4th Faction = 1% of Population

Keep in mind, this doesn't reference people who have simply changed from one faction to another and stopped playing their other characters. That is a different issue. This is about people who change from one faction to another during their gameplay, not people who have simply changed faction.

Even so... there have been claims about people swapping faction during alerts or during certain times of the day in droves. I personally never saw this happen, yet repeatedly claims have been made over the last couple of months regarding this behavior. It seems I'm not crazy after all, as these 4th Faction players represent <1% of the population.

OMG 4TH FACTION IS THE 1%!

I call BS.

On?

I dunno, given a population chart of any server for a day, I bet I could pick out when the alerts happened due to population swings. I'd like to know what metric they use to determine "players who switch characters on the same account" because I do it every day for membership certs on my alts, and I would imagine that more than 1% of players do the same.

I'll be honest, from what I see in game the swings in population don't seem to be limited to only 1%

Still SOE have the stats so I guess I can't dispute it with any hard facts

In which case 1% shouldn't really cause an issue as it would be pretty undetectable in game and yet we all now this is not the case

SOE's data could be accurate, but I think their scope trivializes the problem.

I think SOE needs to focus more on specifics. Like the percentage of the population on a given server that switches factions during an alert. Then correlate the switches with which faction wins the alert. We've all seen an alert where one faction's population swells while the others dwindle.

His claim doesn't include people who log on, and then choose to play the faction with the highest pop on a given server from day to day (or week/month--however long the FOTM happens to be), who most people would also include as being 4th factioners. A more meaningful statistic would be to correlate Faction Played with World Pop when logging in for accounts with multiple characters on the same server, excluding those who are logged on for a short time (daily certs).

Come on, Waterson TR population was down to like 22 percent last night and NC was at like 45.

People are picking the side with more people to get easy WSD points. I never cared about over population but I did last night because I couldn't get a WSD point to save my life. While NC was pac manning it to 100 points with no problems.

This is not rocket science

4th faction is only 1% of the pop. That is some bs. When the pop of the VS is 30, TR 28, and the NC jump from 32 all the way up to 38-40% in a matter of minutes it is much more than just 1%.

I've yet to see anyone provide two back to back screenshots of this phenomena and haven't been attentive enough to ever notice this happen.

Assuming you're being 100% honest though, are you sure it isn't a case of the other two factions logging off while the third stays on since they're winning?

Do so few players keep multiple characters active on one account? I tend to play one or two of them for a while each day, but at least try and log on for the passive of certs on the other. I figured I was in the minority, but never suspected it would be by that much? I don't 4th faction it btw, I prefer fighting a hoard than being a member of one, and play each character on a different server.

It could be than many people just use mulitple accounts, but still I'd have expected more than 1% of people to be in my boat

Well, assuming SoE's study is correct, then there must be some other cause for the population shifts we all notice in the first several minutes into an alert. The first hypothesis I'm going to is that when an alert starts people who are on on a popular faction text/facebook/skype/cup-n-string their friends that an alert is on. At some times of day that might be one faction or another. Because there is a greater likelihood that say, VS wins alerts in certain time slots, then that faction will clime to extreme overpop and people who are aware of the alert who don't have a VS main on that server simply don't log in.

I've seen population swings happen and maybe what instead happens is when alerts happen people log off from one side while a few switch characters, the result is what seems to be fourth factioning. It could, in theory, have one faction gain 5%-10% pop if that happened. But that seems unlikely to me as overall player numbers stay relatively the same.

See, I know they're giving us the data, but what the data shows versus what I actually see is for whatever reason off. it's not the first time this sort of thing happen when you consider the many nerf X threads where everyone used data as why something was fine but the experience of the players was drastically different than what the data said it should be.

