Back after 2 years! :D

...but the same problems that made me leave only got worse! D:

Now before you close the tab and think of me as just another whiner anouncing their departure from Auraxis or claming they have all the answers that have plagued us since day 1, I present to you the TL;DR version:

TL;DR NC have best guns and tank yet are worst empire, makes OP sad to have spent too much on them

If you are still reading, Congrats for sticking around! You may ask for pictures of my boobs when we are done. Now then, prepare for some linguistic meat!

1) Why I left
This was just before Hossin came out, when the Valkyrie was teased at, when Mattherson was separate from Waterson, and back when it was still SOE and not DGC or DBG or whatever the heck they want us to call them. The state of the game was comparable to a naughty little word starting with S that the great censorship gods will replace with stars. How so? Well, it all has to do with the Vanu Sovereignty and their overabundance of the most skilled players of the game. A squad of purple meant the downfall of a platoon of red, and in many cases the downfall of the entire server's amount of blue. This wasn't necessarily because of overpowered versus underpowered, the ZOE MAX has been nerfed for months and if I recall correctly this was even a time of buffs to the NC gear. It was quite clearly a balance issue of the kind which no dev could really fix themselves: Community. Naturally, being in love with 200 damage small arms yet very not so much in love with losing every fight to a handful of stupid sexy vanu burnt me out and I left quietly, finding a new MMO to keep me busy while I wept for my home in Auraxis with the greenest grass and a white picket fence.

2) Why I came back
Depending on how you look at it, either fortunately or unfortunately there is no other game that even comes close to this one. I could sell my soul to EA and pick up Battlefield but the fights aren't nearly as big as they are in PS2. I could forego rifles and stick to another MMO but I adore shooters too much to kick them out entirely. There was a particular itch that needed scratching and I found myself with a bit of free time to give it a third chance, even if it only scratched that itch with a rusty cleaver.

3) Why I want to leave only 5 days back in
Nothing. Flipping. Changed. Okay, slight exxageration. There's an auto turret now, an anti-MAX sniper rifle, Valkyries, and a brand spanking new continent more barren than an at-time-of-release Amerish. There are directives to keep the high BRs busy, 20 more BRs to keep them even more busy, and a..."Get Revenge"...button...what? Why is this button here? Why is it asking me for actual money? These are almost all awesome things to have that make me happy to get all at once rather than over the span of 2 years and that's rad as heck! What am I doing so very sad? I'll tell you why I'm still sad and already contemplating uninstall. Other than the TR gaining a numbers surge, community is the exact gosh dang same thing I left this game for. VS are still Kings and Queens of Auraxis. TR is still second place and able to compete if giving their 100%. NC, my beloved space America, is still full of medics passing by dead bodies without reviving them, engineers abandoning dying MAXes, vanguards going solo and turning into piles of scrap faster than you can say "Ginyu Force Rules", ESFs...well I'm not a sky god so I have no idea what the gosh darn is going on with them but I'll assume it's poop. Basically, it is oh so very heart breaking to see that 2 years without my glorious and radiant presence hasn't done anything to cure what I see as the second biggest problem this game has.

4) Why I'm writing this
I only reinstalled really for the few days I've spent already, life is busy and will continue to be so for the next 2 months. Despite the crushing sadness of Space America still in the dunce cap, I WANT to come back to Auraxis so badly. I want to enjoy myself again in the biggest shooter I've ever played. I would switch to TR if I could but all my goodies are in the NC and unless any generous whales read this and convert me to the Red Army through Daybreak Cash injection I don't see much of a reason to play that doesn't involve mental masochism. Help me out ye loyal veterans that could stomach this game longer than I have. Help me come back to Auraxis

Narcissistic troll is narcissistic.

I'm not sure a narcisist would admit to not having the answers and needing outsider help mate, I'm looking for fun in this game not an ego stroke

Well, an upcoming update will include being able to help build your own base, as well as ridding Indar of several highly-contested, seemingly "always fighting over this stupid place" bases. A lot are either for it or against it. I'm more skeptical leaning towards looking forward to it.

I kind of agree. Not to say TR doesn't get wins, but it is frustrating that a band of elitist VS players can crash any cap attempt or cap any objective they decide on with impunity. I still won't leave TR, but it is frustrating and some days it just makes me log off because it's mood crushing whether you're in a group or lone wolfing.

So apparently you work out?

I love hearing about people coming back to the game after a long break but your post sort of confused me with the pros and cons and yet the cons seem to be winning in your head but are not really 'cons' in any real sense:
'all your goodies are on NC'?
'tired of losing'?
...
...
Maybe I missed some other, better points to this thread but it sure seems like your heart isn't in it anymore.

I will admit the whole "stuff on X faction" and "tired of losing" points are subjective as all heck, yet they are still very important points to me. I'm a sucker for cosmetics and while I do have some on TR and to an extent on VS it's not nearly the size of my collection on NC. And, of course, games aren't very fun when you not only lose constantly but don't even have much of a chance at victory

As for pros/cons, I guess another tl;dr version of this would be "Game at core is good but faction I'm stuck with sucks because players". The thread in itself is a pretty selfish way of maybe getting my heart into it, hoping someone else has a good answer to stay on this blue train riding the fail rails

Come to TR! We have fun ...sometimes.

Seriously tho, I feel you. Ps2 flaws make me quit the game every morning, and then the epicness of the game make me come back every evening...

