Dear SOE...Population

Cert gains need to be increased. This weekend pops were up because of it. Your average shooter gamer doesn't want to work too hard for pretty much anything much less pay for it.

waterson is where its at biatches

I fear that unless they increase the cert gain the servers will need a merge.

They need to not just simply increase the cert gain, but add achievements to the game, or things like daily quests.

People need to jump in to the game every day and some sense of direction, and its very hard to do right now if you are not part of an active outfit. People, especially casuals prefer to be lone-wolfs, so screaming at them to join an outfit is just simply not going to work, the game needs to be more casual friendly in both it's progression system and system mechanics.

The progression system only caters to no lifers who can commit every waking hour of their life to this game and people who have hundreds of dollars to dump on a video game. The game it's self provides no sense of direction and no impactful meaning on the players actions and quite frankly just doesn't keep the player within the experience.

If these things don't change, PS2 is doomed to the fate of other substandard MMOs.

It really needs to be noted that Steam only counts the game if you download and play it through Steam, something which I personally have not done. The overlay does terrible, terrible things in games that aren't optimized for it, and is pretty buggy even in games that are. (The web browser is very prone to crashing and forcing the overlay to reboot if you try to use it)

Reminds me of a conversation between Higby and T-Ray where T-Ray was busting Higby's balls for missing getting in a mission system for launch. Need that badly.

There are definitely moments in Jaeger (US East) in which I feel like I have to ask, "Where the hell is everybody?" During the week at early/very late hours is when it's worst. I really wish I could login and play at any time and not have trouble finding good fights or large squads/platoons to roll with. I guess that's too much to ask for, though.

Here is the real problem as I see it, and this is the 3rd time I get to use a self-censored word in an hour.

A large portion, probably the majority, perhaps even the vast majority, behave like moths to a flame as far as 'action' goes. An alien would look down at and say "are these insects trying to crash their game?".

I'm a freak, I proudly admit it. I (here it comes!) avoid the cluster**** as if it were a contagious disease. It makes no sense to me how that is fun. It reminds me of people that take a bunch of medication and then sit in front of a television all night.

So there is the problem as I see it, and so then how to address it? I am not the one to make realistic suggestions, I have little insight into the minds of the many that enjoy said behavior. I would do stupid things like introduce an npc race that would fly in and drop nuclear bombs in the hottest regions, or make a nuclear button on the ground that 50 people have to stand on inside a bubble to set off, liquifying all enemies in the area. I'm sure those few still reading this post can come up with something more practical...

If the problem as I see it is addressed correctly so all are happy, then we could merge ALL regional servers. Imagine that!

So I hop on Genudine as TR at 4pm pacific. Not prime time, but not far off. I join a platoon of about 25 guys. The VS have the highest population on our continent at 34-38%. I'm giving air cover from a mosquito, searching the ground for rocket targets. My platoon takes over Dakaha amp station, cora med labs. No contact. Empty captures. We move onto Quarts and West Highland. No contact at either. Empty caps. We then take over hvar. I see 2 enemy scythes, first and only contact in the game so far. After HVAR we take over allatum biolab. No enemy contact on the outside. No enemy contact on the inside. Empty cap. So finally we roll on TI alloys. No contact. Literally not a single person I've seen other than those 2 scythes.

Then we get to the crown - going to be a big fight there, right? No, about 30 of us total take it over, and I see 2 enemy - they get shot as they're leaving their spawn room. I kill one. I'm now 45 minutes into patrolling the front lines and I have my first kill. Crown capped with almost no fighting. After that my squad moves down to crossroads watchtower. Some contact. I see about 3 enemy infantry, and 2 guys in turrets. We kill them easy and cap. Almost no resistance.

Finally we get to Zurvan and there's a real fight going on. About 55 minutes into logging into the server and going right to the front before I see any real action. It's not like I was hiding away in a corner of the map - we were retaking the main territories between TR and the VS. And the VS had the highest population on the continent, so you'd think we'd be seeing them. And it was between 4pm and 5pm, not exactly slow times.

