is but my feeling is it's pretty low for how big the world is.

I think that's why we are seeing such extreme population imbalance. Large units are skewing the numbers tremendously towards wherever they are playing.

ArmA2 (with careful server / mod management etc) runs with 120-ish players, PVP or PVE. But it's an entirely different game from PS2.