3 Continents. 3 Factions. 0 Fun.

This is all bad.

Right now.... there is no point for me to bother playing PS2 tonight because there is no continent with anything competitive or resembling fun to be had.

I could go to a continent that my faction is completely dominating on. Get 0 action and just follow the zerg as it rolls face.

I could go to a continent another faction is completely dominating on. Get farmed as cannon fodder while what's left of my team camps out in the warp bubble until the zerg dissolves.




The only thing that comes close to a fight is Indar... and there's a Zerg right outside the Wargate.


But really, who's to blame for this? SOE for lacking foresight? The players for deliberately stacking population in a manor clearly not in the best interests of the game itself? I can not imagine how anyone can honestly say that fighting on a continent where the combined total of opposition is still less then half your own population... is fun.... for anyone.

This is a prime example of nature following the path of least resistance. When challenge is met, instead of self-balancing and distributing players to equalize opposition, the population flows to where there is least resistance.... and since there are 3 factions and 3 continents, it's only natural that there is space to share for everyone. Each empire gets it's own place.... with no conflict.

No conflict, no gameplay.
No Gameplay, No Fun.


There needs to be enforced imbalances that prevent things from naturally equalizing. There can never be allowed enough of anything for everyone to share equally or this is what happens.

Definitely agreed. The game should funnel opposing players toward one another, not the other way around.

Bad server, come to Genudine, tons of action going on at the moment on Indar.

I blame the players for making un-fun choices, I blame SOE for making a system that encourages this in anyway.

3 continents for 3 factions would be fine if people would actually look for a balanced fight. The way the game SHOULD flow is TRvNC on one continent VSvTR on another and NCvVS on a third. PS2 seems set up idea wise to set up constant 3-way fights (not actually fun) should be an occasional thing not forced on us. Then having any XP/cert benefit for running around capturing empty basses and non-defensible base set up just encourages this crap.

There are a lot of factors. 3 factions and 3 continents in and of itself isn't much of the issue. The details are.

1 ******* super continent with a Lattice system. Game fix't.

4 hour continent locks. That is ALL it would take to change this. Force zergs to move around to other continents to actually get into fights. Yes we need more continents to fight on, but we also need to know that our continents we control won't get horridly backhacked while we make progress on another continent.

Right now no one wants to risk losing their benefit so Zergs tend to avoid one another. If you know your enemies cannot take the continent for a few horus, that encourages your zerg to go looking for a fight elsewhere.

Better for SOE to use the carrot & stick approach.

If your faction has less then 30% of the population on the continent, you start ramping up XP gain to as much as +50%. Probably half the zerg on continent A would defect to continent B in short order for a chance at getting more XP.

Then put a tiny stick in place if your faction has more then 40% of the population on the content. The farther you get above 40% pop, the less XP you gain (maybe as severe as -25% penalties).

I am having a blast.

I don't sit around waiting for the fun to happen, I make my own fun. PS2 makes it easy.

I was on for 3 hours today before work and every minute of that was filled with battle goodness.

Heh, well, I just posted the same topic it seems. I'd move population xp bonuses down to the continent level myself, and make them a bit bigger. About what ScrapyardBob said there I think.

As NC I would pick Indar out of your SS's .. Been in that situation a few times before and the fights have been hard pressed, a challenge but most of all FUN.

But seems to many people only want guaranteed win's ...

I don't like penalties. Positive incentives are best and would be enough to work if the bonuses were on the continent level.
I also would like to see scaled XP benefit for capturing, based on the number of enemies around while you capture it. Taking a base you have to fight for reaps large rewards. Taking a base where 50 people zerged out 3 gets you essentially nothing.

under pop factions just need a really strong buff to their xp/cert gain to make it more worthwhile to play them. 1-5% isn't going to make me not choose the over pop faction.

This happened earlier today on Connery. Going onto a continent not zerged by your faction isn't 'a challenge', it's impossible and just frustrating. I really enjoy the game when there are decent fights, but stuff like this should never happen.

The only continent in Connery that's dead is Amerish. Mainly on the VS side.

Indar is almost always even. Tonight the NC were focused on taking Esamir from you guys so you all jumped into Indar. It was 50/30/20 VS/TR/NC at one point. After all your Libs and Magriders died out from the Dahaka assault, you guys mysteriously disappeared.

Lo and behold, VS was back at Esamir.

Now I understand VS have a problem with Amerish due to their difficulty of getting to a Tech plant compared to the other 2 factions, but you guys should at least try infantry.

Yeah I'm on connery, BR30 and gave up playing about a week ago. Picking 1 continent to farm easy kills on, or picking from 2 continents to be farmed on just ain't fun.
The devs have ignored population imbalance throughout the entire beta, so I don't have high hopes they'll fix this anytime soon to be honest.
Hopefully they'll get things sorted sometime next year.

I'm glad to say that we never see this issue on Waterson.

Personally, I think this sort of thing might have been avoided if the game had released with only two continents. The continent lock benefits would have needed to be rethought, though.

Agreed, the game is too big. While a continent for each faction isn't the only reason for this spread, it's certainly contributing. If you had two continents instead, there'd have to be non-stop fighting on at least one of them.

get a full 12 man squad and form a platoon. Problem solved. Had a 48 person platoon going to other night. All pub players, working together to steam roll where ever we went. No zerg , just 4 squads working together. Logged in tonight and Esamir was all Vanu. Got some people together, started a platoon and a couple of hours later we got half the continent. That was at 6% TR population. By the time we were done it was at 34%.

Stop complaining about the state of gameplay and do something to change it. Anyone can be a squad leader and start a platoon. The game is meant to be played as a team game. If you play like a sheep you get treated like one.

I think SOE is much more keen to letting their game become unsuccessful than fixing any of the population problems. If the three factions, three continents issue isn't enough - try being outlandishly outnumbered on every single one of those continents with 24% of the world population at prime time. How the hell do they expect to keep customers? Diablo 3 showed us that "it will get better" does, in fact, have an expiration date.