Dear SOE...Population

Discussion in 'PlanetSide 2 Gameplay Discussion' started by SenorBeef, Dec 10, 2012.

  1. Banick

    Yea because that extra 5% resource gain really prevents you from dying when outnumbered 5 to 1.
  2. powerz

    Players are leaving and not logging back on........that's exactly whats happening........and then it snowballs when the server is so far out of balance. 20-30 hours with this game and you be wishing for BF3's fubared hit detection and smooth gameplay......never thought I'd say that.....

    I've been seeing lots of wild population imbalances lately.
  3. SolitarioSoldat

    servers are full dude everyday, slows down in the mornings....
  4. Kiro

    Even servers that have a medium population are mostly empty http://www.soe.com/status/

    Yesterday night Mallory was "medium" too, and my squad (about 20 people) was able to capture 5 territories in Indar, including 1 bio lab, with almost no resistance. We were so bored, we all hoped to meet at least a full platoon, or have to fight ~50 people in bio lab, which is supposed to be a very important base, but NOTHING happened during the whole capture. A few people spawned and got killed as soon as they left their protected spawn, and then they moved to a different territory.

    So we decided to move to Crossroad Watchtower to have some fun... and we shouldn't have to go to the same territory every night to see real big battles.

    Meanwhile on the 2 other continents, groups of 30 people go from place to place to capture without anyone to defend them...

    So...
    1) only leave 1 continent open, close the 2 others. When the continent is captured, close it and open another one ; if it's not captured in 5 days then close it anyway.
    2) merge the servers. Some of them never reach medium population, it must be hell to play there. New players who create their character on these servers must think the game sucks if they only meet an enemy every 10 minutes...
  5. Homeros

    Yesterday TR lost all its bases on Woodman. (except bases around warpgates and the Crown) For a while, we could not even fight back.
    The best solution might be to migrate some servers, for now.
  6. Zxypher

    Hell, all it'd take for me to keep playing at this point (at least for a while) is a serious Exp boost. 5-1? I want a 400% experience boost. Make it worth the time and frustration :p
  7. HMR85

    Yep, Connery is still rocking.
  8. Lemonzzz

    The reason there are no large battles is not because of pop, but because most people tend to avoid them. Render range still being reduced the more people there are is making this game a joke. This game probably will die, because it's huge selling point, large battles, are being avoided due to a terrible game mechanic that the devs have really no interest in fixing because they can't figure out how to make their game smooth without it.
  9. ergie

    I've played online since UT, passing to BF series directly and leaving after BF3 release, (its a CoD clone for me), and I totally agree, its the only one that gives that feeling of war. It remembers me when we played BFE and WGO with Bf1942 when with a web community based on "risk", where commanders decided battles, and we played countless WW2 battles,battles during 24h, with insane tickets counts, and people from US, Europe and Asia playing together (of course not at the same time)
    PS2 is a great game with a shining future if somebody in Sony decides it.
  10. {joer

    My outfit and one other tried to hold off an endless stream of VS and NC on soltec last night until 1am while the rest of TR camped the crown all night. We were talking 60%+.

    Big battles were not a problem, at least not a problem in not having them.
  11. MalDeus

    I've been noticing on Waterson that population has been gradually growing more lop sided. I think faction relative population is probably the greatest risk to this game longterm.

    We can all gripe about whose HA LMG is more OP'ed at any moment in time, but ultimately, extra bodies are by far the most OP'ed attribute any faction can have, and it tends to snowball. Not too many new players say 'Golly, I think I'll join the faction that is getting their butts pwned on all 3 continents'
  12. Rothnang

    Every time I log on these days it's the same story. On every continent some faction or another has a significant population advantage and is just curbstomping everyone else.

    On my server NC significantly outnumber the other factions, so sometimes you get situations where one faction doesn't even have a continent where they outnumber the others, and if that happens to be you you might as well just log off, since you'll be stuck in your warpgate with no resources all night.

    Either way, it always sticks you with the same stupid choice: Go to the continent where your faction is winning and follow a Zerg around that just takes one empty base after the next, or try to defend a continent where you can't win anyways, and get overrun over and over until you're at the warpgate and out of resources.


    I really miss the days of Beta where there was just Indar and you could log in and have a good fight with all three factions. That was fun, now that happens once in a blue moon.

    The current system is simply garbage, it completely encourages zerging and trying to overrun the enemy, and it encourages abandoning continents where you aren't doing well altogether.

    For one, the experience rewards for being outnumbered are pitiful. They need to be at least ten times what they are right now before anyone is going to really care about them. The experience rewards should also be continent based, not faction based. If you only have 29% of the people on the server, but 76% of the people on the continent you're on you shouldn't be getting a bonus for being outnumbered. The system needs to encourage people to go to continents where their faction isn't very strong with substantial rewards, and by the same token discourage people from just all clumping up somewhere and steamrolling over everyone. If you're on a continent where your faction only has 8% of the people it should be triple and quadruple XP for guerrilla operations against a vastly superior foe. People should jump at the opportunity to hop to a lowpop continent, not all run as far away from it as possible.

