Dear SOE...Population

Its a broken musical chair.

We have 3 factions, 3 chairs... now the developers think that adding one more chair is going to help. 3 factions, 4 chairs... every faction will have their chair and one chair is going to be empty.

How to solve your flat tire situation? Flatten the the other 3, 90% of the developers does it.

I am, right now, leaving amerish because there's literally nothing to do there. I drove around for literally 40 minutes seeing almost nobody, stopped by a facility 2 guys were capping once, and then the next one I stopped at easily >5 enemy galaxies (not empty), several liberators and something like a dozen scythes showed up.

looooool.

Deconned vehicle, suicide, move continent. There is no ******* point.

Yes, this is indeed a problem. Part of my concern is that I didn't expect the population imbalances to show up this heavily, this early in the games released state. Some difference is acceptable and unavoidable but to this degree...as it was this morning I couldn't even leave a warpgate on any continent without being camped by the enemy faction. I had to stop playing out of frustration and play a different game.

There's no threat of me not spending money because I don't like it, there's the simple fact of me not spending any more money because I don't see it as a sound investment, entertainment or otherwise.

The problem is simply that the game punishes you for going where your faction is weakest instead of giving you a reward that makes people jump at the opportunity.

When people log in and contemplate where they can get the most certs their first thought should be "Where are we the weakest" not "Where are we the strongest".

The problem lie in the community where people jump ship as soon as they start loosing , they all clump up on one continent up to the point where they become 70% of the population.

The problem is quite easy the queue is ineffective because you can use hot drop to switch continent without even needing to queue up. Fix this first then afterward implementing a cap per continent so you can never have more than 15% difference betwen each one will fix the "4th faction" problem.

So much truth here. We need at least +100% XP if you join a continent where your faction is weakest. People should say, "Wow, we've got 6% population on Amerish? I'm going right away!"

We need huge XP bonuses to encourage:
- defending bases in general
- guerilla warfare against impossible odds

I've been braining this one out, and thus is my solution:

Change the experience/resource benefits, make them more drastic, make them hard limits.

40+% population: No bonus
33% population: 10% bonus
25% population: 20% bonus
20% population: 30% bonus
15% population: 40% bonus
<15% population: 50% bonus.

You'll notice that when the three empires are even on a continent, they're actually pulling an XP bonus.

This needs fixes before little bugs but SOE is clueless.

Well, I wonder why there are 3 factions anyway. So often I see one faction gets attacked by the other ones together.

There is no reason to fight against the zerg.

They need to assign each faction a continent and take away the footholds of the other 2.

The Meta Game right now is a joke and its only going to get worse...

The game is fantastic when it's busy, and dull when it's quiet. Yes there are balance issues but the biggest issue affecting the game is the numbers. Advertisement is definitely the key. Or some form of cert bonus for inviting friends perhaps (limited to prevent abuse)

They either need to improve the amount of people starting to play or improve the retention of those that are already playing.

The other aspect that could improve things is a more informative way of allowing you to see what is happening on your world when you start playing for a session. Flashing bits on a map are all good and well but I'd love to see a count of kills in last 5 minutes and deaths in last 5 minutes for each faction in each hex and continent from the map screen, either on mouse over or next to the other stats once you click. That way when I log in I can see where fighting is actually happening, not just ghost caps or a one sided fight.

If I see a hex with 500 deaths and 500 kills for my faction and an opposing faction I'll know that there's a good fight going on and it'll be a fun place to hot drop to or spawn.

The solution to this is simple... but hard to implement at this date. SOE made a choice when they developed this game that was not optimul (for this type of game). What they need to do is have characters by account, not by server. This would allow for less servers, and for players to go to the busier servers on off peak times.

Unfortuneatly this is not a change that could be made easily at this point (as it was not now the server architechtures were designed). This is something that many games are moving too, and that would help a game like this to remain busy at all times.

Hmm Metagame ....

Actually, I was thinking to buy 3x station cash but at the end it does not change much. I see that I login less already, getting tired of the hamster wheel and the lack of actually a goal for your own faction to win a war. You just go around in circles...its so pointless.

Faction balance is an issue and I actually ask myself why are there 3 factions. Often I see that two factions attack the other one but dont fight each other.

The server infos dont represent the ingame gameplay:

* you see a more or less balanced server with 33%/33%/33% but ingame on the different maps the playernumbers are totally unbalanced.

You don't need to do anything so drastic: just make the xp bonus be per continent, instead of per server.

whats this thread doing 5 pages back, up with you.

Yes, I agree. This is how I think it should have been done but...it is probably too difficult a change to make at this point in time. I'd happily just play a different faction on a different server but I'd have to start over from scratch and that is just not something I'm willing to do when I've spent money and a lot of time on my current character. The incentive for players to manage balance just isn't there. They wanted zergs of people and that's what they are getting, despite what it may actually end up doing to the health of the game.

The problem is there's no real incentive to defend, plus 3 continents. Each faction forms a zerg on a continent, creating a visible population bubble. Other factions see it and say "F that" and pick another continent to zerg on. Those big battles we all love are a thing of the past.

What we need are rewards for defending to be even with the rewards for attack. Or perhaps having the rewards for capping territory scale with how many were defending it. Less than 10 people defending = 0 exp and 0 certs for capping. Something like that.

What about at least the feeling that you did win the war ? You dont need even a reward, but at least a feeling that your efforts are not pointless. At the moment it is an endless hamster wheeel.......station cash wont fix this, player balance neither but it is a point of course. Most FPS game rounds or maps end with a winning team, this is missing here and we dont need just a reward or XP but actually gameplay with a result. If you farm only for XP you will get burned out very fast.

This goes against the concept of a persistent world. If the actions you make have no meaning it isn't persistent. Look at eve online. Any choice you make has to be dealt with.

The thing you want would ruin the concept of the game.

You do realize there is other parts of the world other than the one you are currently living in, yes? Suprising, yes I know. Also the world is not flat!

On topic....server transfers imo. If SOE is not going to fix it, let us do it ourselves...thanks.

p.s. That is odd pic from OP, I play on Helios and it's usually TR at the bottom most the time....on thing that is true: helios has an absurb amount of VS. But that's no suprise...best faction hands down and people are startin to re-roll.