[Miller] I have to be fair with you...

The real issue with Miller, besides the fact that TR has been overpopulated on a general basis for a while, is that there is this sort of asymmetrical balance in populations.

Starting from the early morning, TR population tends to skyrocket to unimaginable levels and usually normalizes in a couple of hours, still staying higher up until around 12pm UTC.

Around this time population is generally balanced, but there comes and alert and the population shifts towards TR. As a general rule, population bias towards TR continues up until later in the evening.

It's around this time that there's essentially a change in the lead, population-wise. Lately I've been noticing the VS sport some insane percentages during nights and very early mornings.



This is probably an extreme example, but the VS population has been steadily above 40% the whole night after the VS alert win.

Now this is not meant as being against VS and especially not something meant to "defend" the TR, as it's still the most favoured faction on Miller. I will however say that this trend is having some sort of shift and lately there's been several imbalanced situations where a faction (in rare cases it was the NC) is blatantly outnumbering the other two insanely.

This is just to note that no matter who you favour in a server to compensate, what this will create is more imbalance and a less stable one at that. We don't need an overpopulated TR, but we most certainly don't need any of the other two factions to be so either.

There must be something done about this phenomenon as I am sure it affects other servers too. There should be a flexible faction-specific population cap or a similar system to discourage things like these.

Discuss.

I don't know how to fix this but I've got one off-topic thing to say:

TR shouldn't attack NC or even fight back NC, let them even get to our WG. If we want to have any chance at winning the WDS we should just focus on attacking VS territorires not connected to the NC territories, after NC get to our WG they will have no choice but to attack VS as well so VS will loose a lot of territory, but I don't really think we'll be ever able to catch up to VS score though.

They need to get over the notion of offending their subscribers really (cannot remember the exact quote from Higby) and implement a faction lock or just prevent switches during alerts and limit overall switches on one server. Seriously, its mollycoddling sensitive little twits. I love this game, it has incredible potential and i want to see it succeed.

But how can they expect to keep subscribers long term when I log in to a game, supposed to be an enjoyable experience, escapism, relaxing. I get zerged, every night. The NC had overpop of ridiculous levels maybe twice. Its telling really.But seriously, people have had enough, outfits are dwindling, fun is becoming a pie in the sky.

1 char per servers. And I have 2 chars on Miller on same account and willing to sac my alt. If you want to play other empires, go have multiple accounts, don't care. That much. People will lazy up.

You must be digging the ZOE floods and the humming hoards of Magrider mayhem throughout the night!

-Mattherson

There isn't much of pop at night, so those 46% is prolly 46 people.

It happened two nights in a row this week. Perhaps it was merely an alert going favorably towards the VS. I do remember winning a couple alerts yesterday, for a change.

This is the week stats:


And this is yesterday:

I dont think we will either, not till someone else is top dog, simply because the competition rules were changed to massively penalise TR in the current situation, which is why theyve gone from first to suddenly the worst of all three factions.

TR wont get any traction back till theyve lost the current week and another faction (VS) gets the lodestone of doom called top dog and TR can get some payback raking in the biassed bonuses.

Seriously you would be surprised.

The only crowd this really stops is the paying crowd, and that's the LAST crowd SOE wants to inconvenience. This is NOT the winning move, and never will be. Hard disincentivising or greatly incentivising players to balance populations is the real answer, but SOE wants to keep everything so uninfluential so as to seem fair. Yes, SOE needs to get over making people upset, but that needs to be done in a way that regardless of the number of accounts One might have, they'll be discouraged playing empire A and encouraged to play empire B. Hard locks just piss some people off, the rest will shrug. Laziness isn't a trustworthy factor to base a solution around.

pop stats in the night of early morning are totally irrelevant as there are so few players that one additional player may result alone in a 5% pop increase...

I subscribe now and then, not all the time. But I can see the reality of faction based games and realise there has to be limitations. If it continues as is i wont be around to buy SC or pay for subscriptions. If people cannot be rational about limitations such as this i cant see what SOE can do to fix the issue. Even outside alerts on Miller populations are absolutely mad. Something has to change.

