[Suggestion] COBALT VANU OVERPOP is killing the server slowly…

So, i was hesitating on writing this. But for me and a lot of players this is reaching critical levels. The huge amount of VS players on Cobalt is overruling the fights EVERY day. I log in, and as usual almost every alert is won by vanu in the evening. I cant tell and think about the latest NC win, as maybe for me this is about 2 weeks ago lol.. and in the meantime, VS wins 70%

While playing on the NC side, which has the lowest pop on cobalt, i find it extremely diffucult lately to have fun in fighting one faction which has the best players, and which has atleast 40%\45% pop in the evening times. Its just impossible to win huge battles against them..atleast we try with our clan, but lately i just give up and go fight TR as the numbers are almost equall, and the fights are unpredictable. Fightin VS is so predictable that its pointless. It takes out the fun for me and a lot of players.

Like, it is now; NC has 2/3 outfits who are on different times off the week online and corporating. VANU has about 6/8 big clans, with so many high ranked players. Developers should really pay attention on this, as it is not letting new NC or TR players getting through with every night losing everything. I see a lot of new players whining on chats about this problem. It has nothing to do with how good you are or whatever, this is about balancing the server to a level that is OK for all. And not only for one side as it is for a long time…

Its really, really a shame that nothing is being done about this, and not anyone is speaking about this. But continuing like this, well that will kill cobalt slowly, and IT IS doing right now… please come out with a solution for this, as it is being a big problem on this server

Yeah Cobalt almost always has 40% VS population. It's not even fun anymore. The simple solution to this is to merge Miller and Cobalt, there are so many benefits of merging two servers idk why they haven't done it yet. Population levels would reach what they were a few years ago and we can have at least 2 continents open at the same time. TR and NC have higher populations on Miller as well so it should balance it out. With how dead the game has become, splitting the playerbase into 2 servers is just stupid.

I totally agree. and the introduced NSO fraction has no effecton the balance of playersin the game. (plus , the NSO's capabilities are a bit limited. Max is soinferior in genera ) . please limit the maximum size of the mainfractions (TR, VS and NC) to33% . Only NSO are already going beyond their size.

Playing premium NSO on Cobalt and then joining VS faction is basically pay-to-win, isn't it? However I think that limiting factions to a certain size is not a good idea. Instead power-up and bonus for playing the underpopped factions should be drastically increased.

Agree. we need STRICKT faction queue. We need to block vanu character creation for a time being. Merge servers or implement queue or server will be dead in month

The Vanu Sovereignty on Cobalt has been killing the server since 2020 I remember.
The only difference was that you had outfits willing to take them on back then. Now there are none.
Currently the game is not receiving any players for outfits to grow. People who want to lead can barely scrap 6 players. Only long time communities can form larger groups but they left. There's a lot of cheating/stalking going on. Also many bugs giving leadership trouble, like voice chat disconnections for random people without knowing how to reset it and for also leaders who must be PMed, server lagging to almost unplayable levels when outfits tried to get in, no deploy zone bugs (Construction), map timer bugs and so on...
(No deploy zone bug feels to be a weapon now, not random but actually targeted. Same with voice chat disconnections, targeted, many times against leader to make them leave or new players so they get kicked from squad for not following orders)

Both VS bias and cheaters are fully to blame as the primary cause for hounding out all newcomers, and by cheaters I don't mean flying turret but those who are supposedly 'high skilled' and just **** on everybody. Last dev teams treated these types as their most valuable, all resources went towards them and nothing towards new player experience (or rather their delusions of improving it), and now what you have on the server is only them, not allowing room for any newcomer to play the game.
Most of these "highly skilled players" use tools which heavily modify their game, many pilots I see are able to perform impossible maneuvers with mouse controls, on the ground some people have DPS correction, aimbot or aim assistance, some lag switch, and whatnot.

Like whoever is the advisor of these current dev team is trying to kill the game it seems, because resources are going towards very sketchy ideas, while game's under literal sophisticated attack by inside communities, and server weapons.

there should be up to a 2% overpop only to the lowest population... that will drive people to switch factions if they want to play. i totally agree... that massive vanu pop is just destroying the game... i think its time for me to cut my subscription and stop playing.. at least until i read about something being changed in the game... up until now this was my favorite game... unfortunately not anymore..

I wanted to write about the problem, but I would phrase it a bit differently.

Let's imagine that a Planetside 2 server. It has a faction that consistently wins the alerts. I'd dive into reasons why they win those alerts - skill difference ?, overpopulation ?, some gameplay advantages if compared to other factions ?, cohesion of the squad command ?, resources usage ?- but that would be a whole other topic.

In the era, where "DoN't DeStRoY SuNdErErs, YoU KiLL figHts :'(" can be heard from the loudest players, purely hypothetically, what would happen to the population of the said server, where the aforementioned faction exists ? How would that affect, let's call a flow of players, among different factions, and what impact it can potentially have on people who discover the game ? And the game does need new players, indeed.

All guesses for that hypothetical situation would be welcomed !

As I play NC, I have also to mention that the latter faction is being rather dumb when it comes to the situational awareness. There are squads that do a fine job managing their troops, such as ROYS that have appeared lately on the server. Some Russian and German random squads do okayish job - communication seems to be on point, thus they deliver the results. Evidently, tto have a good synergy, one has to understand those languages.

