!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!This Deals with CONTINENTAL populations, NOT "world/server" Populations. As it stands thus far, the below issues make the game unplayable, Fun wise. Simply because playing under the below conditions is well... Pointless, and fruitless unless you are on the higher populations side. 1st Problem - When a continent is full one race maintains 48-80% majority at all times, making it impossible for other factions to log in and thus becoming impossible to beat due to sheer numbers. -An example - Last Night on Amerish (Waterson Server) the populations looked like this = 70% NC faction, 15% TR, 12% VS etc. This was NOT due to there simply not being any Terrans around, in fact upon warping to other Continents you found 100's of terrans complaining about how they could not warp to Amerish because it was full. ------------- It is no fun to play on a continent which maintains these types of numbers, Unfortunately this is the case for most of the continents. The continental server can only support so many people, if one Faction manages to maintain the majority at all times by a large % , then there is no way in which to beat said faction as they will always steam roll you with numbers. SOLUTION - Cap "FACTION" population on a Continent rather then "Population in general". at say 35%. This means that no matter what the fight will be semi even in numbers, while not allowing a faction to simply win by Exploiting the mechanics of the Continent server. So if you had 35% NC they would cap out and a que would start for "NC" individuals. While TR and VS would still be allowed to join the Continent (Up to their 35% cap) but NC would not be able to win simply by China Zerg so to speak. This solution ensures that the populations will remain generally even across all continents while still allowing for a slight overpopulation on occasion. 2nd Problem- Population bonus's, I apologize and mean no insult to the Devs when I say.... WTF were you thinking, these bonus's do jack crap. Heres why: 1. Looking at the population example I listed above you can assume that a faction with a low pop is not going to have much of any territory with which to gain resources with. Thus making any type of resource or xp bonus negligible at best, and useless at worst. 2. A low population will not be able to take much if any territory from a larger population or attain many kills if the diversity exceeds 10% between the 2. This is simply socialistic statistics dealing with warfare. If China for example invaded America, they could do it with sticks and stones and they would roll over us, because they outnumber us somewhere between 5 and 15 to 1. Much like High populations in this game outnumber lower populations. Thus making your xp bonus.... Negligible at best, and Useless at worst. Solution - For a lower population to have any chance at all of taking back territory from overwhelming odds the only possible way game mechanically to give them said chance is to SEVERELY and MASSIVELY buff their Factions Damage and Health/Defense based on their Continental population. Making them harder to kill and much more likely to kill others, as the population increases, the bonuses get weaker and weaker until they disappear. This ensures that as a faction becomes outnumbered and outgunned, rather then the game becoming pointless to play (Simply because at this point your lucky if you spawn and live 3 seconds as it is), there is still a fighting chance for them to take back their land. Please consider this issue, as if this problem is not fixed, Most of your player may leave. As I said above, When the only action you can take in a game is to die to a larger population with no "chance" of success, it's no longer fun to play.
Not only do I second this, I highly agree where this is coming from. Being able to just 'overpopulate' a server's continent is a lousy tactic to win the game. It is cheap. It is dirty. And all it does is make new players simply change sides upon looking at the maps. Rather than balancing out each side, people will go on the side that gets the most land, thus continuing the trend for servers to maintain an even and balanced population, which then makes it fun for everyone. In addition, just to point something out. This also leads to the server's population hopping continents, locking out other players, and just 'roflstomping' over a faction that was already making head progress, and locking out players connecting to the battlefield from actually joining the battles. In a war, there's no such thing as "Ok, My side brings 100 troops, but you're limited to 10... have fun"
Developers explained it lots of time. Servers have player limit, for exemple: 1000 TR 1000 NC 1000 VS THE IS NO POSSIBLE WAY to balance change like: 2000 TR 500 NC 500 VS Only: 1000 TR 500 NC (500 free NC slots) 500 VS (500 free VS slots) Server is not overpopulated by enemy, simply your side is underpopulated.
@ Kempinukas That's untrue, otherwise TR and VS would be able to warp to the continent without getting the - "Continent is Full, you have been placed in a cue" Error when the Terran population is only 16% on said continent (While the NC is at 60 or so). (This would mean "By your example" that their are free Terran slots, Even though in fact, there was not. You should read my post more thourolly, as the evidence I listed makes your supposition null and Void, all you have to be able to do is simple math to figure out that your example is NOT how it works, and that MY solution is in fact almost EXACTLY the same system you are saying is currently in place. Which as I said the evidence says your post is NOT the solution and system that they are using, just the opposite in fact. On anther note.. There are FAR more then 3000 people on each continent.. That would limit each "World server" to 9000 people, (Which is just.... well stupidly low for an MMO) Most servers used by the MMO industry support 10,000 - 20,000 + Minimum. And that's the servers independent small MMO game titles use. This is SOE online Entertainment your talking about.
You need a Quote? Here you go (i believe you know who Matt Higby is): nitshft 2 days ago SHARE okay question why is there no system in place that protects from overpopulation on one empire. The last few days on the helios west server the vanu have been majority population by over 10% and they were more then 50% of the population on esamir and amerish. Matt Higby @nitshft 2 days ago SHARE There is. There are absolute caps on how many from each empire can be on a continent at a time. If an empire is "overpopulated", it actually means that your empire is UNDERpopulated. Any type of dynamic population cap that prevented the higher population empires from being able to go to a continent until the lower population empires had more players there would break down outfit and platoon movements and ultimately hurt the strategic gameplay. Really, we need to give players better tools to rally the troops and get THEIR population to match the enemy populations, that is a goal that is achievable, and one that we are working towards.
