How it feels to play PS2

Your signature is worth a thousand words.

How it feels to play PS2 if you aren't a whiny nitpicking grouch

Thats pretty much how I would feel when I tried to play on Waterson, TR had enough population that it wasn't even fun let alone a contest.

Waterson VS checking in here.

Am I the only person on these forums who is looking forward to the optimizations? Or has learned to live with being underpoped by playing casually unless I can get on with all my friends?

You mean you do something other than ***** and moan constantly, and don't have a "poor me" attitude? Holy crap, good sir, you are a rare breed.

I'm trying. It's hard to stay cheery when my sun-D gets evaporated by a half-dozen Vulcan-harassers, but I think it comes from my habit of saying "why did I fail there?" instead of "how did they win there?"

It's also hard to take the moral high ground when my plans to start a super-leet ops outfit are stalled by college work. >.<

That's an attitude that not many have, especially in this crowd.

Threads like this amaze me though. What's the point? If you aren't having fun in the game, don't play. Don't come here and try to make others suffer along with you; you'll just get laughed at. This perpetuating "poor, poor me" attitude is why this forum site is an absolute disaster.

This is why children shouldn't be given unsupervised internet access.

So you're saying if someone left a steam pile of **** on your couch, the couch that you enjoy sitting on, a steaming pile of **** that should have been cleaned up but instead the person responsible for the **** decide to polish a **** pile in a different room, that you would just sit on the pile of **** rather than ask them to clean it?

Or ... you're saying ... that you have a Dodge pick up that you really like, but the brakes are kinda ******. Everyone sees that the brakes are ******, but the mechanic decides to work on the muffler instead. You wouldn't then remind him that the brakes are at least as much if not more of a problem than the exhaust?

Or ... you're saying that a paying customer has neither the right nor the privilege to point out certain design decisions that he or she disagrees with?

If it wasn't fun, I wouldn't play it. But I see things about it that could make it much more fun, things that were talked about as features during beta, things that were put on a roadmap for August, things that are blatantly obvious to me as a player, that should be addressed.

I'm saying that instead of making a thread like this that is entirely unproductive, maybe you could be doing something useful with your time.

Oh and maybe if you paid attention to what's going on right now, you would know that the devs are focused on optimization, so they can't take your whine call at the moment.

Edit: it's just a video game, one that you're not working on, I might add. You'll get it when it's done, and life goes on in the meantime. Sitting at your computer crying like a baby doesn't help that day come any faster.

I'll avoid pointing out the logical fallacy in you crying about my crying.

What I do with my time is my business, and as it happens, I'm beyond board at work, and as such, I choose to make a thread that reminds the devs that population imbalance feels a lot like getting kicked in the sack - or arguing with some idiot on an internet forum.

I know very well what the devs say they are working on, I know that Higgles said we might see the optimization patch on 23 October, and - as you may or may not have noticed - I also said that I disagree with the decision they made to halt all other actions until optimization was complete. Despite the fact that your mother told you that you're special and important, no, this thread is not for you. This thread was intended to provide further feedback to the devs from a paying customer, and to amuse me in creating it. If it happened to amuse a few people then so be it.

Suit yourself. I'll keep playing the game as is, and not consider it akin to being kicked in the balls every time I log in. Until you are in a position to sit down an write the code that's being implemented, I would suggest doing the same, for the sake of remaining sane. In the end, no amount of ******** here will change what is already taking place.

we're the underdogs, yo.



waterson VS, re-pruh-zeeehhnt!

Indeed sir. I play every night for an hour or two, and I genuinely enjoy it (despite the fact that I rage in TS about things that piss me off.) But I could see how some folk would get discouraged in the face of 50% TR (or VS on my server.) I don't want those new kids run away and say PS2 sucks. Then SOE loses money. Then the game folds.

