[Suggestion] Improvements to underpop factions

I am always fighting as overpop faction, and it makes for a booring one sided battles. Only rarely do i get change to reinforce the lines where they are weak and fight against equal or superior numbers. I really would like to see bigger and more visible XP boosts for not only fighting as underpop faction, but also as fighting where your faction is outnumbered.

1. When you fight on server where your faction is underpop, you should get XP bonus and you should be visibly informed about it very clearly.
2. When you fight on a continent where your faction has underpop, you should get XP bonus and you should be visibly informed about it very clearly.
3. And when you go to defend a base where enemy has superior numbers, you should get XP bonus and you should be visibly informed about it very clearly.
4. To engourace big fights, you should get XP boost if there are more than 50 players from your team in a battle BUT your faction has less than enemy faction.

All of this engouraces players to go where there are least players of your faction. At the moment it is not clear enough that you get XP boost for fighting as underpop.
#2 and #3 means you always want to find place where your faction needs more players.
#4 means you still want to go into big battles, but just want to find balanced ones.

And those bonuses should all stack up.

Experience bonuses are too menial to dissuade people from zerging along with everyone else.

It's just frankly much easier to play on the over-popped side. You can take pot shots at your leisure and risk of dying becomes almost negligible.

We've been asking for bumping bonuses when dinosaurs still roamed the earth. Since it falls on deaf ears, I say more people needs to play the over pop side and break the frick of it. Only way it gets their attention.

Agree with Beerbeerbeer, XP bonuses are not interesting anough to encourage balancing fights.

I'd prefer having more means to influence the battlefields, but since the beginning of PS2, Zerging has been the go-to and "only viable" mean to win battles

I like everything OP said except promoting large battles. Battle size is entirely dependent on preference, but having a challenging and even fight where either side has the possibility to win is good for any competition. As for XP not being enough to persuade people to balance things out, I think that entirely depend on how much XP/certs we're talking about. For a 50% boost I'd definitely surfer through more defeats, much more so than I would with our meager 10%. Regarding zerging being the end all be all, if there was in increasing spawn penalty then the lower pop team could eventually catch up if they're more skilled.

People play this game to get large fights, so they need to be engouraced.
Bonuses need to be 50% or more for sure.
Spawn time penalty for overpop factions is also good idea.

So what happens if your faction is underpopped on a continent but has numerical superiority in a particular fight on that continent? You could presumably outnumber the enemy in that particular battle (maybe by a lot) but still get bonus xp for being under popped?

And why should you get better xp because the other side has used better tactics by bringing more force to bear in a particular battle?

We've got the Faction Balance Queue already. It sets a limit on the amount of overpop allowed (10% I think). I don't see why there should be additional punishment if you have been allowed to spawn because balance is within limits set by the game........... or if something beyond your control happens, like when the queue is in force but over pop gets bigger because the other factions are logging off.

And what if you are in the one battle on a continent where the underpopped faction has a local superiority in numbers due to concentrating their forces? Is it fair to load the dice against you winning that battle by stopping you from getting back into the fight as quickly as the other side can just because you have a bigger pop that happens to be mostly somehere else on the continent?

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Fact is - I've played for nearly three years now and seen battles involving just about every balance of power. I've never yet been unable to find one that produces a good fight. If I cannot find a decent fight it is usually due to lack of numbers on both sides (cough - Hossin - cough), or "veterans day out" when I seem to be the only player well below BR 100!

I personally hate the continent warp timer. It's a terrible punishment for your faction having more players at that time. I play this game for large scale, combined arms battles, not 1v1 ghost capping, so there's no other option but to wait for minutes and minutes to play. I think games are more fun when a battle can swing either way, not just in Planetside 2 but football, martial arts, beer pong...... and the developers should strive to have balanced fights. But thy should do it with rewards to the under-popped, not by punishing players who's team happens to have more people online. I can't defend the current system. I don't think one side should get magic rewards or start dealing more damage either. I like penalizing repeated deaths because it not only encourages/rewards tactical play, but it slows down some of the cheezier tactics, like suicide c-4 spam. It also allows better players to slowly get an edge of a greatly numerically superior force of less skilled players. I don't really agree with OP's plan of punishing a team for having more players, but I think finding a way to reward the underdog is worthwhile.

Well now, I could go along with an xp reward for underpopped faction if it only triggered when they were severely underpopped AND the faction balance / population balance queuing systems were removed. I must say I never wait long in a queue on the EU servers but it is a ball ache to have to wait a bit, then spawn to a warp gate, then either die to redeploy or take pot luck on instant action.

I still think it is weird though, if you have continent underpop but get the bonus points in one particular battle where you happen to outnumber your opponents.

XP rewards are terrible, terrible ways to incentivize players to go somewhere or stay away.

You don't want players going to the high XP value's and have a bad time because they are underpopped. You just want them to have a good time no matter if they are underpopped or zerging. XP influences your enjoyment only a little bit, so you have to look for the alternative: Gameplay.

