I posted this in a thread somewhere, but thought I'd repost it as a suggestion: Im a bit undecided on the whether the Alert the way it is today is a good idea or bad/working as intended. It can completely break up a stagnant fight and give players a sense of objective, but it can also make people faction switch. From observation on Miller faction switching rarely change the server population from more than from 33/33/33 to perhaps 40/30/30. You can make a pretty decent defense with 30% population in for instance a biolab vs 40% of TR. And the largest faction will have a tough time winning against two other factions with 30% each as long as they don't fight each other primarily. So the population it self shouldn't be a reason to not fight for the alert. Players in PS2 seem to lack a bit on the attitude side here or maybe the incentive to switch continent isn't good enough. In PS1 the largest faction would usually always get sandwiched by the two smaller ones. In PS2 however it seems like if TR/VS/NC fight on Indar (which they do 90% of the time) and an alert goes off, then TR moves to that alert while the two other factions choose to remain on Indar. They already know they will most likely not win the alert, which is true, so why bother? The problem is that the smaller factions don't even care if the larger faction win since it doesn't affect the fight on Indar. It has no real consequence of importance if TR in this case win the alert. So why bother stopping them? This could be solved by adding perks that can be gained through winning the alert or capturing certain bases. Perks that could affect gameplay on other continents as well. Then everyone would have a reason to go fight the largest faction even though they had no hope of winning, but at least you would stop the other team from gaining those perks. In PS1 we had things like extra vehicle shields, extra infantry health, lower timer?, auto repair at the same places you would get ammunition for vehicles (which I personally miss), and more. Things that would be really annoying if the other team had and you didn't. Things that didn't change the outcome of a battle too much, but really made the game more convenient for you to play. Example; You simply had to go fight on Oshur for the health benefit even though you hated Oshur or you had to go get a cave module, because you wanted that vehicle shield and auto repair at repair stations in bases. You just couldn't ignore that one faction was capping all the benefits. I think introducing such a system in PS2 could work wonders, the XP incentive is good, but you can get XP if you stay where you are, so why bother? Vehicle shield though or auto repair.. I'd fight for that. Or at least make sure the enemy scum didn't get it. We can't really expect the Zerg to move because of XP incentive, when they are already content with the XP where they are. Outfits however will most likely move to aquire the perks and perhaps the zerg will follow the outfits when they see that the current fight is being abandoned. Ready set discuss!/flame!