When it comes to solo players... this forum forbids the use of strong language and violence, unfortunately. It's as if they have a fetish for dying in a video game over and over again. Accordingly to their desires, what seems to me, they make the dumbest decisions.

Forgot about that one. Gonna write it down in my topic to the devs.

These images are the last few days, you can see the stats. I ask developers to really look into this situation. It seems sometimes the game at Cobalt is made for 2 factions, and NC is just completely wiped off the map. And this has nothing to do about skill or how good players or outfits are!! this is just about being blasted by enormous amount of VS players on this server.

Do something about it please!

The images are from:
https://ps2alerts.com/

There you can find the stats

That doesn't sound right. If I, as a player, want to play a faction of my choice, I should do so, regardless of what other players feelings. A player was farming on it's VS, or TR, or NC account. He has some free time. He comes back into the game, and sees that he can't join the battle, because his faction is in overpop. Late night/Early morning NC players would definitely thank you for your contribution, since they seem to overflow the server at those times.

we must nerf the vanus and clearly limit the vanus population
35% of Pop or even 40% no more we must nerf their most powerful weapons.

Vanu weapons are in need of nerfs but honestly whenever the population on Cobalt is fairly even Vanu always seem to get destroyed. Everyone goes on about how Vanu has the most skilled players but when the fight is actually fair on Cobalt, they do worse than NC. The problem is, the fight is almost never fair apart from a couple hours on weekends where they only have a 1 or 2% population advantage.

Yeah it is tiresome.
Then again see it as free farm against the CBMC lemmings.

So it seems I am somewhat part of the NSO problem you mention. I am sided with VS and in an outfit, yet remain in freelance, because that's the maximum NSO experience.
I fully support the increased low pop benefits. There is no reason to play a lower populated faction just because of 10% more XP.

Why nerf the faction, if the population imbalance causes the issues? And why should the main faction (excluding NSO here), with the least diverse arsenal, get their one or two competitive weapons per class gutted?

The problem with certain vanus weapons is that we all have the advantage not to drop the unlimited ammunition because the weapons overheat the laser so yes we will have to nerf all of that for the fights to be balanced why should the vanus have all the advantages?

I disagree on nerfing anything. People grinded for whatever they have. Therefore, removing the advantages they have will be unfair to their time and money. The solution would be to buff other factions. If done so, it might bring people back to those factions, and make the gameplay fun again.

I would not buff anything on the NC though, because they already have a lot of great weapons.
The only buff TR needs is also a fix for all factions. I am talking of the FPS/rpm problem.
The heatmechanic on VS already got somewhat nerfed back with the arsenal update, by slightly reducing the theoretical magsize.

The advantage VS has at the moment are overwhelming numbers. This is unrelated to their oh so overpowered arsenal. Plus the VS faces a lot of incompetent NC/TR players who would rather log off then even try to fight them. You can thank Ipdan for that, because he somehow managed to get A LOT of low-skilled players to listen to him. Then add around ten "zergsurfers" who will use the lemmings as bait to finish of the majority of the opposing players. Also VS Cobalt tends to play more coordinated compared to NC and TR Cobalt, this was observable by the alert-win-rate over the past decade.

Four years ago TR was the faction with the overwhelming numbers, yet they still lost to the more coordinated VS or NC back then.

Every time a faction is +5% turn off their /y globally.

I could really do without hearing how awesome they are for their login choices.

I would love to witness an arsenal update, where TR and NC get to get weapons of which rounds would not be affected by the gravity. Tried those on maxes, infiltrators and heavy assaults. Absolute madness ! You aim and hit the target either instantaneously, or nearly so. I don't have to pre-shoot to see how the gravity affects the round on this or that distance. Let me tell that the foes weren't staying around to find out how good my aim is. They feel damage, they know they can't tank it, especially is I'm well hidden, thus they are falling back, allowing allies to push.

I'm not saying that's a bad mechanic, on the contrary, it's nice. If I were a new player, I'd go play VS solely because of that feature on some guns. It's easy, you point, you shoot, you hit ! I have yet to find the equivalent of those on NC and TR. And yes, NC do have good weapons. They'd win in close combat 75 % of time with right arsenal. Whoever, it's not really the type of game where you fight only in close quarters, right ?

And now I remembered that VS tanks also have shells that are not influenced by gravity ! Stay at the limit of the visibility/draw distance, and shower everything stationary.

Again, fun mechanics to play with. I wish other factions could have the same kind of fun without the need to use advanced tactics to overcome that difference.

I see a lot of ppl talking about nerfing this or nerfing that.

In my opinion its not about gaining advantage over another faction, its a pointless discussion. Its about balancing the server which its all about. Having a more equal amount of players on 3 sides. Now this is really not the case. The situation is terrible, and very in favor off VS, this has nothing to do about weapons and stats in my eyes.

I wonder if we can get any reactions of any developer on this?

You should play the faction you want.. you will just be in a queue until someone leaves or more people log on from other factions. no one is making you change. Just like when the servers used to fill up and to play you had to wait for a queue to log into the open map...