I have been calling for this from day 1 but I felt the need to reiterate it in text again. Alerts have always had one defining problem from the very, very beginning that constantly gets in the way of making them competitive: population. Or specifically, the lack of any value being given to population when tabulating a winner. See, if your faction only has 30% pop, and the alert is won based purely on raw territory %, then it's virtually impossible for you to win and there's no point in even trying, so everyone will just bail and ghost cap another continent while the other two factions fight it out on the alert cont. Often people do try anyway, but you get no reward for your efforts because it doesn't matter how well you played, if the opposing faction has 40% pop and outnumbers you everywhere, they'll end up with the most territory and win anyway simply because they have more people. What we need, and I have said this all along, is that territory control must be weighted by population, so that you must punch above your weight to win. If you have 40% pop but 38% territory, or even 40%, and another faction has 30% pop but 33% territory, the latter faction should win the alert even though the % is lower, because of extrapolation - obviously, if they had equal pop, they'd have more territory than you, so things should be weighted accordingly. So just as an example, yesterday there was an Indar alert where the VS won with 43%, the NC had 42% and the TR had 15%, but the VS had 38% pop while the TR and NC had 31% each. So clearly the NC was outplaying everyone, but since they only had 31% pop the VS won through sheer numbers. By any fair system that takes the advantages of superior population into account, the NC should be crowned the winner here. As for the unlikely but possible scenario that an entire faction quits 1 minute before the alert ends, giving them an insane weighting and guaranteeing a win, I propose the following imperfect but workable fix (I don't think there's a perfect fix but I'm open to suggestions): any player who logs at least one base capture or defence during the alert is counted towards the population weighting even if they leave before the alert ends. Would also encourage people to stick around and fight even if outnumbered. What I can't figure out is why SOE/Daybreak never thought of this and think raw % is fair.
they never should have take the rewards away. by that i mean where all involved got certs, just the winner of the alert got the most. because as you said "whats the point" the way the alerts are working now keeps shartfits like GAYOD PHAGX zerging continents on emerald instead of going to where the fights are between alerts
