Dear SOE...Population

It was like this on Esamir last night. We (NC) had the lowest population, about 26%, and were constantly being pushed back. I checked the map several times over a few hours, only to see that there were almost no enemy activity in the border areas of TR and VS! Just some sporadic "squads detected". What's the deal?

I don't view the issue as solely population balance, but I agree, that is a problem though.
I think a lot of the issues hinges on there being no alternative to zerging. You can't back cap in this game like you could in PS1 which would instantly created a battle front any where on any map. Since you have to slowly push connecting territories together from your Warpgate, people would just rather stay at the front of the biggest (only) fight. We need to be able to capture any territory even if no adjacent territories are allied. Just require a HACKER to affect the SCU or Critical points...just like..Planetside 1. Get your hacker to the position, capture the base, creature a secondary front or tertiary front...or create more than a single fight anywhere, might solve some of the zerg issue.

And you think anyone is going to report for an all night jackboot enema for a measely 3% XP?

wah wah i play on a skewed server and grinded my BR up with the boost now im mad that it's skewed cause i have the unlocks i wanted?

First off its a free game make a second character on a server for the opposite prime time maybe?

i have a euro(11) and a west coast(18) character when one is dead due to off hours i play on the other one

a lot of the pilots i knew were psyched about this game at launch and dropped ~$50 in SC at the start (me included) because at release it was worth it to us the balance was good and we wanted to support the business model equal to what we would for a CoD etc.

but then due to loud uneducated whining the things we paid for got nerfed and everything that makes it hard to fly got buffed. ever wonder why there are so few jets now? its because its a waste of time now, the xp was always **** in them but at least we made a difference for our team. when i wanted to xp i switch to my engie and resupply the front line

and no before you ******* assume i'm an esf pilot i cant fly them for ****, what i do fly is libs and galaxies and now i honestly can't be bothered to, even as a great pilot with all AA and lock on missiles i can't stay in the air much longer than one drop, flares are worthless because after all the whining everyone and their dog bought the AA missiles now there are 10 of them aimed at you when you go near a point and they just wait till you burn your flare and your ****** not to mention now people have enough certs to actually unlock the second burster or skyguards. on top of that i have no weapon to return ANY damage without gunners (and no one is willing to get in to them anymore) so yeah that contributes to why a lot have given up on it

the whining from this community about things they have no comprehension on is ******* sickening. the community (at least that which is vocal here) are about as smart as 5th graders when it comes to faction v faction v faction balance

at release the game was amazingly balanced (once people accumulated enough certs) the problem has been the whiny gimmie gimmie crowd who want end game versatility after playing 10 minutes, i seriously feel bad for the Devs stuck trying to deal with this community my only advice to them is **** the vocal ***** here, they don't know how to do anything but complain so ignore them and trust your actual knowledge of the REAL numbers its not like the whiners paid for anything anyway and never will they are here for a free easy ride so to hell with them focus on keeping your paying customers around ffs

I have no idea of the ratio of bonus to population normally, but I've never seen the server with less than 28% pop, and that was 5% I think. I've no idea what it'd give you if it was down below 10% pop.

If you want people to go where they are needed the most you have to offer a substantial reward. 5% is practically nothing, nobody would look at a population breakdown and go "Oh, 5% more XP, I'll go here!" If it was 25% or 50% you might have something, at that point people might start feeling like its worth their time.

The whole point of the lowpop XP reward should be to make people chase the big rewards, and thereby balance the population. I mean, when we had the double XP weekend people went nuts over it and logged in like crazy - because that reward was meaningful. It needs to be a reward like that that draws people to lowpop areas.

I hope SOE responds soon...

What does any of this have to do with my post? I care not for your concerns of AA in this thread, this thread is about population imbalances. If anything you're the one coming off as whining about AA imbalances. I am a paying customer btw. You know what they say about assuming.

