You only have fair fights for prime time so maybe 6 hours a day... The rest of the time is disguistingly unbalanced and driving away new players. It is 3pm in the afternoon nc has 53%, vs 23% tr 23%........ How does anyone new player enjoy playing out of a spawn room or ghost capping. It is out of hand been this way for at least a year but they continue to ignore it. If not low population balance que, then something else at least.
Many players work, attend school, or daycare. Players live in different time-zones. With several continents available, favorites play a part. I prefer Amerish, others Indar, etc. We might grumble about over being out-populated, but when it's in our favor we always gleefully try to warp gate the enemy. That's the pattern I see. The phrase "Ghost capping" suggests it's despicable to capture a base if there are no enemies at the base. At the moment, the strategy to win is to have more territory than other factions. It is on the base owner to defend. It's war. We don't wait for the enemy to bring the most and best they have.
I can't say this often enough, play all three factions! Yeah sure, you can get NSO but it's currently broke and meh. Investing the skills learnt on your main will have any new alt working well in no time. You see the OP weps from the other side. You experience the "organised 2v1" from a position of reality instead of fantasy! After all these years I just log onto the underpop faction when logging in, cuz, why the hell not. Yell whine instantly gets a whole lot funnier
The problem isnt that there is a population imbalance, the problem is that its not fun being outnumbered. PS2 doesnt have population balancing or matchmaking, its impossible to make sure you arent outpopulated on a local level. The only solution is to make it fun to fight while outpopulated. Spawnrooms should not be hard to escape coffins, objectives for players should shift the more outpopulated you are to allow stalling techniques without having to fight through multiple chokepoints while outnumbered.
Would help if there weren't so many mechanics like proxy mines, recon darts/radar, spitfires, etc. that essentially stop anything but a sensor shield infil from getting out of spawn to.
Yeah, I agree, but it gets worse at night and even worse late at night. Basically, half the population of one faction and half the population of another faction go to the 3rd faction. They zerg the hell out of everything, then, on the next continent, same thing happens. Sometimes from one continent to the other, they stay, sometimes they change, I think it not only depends on "who"s winning" (though that's a big part of it), but it could also have something to do with which bases an outfit or group of squads likes to defend and which they like to attack, that kind of thing. Whatever the reason, like you said, population is rarely balanced outside of prime time and it sucks. (even at prime time, if there's a 2nd continent, it'll usually be zerged by one faction)
I had this Idea, they attempted that to fix with the 4th faction, the NSO robots. But it's not working properly and they're only accesable for paying members. You must understand, some ppl are faction loyalists. In addition, the insane grind of certs and ISO make it unfun to roll a new toon. They should implement something similiar as the NSO bots, one toon per account should be able to switch factions and keep all respective Upgrades. Got the LMG directive as VS done? with this toon now you can switch to NC and TR too and have the godsaw or butcher unlocked. Driective score stays the same. You only would Need to track all empire specific stuff, everything has it's Counterpart. But yes NC overpops almost all the time on cobalt right now, sorry for picking the faction with my favourite colour and cool guitar rifs.
This, plus allow movement of certs between characters, and greatly increase the exp boost for playing the under-populated faction. Go over to one of the mentioned factions which has 23% of the population and get a 200% exp boost for doing it? **** yeah! Hey, we're my exp boost go? Oh right, the system worked, populations are balanced, so the the boost went away
The devs really need to add massive bonuses for being underpop, I hate the idea of faction queue, if people want to play their favourite faction, let them, But give people a real incentive to log on to an underpop, Example: For every 1% population difference (compared to the faction with most players) you get 5% more xp and 10 nanites per min. This means even with a 10% underpop you'll be getting 50% more xp and 100 extra nanites per minute, The higher the underpop, the more insane the incentive becomes, try resisting the urge to log on the 20% underpopped faction! Knowing that You'll be getting double xp and 200 bonus nanites per min! Grenade bandolier, i choose you! These bonuses should be displayed on the map screen when you look at continent population balance so people can see how juicy it will be to log on their underpop alts And even if people don't switch for the crazy benefits, it would still give the underpop more tools to fight them with. Try zerging the underpop and expect to be met with grenade spam, perpetual max crashes and an endless supply of vehicles! The bonus nanites should really help to level the playing field
I'm against this idea. You don't want players to have a carrot (more XP and nanites) but without improved gameplay. They would still have to fight overwhelming odds, have to fight out of spawnrooms that work against you instead of for you and you still have to go through chokepoints with less players than your enemy. End result: you've just encouraged players to fight a fight they don't want to be in, they have a bad experience and will burn out of the game faster. You need to have features alongside those incentives that make it fun to be outpopped. Make sure you can leave the spawnroom without it working as a chokepoint against you, let players stop the attackers without the need to hold the points they cannot hope to capture and hold anyway, give ways for players to get around the base quickly and make it harder for the defenders to just shut them down. I would also not give more nanites, but reduce nanite cost for items instead. That way you can make it easier to give benefits for being outpopped locally without players using such features to "mine" nanites. "Oh my nanites are gone? I'll temporarily join an outpopped fight to quickly top my nanites up, then go back to where I was fighting".
but would it be overwhelming odds? sure the other team have more people, but your team can be chain pulling banshee ESFs /mattock maxes or spamming grenades and c4 like they grow on trees. i'd rather be on the underpop in those chokepoints than face the fury of ten thousand grenades, superior numbers mean nothing when the enemy can blow them all up also i think we had a little misunderstanding here: i'm thinking it would be based on continent pop (since that is where the queue is.) and not hex pop. we should remove the faction queue and give the underpop the bonus of being able to pull more toys. (and a very nice boost to XP) and if you still think people might hop continents to get nanites and hop back, well currently they'd have the max pop queue to deal with, but i also suggest reverting the nerf to continent pop (its 900, used to be 2000) if that happened there would be no map hoping, because we'd fit the whole server pop on one map no map pop queue, no faction queue.
From my experience, Population balance seems overstated. To me it seems it mostly depends on what Outfits are active. Have been plenty of times i have played on TR or NC with majority pop and still lost alerts. You can have plenty of randoms, yet if they're running solo and without an organised group, their contribution to the overall fights are rather low. Also count in the AFK'ers or other "Non combatants" At this point it's all about the outfits, if DIG and KOTV is online they obliterate everyone, when they're offline Vanu is a wet sock.
Some of it is on the players just finding a way to screw each other. The leaders during off hours suck. They form up a big zerg on each faction then go around the map fighting empty lattice instead of each other. To scared of defeat. The solo A2G / HESH farmers suck too. They know with the low pop it's unlikely someone will come along to counter them. And who pulls a MAX at a 24-48 vs 1-12??? I'm playing NSO a lot (already asp100 on the other 3) and it suuuuuucks. Constantly underpop. Game is bearable at a 2:1 outpop and even fun. Beyond that or if the max/hesh/a2g low skill cheese comes along it ruins the gameplay.