Yes that's right, it is "Underpopulated" Because the OTHER faction has the majority of Server slots taken and "Your" Faction can't warp to the Continent. That's exactly what I stated. The solution is to cap the "Factions" on how many players they can have on said server. IE they can't have more then 1000 (as you stated) for example. Remember the Terrans are trying to warp to Amerish to bolster it's pop and are met with - "Continent Full, you have been placed in que" errors. The problem isn't people not their to help, the problem is The NC overloads the server with its massive population and no one from either of the other factions can get TO Amreish.
There are absolute caps on how many from each empire can be on a continent at a time. p.s. I overestemated number of players, the are only 2000 x 3 players on server http://kotaku.com/5917860/planetside-2-plays-like-a-first person-shooter-not-a-massively-multiplayer-compromise
Apparently the "Absolute" cap, is larger then the "Server Cap" as far as maximum server population goes. So it still stands that it needs to be fixed. For example, well say the NC's Faction cap is oh.. 1000, But the server can only maintain a stable population of say 750. NC could easily maintain 100% and no one else would be able to get on the continent because the server is "Full". your not reading when I state that people ARE trying to get to Amerish, but CAN"T because the continent is FULL.
I'm looking into this currently, there have been so many changes over the last week since launch, it's very possible that the caps did/didn't get adjusted to be in line with some of the hotfixes, or that something got overlooked. Let me verify all worlds/regions are set correctly and I'll get back to you.
@Kempinuk Alright there's some numbers, so each faction is supposed to have around 666, but as you can see that isn't the hard cap for a faction (As he states one can have the 667th player or more), they want 2000 on a server, so you could easily have 1500 NC, 250 Terrans and 250 Vanu. Boom Server is capped, Terrans can't log into the continent because the NC has 1500 people taking up 1500/2000 slots. And of course the server isn't going to boot NC players off simply because Terrans want to play or Vanu wants to play. No its just not going to let anyone else onto the server. Thus NC are going to population control the continent with their massive majority. So you see the system they have is BROKEN in some form or fashion whether it be as the dev there stated just an oversight or an accidental change, as I stated,. and needs to be fixed. And thank you for looking into it Veratu.
Actually come to think of it this wasn't an issue until I think it was the hotfix before thanksgiving, it's only been an issue in the last 1-2 weeks or so. So it may indeed be something was accidently changed or changed as a side effect unknowingly. Well I mean to say it was a "manageable" issue before the hotfixes at any rate.
I have checked the production environment, and they are indeed set correctly. The system does have per-faction limits for continents. So now my next question to you is going to be .. when did you see this heavy NC distribution where other factions were told the continent was full? I also need to know what world you were on. (I know you said last night, but can you give me a timezone/timeframe, as it's last night in several parts of the world) It's possible we may have a bug, so providing this information will allow me to look through the logs and server stat histories to see if I can piece the puzzle together.
Ok, I looked through the stats and logs for Amerish last night on Waterson where you indicated NC had 70% 15% TR and 12% VS. I checked from 6PM to 3AM EST. Here's what I found. NC was at their cap for most of the night. TR was at the cap for about 3 hours, and Vanu never hit their cap on that continent (but came really close), they were capped on another continent. So this looks like it's an issue with the graphics showing you the population for the zone being inaccurate compared to what's actually in the zone. There's one point in the evening where those numbers were fairly close to lining up, but if you can give me an exact time, or a closer ball park I can validate it. I'll log it with the dev team to investigate, but the system is working as intended it just appears to be a client graphics bug displaying distributions incorrectly. The next time this happens, please screenshot the zone distribution graph showing the imbalance so I can take that along with the stats data to the dev team. They're going to look into this, but it always helps to have pictures match up with logs/data
Regarding the proposed "mechanic" change, I agree with OP that some degree of non-resource buff or at the very least incentive ought to apply when the population is unbalanced. WoW did this quite well in Wintergrasp and it helped a heck of a lot to counteract the "zerg always wins" mentality.
I think the issue is that there is people are looking at the % numbers on the global map, which DO NOT indicate continent population Instead that indicates TERRITORY OWNED percentage. There is nothing that says this in on the map, however, if you open up your map, and click the drop down and move to territory, it will show an identical percent. I think theyh did this to better show how each continent is doing based on the global map. if they showed empire population it would show something like 33%/33%/33% for all three continents when the server has hit a queue...not very informative at all. I am sure that someone on the continent you think is not locked, upon pulling up their continent map would see a 33%/33%/33% population balance. I know I have done this sever times, saw a continent with 14% NC, got a queue, when I got in, we did indeed have 33% of the population (and only 15% of the territory)
Lack of incentive per continent is definitely a large problem. If I log on TR and see that Vanu has 60% population and TR has only 10% in a given continent, I'm not going to spawn there. I know I'm going to get overrun and not going to get much exp or resources. And because of that the population in that continent will never change until some large group of players actively decide to go there, which usually ends up changing that area to be dominated by another faction instead of evening it out. It almost seems that only one continent is worth playing so far, the other two on any given server just bounce back and forth between which faction has the most population there. Incentive to balance populations over all three continents should really be a high priority item on the devs list right now, otherwise you may as well just take one continent out of the game completely to consolidate population better.