The XP/resource bonus for outnumbered empires is poorly thought out. We can't have characters from multiple empires on the same server like in PS1. So you've eliminated the people who would switch from the high to low pop empire for the xp bonuses. This seemed to bring pops back towards even in PS1. Now, however, were relying solely on incoming players to see the little bar graph and say I want to play for the losing team cuz they get a little bonus! Its just not going to work.

Actually as of a while ago you can have multiple factions on the same server, or at least I can.

What does the overall pop look like during prime time? At wee early mornings the pop differences are going to be skewed. On my server NC way outnumbers VS & TR during offhours, or what I call non-US hours where foreign folks play (and I don't know why they are on west coast server but they are).

Generally speaking, from my experiences NC and TR are pretty close but always outnumbered by VS on Helios. It has been getting worse over the past 4-5 days though, like all the NC are fleeing from a plague...possibly Magriders, I am uncertain.

O rly? I'll have to give it a try. It was always fun using alt accounts to screw with friends.

I'm not too concerned about population balance to be honest, on my server. It could be a bit better. Seems like TR dominates the continents most times. But we do okay and there's always some action to be had.

But, I do feel like SOE needs to do something to allow people to transfer servers somehow. I have a VS character that is BR27 and I have approximately $100 worth of SC into him (Alpha Squad + SC purchase after release) and recently found out a bunch of friends are playing VS on another server. There's no way I'm dropping that much time an money and starting fresh with a new character.

We need a server transfer option. Put it on a cooldown, or associate a cost with it, if you want to discourage it from happening all the time. But it needs to be an option.

In that case you are looking at issues with empty base capping, Outfits avoiding each other, and it's more of a faction imbalance issues between continents than actual overall population issue. They can fix the continent issues by implementing locking mechanism and other gameplay features. Those will take time but I have on doubt they'll be here to resolve these issues.

I believe this was a relatively recent addition; with the last big patch I believe. It was that line that worried me the most in the patch; making 4th factioning possible again.

NC suffers similarly on Waterson; I don't think we've capped out the continents yet, unlike the others. Yesterday in particular was quite an uphill battle, what with the VS having two continents with the majority of the pop and TR mosquito swarming us off of Esamir, the only continent we apparently owned.

I think they messed everything up when they allowed cross faction character creation on the same server. SOE basically created a 2 faction game. I play on Jaeger and before this change our population was pretty much balanced most of the time +/- a couple percent. Now whoever is "winning" sees their numbers swell upwards of 40% pop. Whoever is doing ok stays fairly steady. And the third wheel that's getting wrecked sees their pop plummet. You guys that are seeing sudden, sharp drops in population probably had a healthy amount of alts on your server. Along came x faction and those alts didn't need to exist anymore and here we are.

They need a rotating "prize" continent. Every few hours a large area on 1 of 3 Continents needs to yield a big reward for the faction that holds it. They need to implement some type of server side mission system to help instigate large fights.

It should create a random "king of the hill" type situation where everyone is fighting for majority rule on a continent. There needs to be a bigger reward for holding a continent, big enough to motivate a faction to keep it, and big enough to motivate the other 2 factions to prevent any 1 side from having that advantage.

At random, a base should offer dbl XP. Or maybe something like 3000 xp for holding a base for "x"minutes. Have something like a ticker that counts down to the reward over a long period of time. There should then be an alert that goes out that offers a 2000xp reward to any faction that takes the base. Or maybe reverse the values, either way- either way there needs to be a hotly contested area every once in a while.

The algorithm for which base is to be selected could depend on varying factors- population, how long a base has stayed 1 color, how deep in enemy territory.

Something needs to drive the wars a little bit more than just the satisfaction of seeing the map your faction color.


......what if locking a continent gave a faction access to an orbital attack? That would definitely motivate the other 2 factions to fight against continent locks.

Screenshots taken around 4 pm eastern on Mattherson this past Saturday the 15th.

It is EU prime time and only Hiller is high. The rest is medium and some lows.
http://s14.directupload.net/images/121217/47e3ce3c.png