If they don't sort out the faction switching for when WDS is out of beta, then it will be an utter joke. It will be completely insane if they allow faction switching to continue and if the account not the character gets the reward like now, well that would just just be completely baffling and certainly not a game i would want to continue playing.

I've found the populations to be better, on miller, recently. I'm usually logging in between 6-7pm(uk time) when i screenshot the populations. The last few times I've been on have been
tr:31 vs:32 nc:37
tr:37 vs:29 nc:34
tr:36 vs:35 nc:39
tr:32 vs:31 nc:36
I could merely be fortunate to only be on at times when population is not too bad, at the least it seems like it's better than it used to be.

you must be very fortunate, 110% pop at one stage there.

Seriously though, i generally play from 8.00/8.30 or so on. Its been worse than ever in my opinion, with huge swings between TR and VS. Used to be more settled i think. NC actually had reasonable pop last night for a while before dropping to around 28% for most of the night and falling to 23% eventually.

To be clear I also hate the times when NC is over populated too. Its almost as lacking in enjoyment as being on the receiving end.

Honestly I don't see any way to balance populations with the F2P model because, as has already been stated, if they introduce charachter locks the people who lose out are the guys paying the subscription fee, anyone else just needs to create 3 accounts and then log into the right toon they want to play as and when they want to play it and anyone who thinks someone who has no faction affiliation and swaps factions to chase the "You win" message that you get for winning an alert (the only logical reason I can come up with for why someone fourth factions) will not take the 2 minutes this process will take to swap as and when they feel like it I think are deluding themselves.

The game needs to be better balanced, I am sure most people who are not blinded by faction loyalty can see that something is obviously out of whack at the moment but I am unsure that any amount of XP bonus will incetivise people to play the under dog, especially if you are new to the game.

I know what needs to be done but am not in a position to do it and also there is not the tools in game to make doing what needs to be done particularly easy. Outfits need to take responsibility for the people who, for whatever reason, are not willing to commit to joining an outfit. Provide well lead and fun platoons for your faction to play in that make people want to stick to your faction. Co-ordinate over the leader comms to give your empire a co-ordinated response to whatever the current goals of your faction are, make players feel like they are involved in an effort to win a victory for their empire.

All of this in the games current implementation are a pipedream as it is just not worth the effort but in a game where the players are the content it is also upto the players to address some in game issues, such as making your faction the most attractive it can be if you want to be the faction that retains it's player base - something the NC on Miller have always had an issue with and the TR on Miller have (from an outsiders view and from posts made by prominent TR outfits) always been good at.

As far as I am concernted there are only 2 OP factors in the game at the moment. TR Marauder and Vanu ZOE MAX, the rest are within acceptable margins of performance or your empire has a NS option that allows you to compete on mostly level terms with the enemy but I cannot see these 2 items being the reason for either TR or Vanu having massive population imbalances, for me it's the player experience for the vast majority of a faction on the server who are not inclined to commit to an outfit and the play experience they get from the faction they play for being better overall on one faction rather than another and the onus is on outfits (rightly or wrongly) to be the ones to make that a better experience or keep on losing population.

From a purely selfish point of view though my outfit takes priority over the public players hence I don't put any emphasis on WASP running public squads often because the frustrations that this gives to the most important part of your outfits longevity, leader burn out, are not worth the risk with the games current lack of incentives and tools for people to play the leader role.

Er.... one of those equals 99% and another 110% total server pop.

I have to say though, i dont particularly belive people subscribe for character slots, they subscribe for the xp boost, resource boost, no continent queues, possibly the extra loadouts and the early access items. I think its guff the more i think about it.

Our server is special, it goes beyond normal capacity, didn't you know?

Ahh thank you, will edit. The 99% one is what was shown on the map, i can provide pic if you doubt it, the 110% I wrote 39 instead of 29.

Edit: Well I would change it but the edit button is not showing .