The Zerglings are "enjoying" it because they don't get their butt kicked, they constantly win the battle, they get practically free XP and they can upgrade their KD value by farming underpopped defenders. The defenders however don't get anything out of it, except sometimes XP and KD when they play Spawnwarrior, which isn't exactly stellar gameplay for either team.

So you make it enjoyable. You change the conditions of the fight. You make sure the defenders even when outpopped have a chance of fighting back. Give them alternative exits that are unpredictable by the attackers, this prevents spawncamping and spawnwarriors since the attackers don't know when or where an enemy will come at them.
I would also change the conditions for winning the base. As an example: When you are underpopped, each kill adds time to the capture timer. Each death on your side substracts some of this added time, but less than a kill for you does based on how much you are outpopped. This allows a battle of attrition where the defenders try to kill enough attackers to keep the timer going on indefinitely while the attackers try to get enough kills to keep the added time at zero.
That's just an example, I'm sure alternatives can be made to make it interesting for both the attackers and defenders no matter how outpopped you are.

Yep, there is absolutely no reason to play the underpopped faction unless you're masochist or enjoy being farmed.

The meta of this game built around getting the most kills while minimizing risk to death and simply put its just so much easier doing that with the Zerg.

Even if you fight over killing people, you still get more experience on the fat *** side simply because you're not dying so much and staring at spawn tubes.

Even more, regardless of pop, people will typically fight the faction of least resistance. That means the faction with the least amount skilled people. On Connery it's the NC. On Emerald, it's also the NC. No idea why there aren't many good players playing NC, but fight against the TR and VS and the chances of running across decent to good players goes up, anecdotally.

Sorry NC, you guys are the short bus. Again, no idea why, but you guys have a serious lack of good players.

A perfect example is happening right now on Connery. VS and NC have both pushed TR (The slightly most popped faction) to warpgate. No matter where you go, the fight is 2:1 against TR, so there's literally not a single decent sized good fight to go to. I switched to my VS account because taking shots with my Mosquito from warpgate is lame, but flying my Scythe is just as lame because they're doing nothing but LOLpodding spawnrooms and gangking Mossys that get too far from the warpgate. So now I'm watching YouTube, posting on here, and have decided that after my first month I've spent enough money in this game. If players were encouraged more to spread the fight out and not keep doubleteaming a faction that's already been warpgated, I think that would be a positive change. And, not to mention, how many times have you been frustrated at a 96+ friendly zerk shelling a near empty spawnroom while you're getting warpgated by the other faction? That just sucks, stupid meat shields should be funneled to where they're needed.

It would be nice to have fun while getting your teeth kicked in, you you do have many ideas to help underdogs not get cornerd in the spawn room so easily, but the reality is most people take the path of least resistance and view winning as all that matters, not the fun of the fight itself. And really, the whole point is to offer enough reward so that you're not getting paid to get farmed, as you'd ideally lure enough players with easy certs to the point where it becomes a more even fight.

So who are the people who stick with defending against a Zerg? What are they doing there? There's a lot of complaints about being underpopped, and yet there's still a few people who stick with it and either play Spawnwarrior or throw everything against it to hope they can make a difference.
So why don't we give them more tools to make a difference? Spawnwarriors/Spawncampers can be prevented with offering alternative routes out of the spawnroom that the attackers can't camp. You can also change the gameplay and offer new goals and objectives for the attackers and defenders to reach depending on the overpop. Such as adding attrition that can allow the defenders to prevent capture indefinitely by killing opponents. This is already a success, since the defenders have a two-staged goal: 1. Prevent capture of the base, which is now successful. 2. Push the attackers away and start a counter-attack. They can't accomplish the second part, but they can sure as hell achieve the first one.
But the second one can be achieved by holding out long enough for reinforcements to arrive. And since you can achieve that by fulfilling the first goal you are essentially winning despite being overpopped.

You could even add bonuses and special rewards for the defenders for instance by giving them XP for every extra minute it takes to capture the base, as well as giving periodic more special rewards for every 5 minutes extra they can make a single capture last.

I'm all for that, I just think it could compliment some monetary incentive to stick around for the tough fights.

With "monetary" you mean XP and Cert rewards?

XP and Cert rewards have it's place, but only a small one. Unless you go to extremes and give 3x the XP per kill, it's just not attractive enough to get your face shot off just for stepping outside or sit in a spawnroom shooting enemies through the spawnshields until reinforcements arrive. Even then it will actually start devaluating the experience outside of an outpopped fight. If you want (the feeling of) quick XP players would go to outpopped fights and kill. On the other hand when they leave and kill players in even fights the XP rewards will feel too low to be worth it.