Whenever I get shot down doing the thing I enjoy most: flying in my lego brick Reaver, I just look for the biggest and most even battle on the map and grab myself a Max with dual anti-air. guns. Then I go blasting off on a revenge spree and get about 10x more certs feel good again. When the sky looks clear and I'm tempted to grab a Reaver again, it's filled with Strikers or lock on bugs. This game..

HELLS TO THE YEAAAAH!

I'm against overpop as much as the next guy, and I get your frustration. Nothing sucks more than finding a good fight, only to have it ruined by 3:1 odds. (Or to never have a challenge because you overrun every base you attack!)

Overpop doesn't seem like something that can be fixed with a simple patch though.

I mean, SoE could (and should!) go about balancing all the factions weapons so that there is no incentive to chose the "better" side, but even then you would still have imbalance issues that just naturally occur. You could add server transfer tokens and provide incentives for going to a server where you faction is underpop, but you would still have people who look for the easy fight. At the moment SoE is working on Optimization: which should bring in/back more people and should hopefuly make the overpop bearable BUT is not an end all solution.

At the end of the day, (and in my opinion) the best thing to do is optimize the game first to bring in more players and try to solve the pop problem by dilution, then balance the factions properly (once you have a large enough player base to work with AND A GAME THAT IS STABLE) and then throw the transfer tokens and convince items on top of that.

But, given the staff cuts at SoE, this could take an eternity.

An intelligent post. My opinion, and it's worth the 1s and 0s that it's written on, is that the devs unwillingness to apply the stick in the face of the carrot is the real problem. Modifying XP up for an underpopped faction is all well and good, but it doesn't provide any disincentive for the overpopped faction to ... not overpop. 150% of zero is still zero. A negative XP modifier would have some effect, certainly for the fourth factioners. Why would a faction switcher turn off his VS to go play TR if there's a 10% penalty cause TR is already at 40%?

I agree with you. Optimization will bring in more players, and that is the best thing for SOE's profits. And really, that's all that matters. If they don't see long-term committed players as their number 1 income source, they won't cater to them. It's really that simple. I've said somewhere else in these forums, I'll bet my mossie that the F2P model is based on getting as many players as possible to try the game, spend $10-15, and then "who cares" what happens next? Because the percentage of players that will play the same game for 1-2-3 years is very low, and further, in an F2P game, the percentage of players that spend more than $15 or so probably plunges logarithmically for every dollar over $20. Kinda sad, but they're running a business and I get it.

In the end, I enjoy their product and will keep paying the subscription fee. There was actually a queue for Indar twice this week AFTER primetime when I logged on!

Thank god almighty, another intelligent person!

Yes, the F2P model does encourage a very "pyramid scheme" style of business, however I'm hopeful that once SoE is rolling in MORE money that they will get to polishing! (And if they don't then by god we will let them know it's time!)

I never considered the negative incentive idea before. It sounds quite effective, but it also sounds like it's purpose built to target 4th factioners. Now I have no issue with giving the fair-weather patriots a cuff off the back of the head but I'm just curious: if 4th factioning was reduced to negligible levels, what purpose would such a function serve? If you have a faction on a server that just happens to be overpop, would you want to punish those people just because their favorite toon is on that side?

Just a thought.

In that case, it would not help. With only anecdotal evidence to work with, the fourth faction seems to be the biggest culprit, certainly on my server during my normal play hours (post primetime.) I know the TR overpop is bad on others, but don't know whether or not it's consistently so, or just mostly fourth faction surges. 37%-33%-30% isn't what we're complaining about, right? It's when one faction gets up to 40-45-50% that really throws the experience off. Theoretically, negative xp modifiers don't kick in until 40% or so, I guess.

The most frustrating thing about the lack of polish waiting for more players (optimization) is that they told us what they will do when they get to it. Hossin is sitting there on the test server, just waiting to be plugged into a global lattice. TEASE!

Can we all agree now that all empires are OP, faction pop will never be balanced, and just go play the game? Please?