I love the hell out of this game. I've played it an insane amount in these 3 weeks. I presubscribed for 6 months and I plan to make a bunch of purchases next 2x sale. I'm as enthusiastic about this game as you can be. It may be the most fun I've had playing games in the last 5 years. And yet the fact that I can't even find a fight at all, let alone a big epic one, is totally ruining my enthusiasm for the game.

I agree, look at what happened with SWTOR. They had more servers at release than any game I have ever played and what was the result? Just a lot of low population servers that felt like ghost towns.

This is a good point and should definitely be considered.

I started a spreadsheet just to monitor the situaton. It doesn't quite paste right, but the gist is - low is a 1, medium is a 2, high is a 3. Samples were taken at 3pm, 4:30, 6:30, 7:30, 9:00, 10:30 and 12 PST

3pm 4:30 6:30 7:30 9:00 10:30 12:00
Connery W 2 2 2 2 2 2 2
Torremar W 1 2 1 1 1 1 1
Benson W 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
Matherson E 2 2 2 2 2 2 2
Apex E 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
Soltech E 2 2 2 2 2 2 1
Deepcore E 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
Palos W 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
Jaeger E 2 2 2 2 2 2 1
Genudine W 1 1 2 2 2 2 1
Walterson E 2 2 2 2 2 2 1
Helios W 2 2 2 2 2 2 2
Voight W 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
Everett W 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
Snake Revine E 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
Auraxicom E 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
8 servers - a full half of US servers - never got above low at any point. No servers were ever high. This is all throughout primetime for the whole US - this isn't a sample taken at bad times, it's a normal tuesday night primetime. We don't know what low, medium, and high actually mean, but MMO makers usually skew those descriptions to make their games seem more active, so low is probably quite low. Clearly the population is being mismanaged here.

Try Lithcorp EU and you'll figure out what original poster means, frigging ghost server on my standards(old PS 1 standards or comparing to other current ps 2 servers where I got chars) and sadly my main is stuck in lithcorp.

If there isn't going to be server mergers, I hope they give us option to move charachters from low pop servers.. hell I'd even pay for it, that's how sucky the situation is at morning/afternoon/late night to play. Basically only time to play is from 15:00-01:00 my timezone.. anything else is just 2squads maximium fighting/avoiding eachother while capping facilities.

Few days ago me and my friend joined Amerish on Cobalt at night. There were at total of 10 people on that continent. We tested it by checking that if one of us left the amerish pop of TR fell by about 15 %


Seriously Sony? Seriously?

i guess it is safe to say the game is dyeing. I payed 60 bucks for 2 weeks of great fun until things started to die. GG SOE its been real.

There's always a time when there's just not enough people on and I have to give up for the day because flag running is not fun. And I'm on Mattherson which has a decent population. I can't imagine those "low" servers. They need to fix this, especially since people can't transfer their characters with PAID ITEMS to a server they'd actually enjoy playing on -- they are far more likely to just quit the game rather than buy the stuff again on another server.

Any way I could fix it?

I understand that for me, I happen to be quite far away (SEA playing on AU server), so some lag is to be expected. But I've been getting quite a lot of lag spike lately, and I think those are not client-based (maybe ISP, but NOT client).

Players are leaving cause attacking empty bases is boring.

PS1 cloaked AMS, PS1 style mines, spitfires and motion detectors would have fixed that.

Running with the ZERRRRRG.

lol

Most people get an fps drop and call it lag, or something similar. That's why he put quotes around "lag." Actual lag is not a clientside problem generally.

Not really. Every designer knows WoW was a fluke. The only games which achieve this level of success are Farmville/town or puzzle/gambling games which are violence free and attracts a lot more people then any other style of game. WoW removed the need to think and every challenge required by games such as EQ, AC and DaoC. That's why it was so popular, it was built for the masses; the people with average IQs.