Well, for those that don't know, there is a site where we can see faction/server population numbers for ourselves. Has any player actually done their own personal research into Alert faction hopping? Maybe conduct a check during an alert timeframe, to see how the population for each faction shifts as the alert goes foward. Sometimes the cause of one factions percentage going up, is due to players from other factions just leaving altogether. That percentage has to go somewhere, and it's always to the other two factions. That is not at all to even suggest their isn't a population issue, because there is. Some months back, the TR were the overpop. Now it's NC. I'm in favor of even balance, although that might be a pipe dream...

Here is the site: http://borderlinetactical.net/rsnc/world-population/?world_id=18&zoom=0

Hmm.. seems hard to believe.

Let's look at some numbers.. assuming perfect 1/3rd of each faction, and no existing 4th faction at time of measurement, a 1% total swing into a specific faction would make new numbers 34.333% and 32.833% for the two others.
34.333/32.833 = 1.0457, or a 4.6% difference in actual numbers on the field.

Furthermore, since the number provided didn't have decimals, we should suspect it was rounded down from as high as 1.49% of totals, which give us new numbers of 34.8233% vs 32.5883%. The difference on field becomes 6.9%.

If we _really_ suspect SOE of foul play here, we could assume they simply rounded down from as high as 1.99%, a difference of 9.2% more men on the field for the 4th faction destination.

---

However, I don't think SOE lied in such a blatant way.

However, 4th factioning tends to present itself (at least prior to WDS) much more around the time alerts happen, and the average session for a player isn't guaranteed to see an alert, which makes the effect of 4th faction much more prominent when it does occur. I don't have numbers on how much "uptime" alerts have, but if we assume it to be a third of the day (weighted by total player numbers online at the time), the 1% of daily population quickly becomes a 3%-unit shift. from 33/33/33 to 36/31.5/31.5 (the 4th faction advantage being to have 14% more players). During primetime, such a shift would be as much as 108 people (800 players per faction online becomes 864/756/756).

I could believe the above numbers myself, but the numbers were taken out of thin air. Take it more as an example of how to twist numbers.

Also remember that SOE may have revealed the number of 4th factioning players, but didn't consider those players who are loyal to their faction and extend/shorten their playsessions once they have more/less fun playing the game. Winning is generally more fun than losing. If 1% are 4th faction, maybe 3-4%-units play longer than they would have without 4th faction helping them win.. and all the while the normal cycle of people logging in continues.

edit: additonal consideration must be given to all those players who log in once per day just for their "passive" certs. They inflate the daily population numbers without actually changing the visible population percentages much at all due to their very short "play" session. If the average session for actually playing the game is 1 hour, the average session for cert gathering is only a few minutes.
---

tl;dr - percentage-units can fool people, and the effect of 4th faction also influences the gametimes of those who don't ever play other factions. People logging in for certs only can also skew the numbers

Plot twist: OP is a fourth factioner.

They probably decluded logins with time less than 2 minutes on a character since that would obviously be the intent.

What people always seem to ignore is the fact that we go by %age population. During an alert, or even right before... say we have 36 - 34 - 30.

If with 45 minutes left, a huge chunk of the 30% faction gets disgusted and leaves... what happens to those percentages? The 36% and 34% increase while the 30% decreases... This could happen even when not one single player from the 30% faction moves to the other factions... but they change just by leaving.

It is more likely that the population shifts are people logging off completely (or switching servers completely) then switching to the other factions. ESPECIALLY, since you no longer get full XP benefits for a partial alert.

The fact is... the population swings are more likely due to the current high pop faction doing well... and thus everyone there is having fun and more likely to stick around to the end of the alert... and the faction that is underpopped, getting disgusted, frustrated and saying to hell with the event... i'm going to go do something else.

Either way... the population issue is hurting the alerts... but simple things like "Don't let people switch factions" are not going to fix anything. It's a question of motivation. Why stick around for the end of an alert if you are losing AND not having fun. Whereas if you are winning and having fun... you'll be motivated to stay around longer (at least till the end of the alert).

I see this all the time in my outfit. An alert ends, we win... and half the squad leaves (go to bed, grab food, etc) If we are not winning and the fights are annoying... they trickle out during the alert.

I don't believe in 4th faction.