    The resource system is also a giant contributor to this problem, because once you're losing substantial amounts of territory and you're pushed close to the warpgate with little or no major facilities left you will start to run out of resources pretty quickly, especially air resource which is the most important thing for pushing the enemy back. You're getting starved for resources when you're pushed to the warpgate and the faction that's dominating the continent will have +200 gains to everything. The only thing you can do to get your resources back is to travel to another continent where your faction is doing well, so once again, the system massively rewards clumping up somewhere and abandoning any place where you aren't winning. The resource system should share a significant portion of resources between continents. Holding one third of each continent should give you more resources than holding one continent and nothing on the others.

    This needs to stop. This game is turning into freaking Warhammer Online because of this braindead system. Just make a giant army and plow into any place where your enemies giant army isn't, screw defending. That's how this game deals with bases and entire continents at this point, and it's getting boring.


    I want a game where standing against the odds yields the greatest reward. I want a game where giving up hurts you more than fighting at a disadvantage, I want a game where I log into a war, not every factions personal empire.
    • Up x 4
  13. mazty

    People have these crazy things called jobs.
  14. Garzin

    Maybe it's SUPPOSED to but it really doesn't. A lot of people, including me, have FPS issues when it comes to "Massive battles on an EPIC scale" which do not come from computer specs.
  15. Kantsler

    guys wake up, game was dead before it start living.. there is no core game play, no goal and nothing to keep us playing. After you saw all the flashy things and played more then a week there is nothing to keep you playing this game. Im ps1 #1 fan and a vet and I was waiting for PS2 like a small child waits for his first bike. I played tech test and beta - already on beta I knew this game will fail hard. I tried spamming forums but the devs didnt pay attention. Now its been like a month since the game lunched and you start to see pop drop. Its because all the hyped player that this game was designed for are getting bored and leaving to play other random games. PS1 Vets left during the beta because they saw this game is not what they hoped and wanted.

    Now we have a bunch of casual random players who complain about this game lacking tutorial and there is not training. like come da fuuck on! do you really need training for this game?.. christ, what have we come to when people dont know how to play this game when all you do is shoot ur gun!!!. These are the kind of players left in this game and to make things worse SOE gives no ***** about this because all they want is numbers. Alas they have no vision or future sight because they depend on random's to play their game and build a new community instead of using the loyal vet community they built over 9 years of ps1.

    Hey devs here is a question, who do you think pays money for game, random gamers who hop games or vets from the previous sequel..?

    My prediction is that this game wont see the 3rd quarter of 2013.

    good day!
  16. VarkaanPT

    I have created 1 character on each faction on different servers, and lately it has been like that. When i log the server population is balanced, but very inbalanced on each continent, something like:
    Indar:
    VS - 70%
    TR - 20%
    NC - 10%

    Esamir:
    VS - 15%
    TR - 16%
    NC - 69%

    Amerish:
    VS - 11%
    TR - 68%
    NC - 21%

    This usually leads to one of the following situations:
    1 - You play being outnumbered most of the time, which is very fustrating.
    2 - You play with no opposition, because the other factions are being outnumbered, which is very boring.

    Either way it's not fun.
    • Up x 1
  17. Exaar

    I don't think the game is dying, my server (SolTech) generally has good fights to get into every evening. However, I do agree that something should be changed about the way continent populations are handled. I am starting to see on my server the same thing other people have mentioned - one continent of each color most of the time, with each of those having a huge population of one faction and miniscule of the others. So the choices are either A) go to your 'home' continent and steamroll the pitiful opposition or B) go to one of the 'enemy' continents and die over and over again without achieving anything against a vastly superior force. Rare is the time when I see a continent around 33% of each faction, although when it does happen it is by far the best gameplay experience.

    I think what they need to do is either reduce the number of continents to two, forcing at least one faction to always be pro-active (and hopefully that faction will change so that its never the same two in control), or give some greater incentive for conquering a continent so that people are inspired to actually leave their 'home' continent and try to take the others on a regular basis. 10% off resource purchases is nice, but its hardly worth getting excited over, so people have no real incentive to move on other, heavily defended continents or protect their own against a large enemy force.

    I also just want to mention that people camp the Crown on my server too and it annoys the crap out of me. The other day we had like 10% more pop on Indar than either of the other two factions, but we had lost almost all of our territory EXCEPT the Crown, because like 80% of the people we had on the continent were fighting at the Crown while the other armies just marched around them and took the rest of our stuff. Yeah guys, its a fun place to defend, but its not worth that much. Abandon it for christ's sake before we lose the entire rest of the continent!!

    EDIT: Perhaps one thing they could do is randomly assign a much larger bonus to one continent per day - say, 50% off resource purchases or 1.5x cert gain or something. I bet that would get every person in the game fighting over that single continent, which would provoke big battles. Then the next day, that bonus switches to one of the other two continent and everyone rampages over there to duke it out.
  18. Exaar

    I have never played PS1 in my life, but I have over 120 hours played on PS2 so far and have spent 40 real dollars. So obviously they do not need to rely on PS1 vets to play the game and put money into it. Sorry you don't like it though.
  19. moooosa


    Exaaaaaaactly.
  20. {joer

    This is true. Last night on soltech we had on one, 24% TR, 72% NC, and 4% Vanu. The VS were doing the same thing on another. The only balanced continent was Indar.