I'm focusing on one thing: avoiding frustration. I always jump from fights to fights and avoid over powerful organized (VS) squad, and also zergs.

It's all about the mood of the fight.

I played VS for over a year before I tried another faction.

Then I tried NC.
Oh god what a debacle that was. Guns felt clumsy. I was TKed more in a few days than in months as VS.

Then I tried TR.
Guns felt snappy and tight. They felt 'organized' although I lone wolf 99% game time. Love playing TR.

Now that TR are always overpopped I went back to VS because I love playing the underpopped side.

So now that I've read all that...

Boobs?

In all seriousness, try to enjoy the game at your own personal pace and try different factions.
Don't think like 'I spent money on my NC toon, now I HAVE to play as NC for eternity'. You spent that money back in the day and probably had a load of fun while doing so.

Switch to TR if you feel like doing it, just have a go at it and see how it's like. Remember, if Trump is going to be president, TR will be a more realistic approach to Space Muricah.

#MakeEsamirGreatAgain by building walls to keep the drug trafficking Conglomerate and Religious Extremist Vanu out amirite?

I will show you around on VS connery if interested. If you are tired of bad community change it, don't stay in a bad relationship. But if you are committed to NC, try other playstyles. Try out tanks, try out wraith or turbo flashes, try out harassers, try LA, try infil up close and sniping, try max, wait nevermind, no one will rep you., play a medic if there are none on NC. sounds like you have never flown much so try that. PS2 is great not just because of large battles, but also because there are dozens of unique ways to play, not just 1 or 2 like in COD. Also, most importantly, join an active outfit, small close knit preferably, not a giant zerg. sounds like you are craving organization, you won't even find that on VS unless you join an outfit. join some public squads or platoons run by outfits, see if they are organized or not, and ask to join if so, there is not commitment, you can always leave if you don't like or find better.

the reason I am still playing is because of a fun relaxed semi-organized outfit. I found my first outfit VAST, by joining a public platoon, the commander was drunk and doing a queen of england voice, but still organized, and very fun, so i joined. they fell apart after the server merge of helios/connery, and i quit for 9 months, i came back like you, and joined a zerg outfit, got tired of it and looked on forums for an organized outfit, and found one.

A small loan of a million certs will do the job.

Honestly I would recommend returning to Battlefield or some other game, perhaps R6: Siege. As the responses here showed, the community is VERY unwelcoming and toxic nowadays outside of the Connery server.

The issue here is the Connery server is well below historical server merge levels. It has about half the peak daily concurrent users that the servers had prior to the last merge, but they are out of servers to merge.

The fights really are not that big anymore. The servers in general are very empty, especially Connery, but in reality all of the PC servers are on their last leg. One more big exodus like what happened regularly in 2015 would put all the servers to a near desolate status.

You are correct regarding changes. The bulk of the changes have come in making DBG more money and decreasing their costs (server performance has been going downhill for the last 14 months despite player counts consistently dropping as well). They spend the bulk of their PS2 resources on developing stuff like the bounty system or splitting H1Z1 into two games. Very little is invested back into this actual game which is very unfortunate.

Bacon?

Your issue is you play NC but dont play with their mindset. The NC play to kill not to win.

When i play NC i sometimes forget this aswell and for a second wonder why they wont push in or out and its because they just want to farm. When i play NC its to play with their weapons and see what i can do as a lone wolf going for the objective and this in itself can be fun (example: Trying to defend an AMP station with 30% pop and using the tunnels to get to the gens gunning down 4 people and stopping the shield overloading) giving yourself a side objective outside of the games objective can also make you feel like you've won even if you lost a base for me this was making my character and being like "OK im going to just use the Jackhammer" and even if i lost a base if i came out the other side of the fight at a 3-1 KD only using the Jackhammer i still felt like a winner.

PS. Purple isnt the king anymore Red has been putting up a hell of a fight for a few months now.

This reply is NOT directed at n0pax, but it talked about Connery, where I used to play. It's actually directed at DBG.

How has nerfing in general and nerfing the HA worked out for you DBG? How has giving in to the Crybabies and Spreadsheet Warriors worked out?

There are some things that just make a game fun, that's f-u-n. Listing to the same small bunch of whiners and nerfing the fun out of the game hasn't seemed to help. Listening to people obsessed with their color-coded spreadsheets hasn't seemed to help either.

Seems kind of funny when this bunch claimed the game was so unbalanced there were a lot more people here. ( I can already hear the spreadsheet crowd spew lots of excuses about seasons, school schedules, age of game and the color of the sky, as to why pop is super low right now. BS is what it is. )

Listening to people whine about big-battles when the whole freaking point of this game was big-battles had to the worst. So now they are making some Star-Crafty resource thing. Listening to bad advice is bad advice.

So now, it is what it is. So be it. Enjoy.

I'm not even sure this is a good idea, but nobody else brought it up.

That might actually be true...crying shame it's virtually impossible for me to get my own station cash (I know it has a different name but 1) I forgot it and 2) lul dunt curr) and can't make myself pretty and can't make myself dangerous quick enough on the TR

For reals? I've been noticing the TR is on equal footing though VS still feel like the winners. That might just be me though, last I remember single squads of purple were destroying entire platoons of blue and I still have some of that shellshock today lol
at least we all agree my main faction is the hopeless loser

Okay but I am shy

You live on the Galapagos? Nice!