Just think of Destinies infamous Loot Cave. Was it fun gameplay? No. Why did people do it? Because it somehow felt better to do that than play the actual game, because the digital loot made them feel more empowered than actually stomping across the game's villains. We have something similar in Zergs: Why do people do it? Because it ups their Epeen, because it's easy, because it offers that grief thrill that many people secretly love when they have power over other players, especially when it's a "legit" method of achieving power over other players, such as moving through the environment allowing you to murder players without getting murdered back or throwing grenades through walls into spawnrooms. Any bug that can be exploited will be heavily exploited even if it is a clear and unfair advantage.

You want people to stick to outpopped fights because it's interesting, you want people to go to outpopped fights because they want to be there. This means that fun gameplay has to be offered even if you are outpopped. At the same time we need to make the rest of the game interesting enough that players will say "Damn I'm in a Zerg, I want to be somewhere outside the Zerg and do something more enjoyable like -something-".

Of course the ideal situation is everyone having fun, and I really think the closest you can get to that is having as fair a competition as possible. And so what if you give the underdog of a 4:1 pop fight a 4x multiplier? People will show up for that. Then it turns in to 3:1, then 2:1, then it turns in to a good fight where there's at least a chance it could go either way. And if people start to filter out in search of the next 4:1 fight, then good, it keeps the battlefield roaring, and helps prevent one team from straight curb-stomping the other. How much you offer to under-popped factions all depends on what it actually takes to actually get players to move away from the horde, but I think it's something that could really help the game, especially when paired with some of your ideas such as base re-designs.

Well giving extra XP does not make the competition "fair". It only gives them XP as a reward, it doesn't help them win, it doesn't help them enjoy it a lot more and it even devaluates the XP you get outside of outpopped events, reducing the total enjoyment you can have since you are still at a massive disadvantage when in underpopped fights. It's not as if when you are outpopped 2:1 that you only win half the time, you lose more than that. You also take a hit to other Epeen stats like KD at the same time despite your increased XP rate.

Also, PS2 is build on the premise that it doesn't really balance fights. You have massive fights, period. If one team has more guys than your team, so be it. It does have to make the game as much fun as possible all the time. Being outpopped shouldn't be a problem.
You yourself already say that the XP would be there to balance the teams eventually. Unfortunately that's not always possible. Most of the time in the game the two strongest factions will attack the weakest faction the most, especially during alerts. This is actually a very smart move, since they aren't going to see a lot of progress attacking each other but the weakest one will definitely be yielding land, and it's better to take it fast than to let the other strong faction take it for them. This means that the underpopped players will have no way to compensate because they are underpopped everywhere since they have to take it up against the bulk of 2 factions. That XP bonus is only going to be a consolation prize, patching up some of the lost enjoyment with a virtual number increasing while your other virtual numbers decrease and you aren't really enjoying the actual in-the-moment gameplay.

Therefore, we need a strong outpopped-gameplay. If you can enjoy yourself no matter if you are outpopped or not the problem is solved and we might not even need XP modifiers to patch things up.

Numbers win in almost every situation, no matter how many secret tunnels you give spawn rooms. Plus, anything like that that strengthens out-popped performance really strengthens even-pop performance. Maybe you enjoy clubbing little baby seals, or getting helplessly bent over by the enemy, but I do something else with my time when it's one of those nights on PS2. No matter how much you fiddle with things, no one likes an un-winnable fight, and only chicken****s like un-losable fights.

Numbers don't need to win in every situation, secret tunnels isn't the only solution and you know that since you read and liked my alternatives for getting out of the spawnroom, and things that strengthen out-popped performance can be variable depending on how outpopped you are, starting at 0 when you aren't (much) outpopped and increasing as the outpop increases. This is already a great way to prevent this system from interfering with even fights and even allows the game to compensate for how much you are outpopped, meaning that being outpopped 10:1 will yield better benefits for the outpopped player than being outpopped 2:1.

For instance that attrition I proposed. In even fights you could easily just let it be a 1:1 basis. You kill one enemy player, 10 seconds are added to the timer. You get killed by one enemy player, 10 seconds are deducted. You could also turn this entire gameplay mechanic off in even fights and only let it count during outpopped fights.
Then as the defenders start getting outpopped the difference increases. Outpopped 2:1? If the defenders kill an opponent 10 seconds is added to the capture timer, but if the attackers kill one defender they only get 5 seconds substraction, just using imaginary numbers here nothing set in stone.

You do have some very good ideas, but I don't like this one, too much space magic. It punishes teams for being coordinated and quickly striking before the enemy can gather themselves. Due to the spamming nature of the game, you many times have to throw numbers at the enemy to break their line, and limiting how quickly one team can deploy based on tile population is no better than giving under-popped teams extra HP. And I'm not claiming extra XP would be enough to balance every fight, or even half of them, it's just one small step that I think could help in a small way that's very easy to implement.

I see your problem and it sucks to be in that situation. But what you describe appears to be about double teaming. If the two factions penning TR in are both slightly underpop I cannot see how they would qualify for a penalty to their xp gain that might encourage them to fight each other instead.