Most battles have bad pop balance

I was just in miller, NC, jumping around the front as no platoons were active.

It's prime time on Miller and most (80-90%) of the battles I visited had 20% or more pop imbalances. Those levels of pop imbalance means the battle has already been decided. I would put some ammo down for outnumbered defenders shooting out of their spawns and rep a few maxes, then move on.

Pop balance problems (defined as +10% balance difference) means battles are one sided and not fun for anyone. Good battles in which both sides have a chance to win based on tactics are within 10% difference, generally.

(i'm sure the heros of forumside will protest that they win battles regularly when outnumbered by 40%... to which i respond, sure you do to which they will respond 'git gud !' )

How to solve pop balance problems? Easy. If one side exceeds 10% pop, they can't spawn inside the base hex. They have to fly or drive in from outside the base. Deployed sundies and base spawns would simply stop working. This would take about 10 minutes for a competent programmer.

It should be noted that this change would NOT stop columns of tanks from coming in, mass gal drops, or max crashes.... those are tactical issues. It would be possible to set up gals as air buses to get around this, but base defenders would have a significant advantage in spawn time, and gals are vulnerable to max and HA AA fire.

This change would make battles more fun, solve zerging, spread pop, even out small battles, and prevent the worst abuses of deployside. It wouldn't matter if VS had 30% more server pop, or it would matter less.

fwiw

Not sure if you are actually trying to hurt organized play or are simply naive to the fact that your suggestions would impact such.

Some players play regularly with a Squad element, and others even prefer to play in Platoons. Squads are 12 and Platoons are 48. Either could easily shift a population by the 10% margin you set.

By what you said.. a Squad dropping into a 48 vs 48 fight suddenly could not use spawn rooms or sunderers? Thats why I'm assuming you didn't think this through. 48 people reinforced by a squad becomes 60 vs 48, or 5:4 odds. Hardly something that should be too Overbearing. But in your example, the fight would go from 50:50 to 56% vs 44% and your idea would kick in.

Those 12 players who want to play together.. maybe in same outfit... maybe even be RL friends.. are stopped from spawning together? And that's assuming a moderate reinforcement. 24 vs 24 fights will lock everyone out if only half the squad goes there.

That right there tells me you will lonewolf over starting a squad. Which means you're not in a very active outfit. Let me tell you something. Anything that prevents friends from playing with friends, or penalizes them for playing together, especially closely like the game is designed around.. is a bad change and a bad idea.

Let me make a suggestion to you. One that doesn't require any coding changes, patches, or dev time. If you're in a bad fight. Find another. Let us who have our squads and platoons be able to use it. You don't have to stay in the fights we are.

Because when populations are even. When I bring 48 people to a base and you have 12 there. That means you have 36 elsewhere. Go find those 36 and role with them. I should not have to break up my formations just so the lone wolves can 'have a good fight'.

They can contact each other and duel out in the middle of the sand somewhere, I don't care. I don't know why you all don't just do that.

Now server population imbalance is a different issue entirely. But that isn't what is being discussed here.

I was on NC Miller earlier today. I quickly logged off.
All fights were 1-12 while VS/TR had several 96+ fights.
Logged in VS for a few minutes and had a blast, but wanted to progress my NC char. So i logged off for the day.

I dont mind being outpopped as long as there is stuff to shoot.
I really believe that boring fights is what's going to "kill" the game eventually.

Do you guys realise that the pop is made by PLAYERS THEM SELVES?...it snot the games fault if your team doesnt go where you go...ffs

If you find yourself in a fair fight you haven't done your planning properly.

That said, I sometimes spend a moment to look at the progress of a battle on the big map and I see pop balance changing back and forth quite rapidly e.g. when attacker loses Sundy spawn points and has to start spawning at a neighbouring base to get back into the fight. Or defenders have to wait for reinforcements to spawn after a failed conter push.The frequesnt exception is Hossin where I see so many tiddly little 1-12 fights on each side that appear to be doing jack.

Personally I don't mind the odd overwhelming victory or the heroic but futile defence (after killing lots of attackers ofc). I have also been present during some amazing turnarounds in what I thought was a hopeless situation.

The military has a general rule that in order to take a defensible position from someone you'd need a 3-1 force ratio, and that number goes up to 10-1 if the enemy is in heavily entrenched positions. While I know this is Planetside and not real life you get the idea where I'm going with this, most the time 50/50 fights end with the defenders easily repelling the attackers.

So many bases are so painstakingly bad to attack that you have no choice but to outnumber your opponent, At many bases even 60/40 ratios won't seal victory. For example Indar Excavation Site or any Biolab in existence, I don't even waste my time spawning at those locations with even pops unless I'm defending.

What this game needs real bad right now it that spawn jammer sunderer they teased about a while back, which would treat the base as if it was cut off (you could only spawn at the hex if you died in it) and give attackers that chance to overwhelm defenders because atm this game is just players redeploying all over the front re-securing bases.

so your squad/platoon has to over pop defenders by 40%? not very sporting of you

how about your platoon split into two bases where there are even fights, perhaps two squads at each base? or does your platoon depend on zerging to win, not skill? just a thought

lol, i haven't been naive in a long time... I just know what makes a fun battle

i disagree, if attackers deploy a sundie near a remote point and defend it, attackers always win a 50-50% fight. Also if attackers have tank/air support, they're more likely to win an even battle....

this is my point, you see... when fights are nearly even, tactics are more important than zerging

so you object to tactics and skill being more important than zerging and playing deployside?

i find unbalance fights boring... what's interesting about sitting outside a spawn sniping at red dots that you outnumber three to one? or sniping out of a spawn room because if you walk out, you're dead five times in two seconds?

How about you redeploy?

You're one person. My squad is 12. 12 beats 1 in any form of polling.

The frequent pop imbalances are why I'm convinced an MMOFPS on the scale of PS2 is impossible to develop as anything more than a second rate casual slaughter fest at best. Good competitive FPS' make great efforts to keep things even between teams and players even when there are clear differences. PS2... is only somewhat accomplishing this between empires. Everything else it's either impossible by design (where populations on a continent go,) or just poorly designed (the infamous HA vs everyone else debacle.)

I think PS1 inadvertently hit that upper limit of "massive scale" FPS numbers even if it stuck with that limit due to tech and network limitations at the time. 100-150 people per side and around 9-11 facilities per continent seemed to keep the fighting concentrated and intense.

Long story short - you can't make an FPS with all of the BS that's in PS2 and expect it to be much of a success... more like a lesson.

There is a way to do it. But we're talking about addressing world population which the OP wasn't referring to. What he's talking about is there's equal number of players on a server between factions, but one side has their forces deployed in a way that makes lonewolfing it hard. Basically the only bases with fights are ones with squads and platoons hitting them.

Obviously the fix here is to join a squad.

But for server population imbalance, even joining a squad won't help, they have more than you do. But as I said, there's a solution for it.

When SERVER population gets imbalanced, bases take longer to cap (or take back) for overpopped factions, and shorter to cap (or take back) for underpopped factions. Say the population is 20% NC, 40% TR, and 40% VS. When the VS and TR fight over a base, the capture rates are normal. When fighting NC, capture times are doubled. When fighting the VS or TR, the NC's capture times are halved.

So TR taking a small base from VS takes 4 minutes. Taking from NC takes 8 minutes. NC that takes the same base from TR or VS takes 2 minutes.

On top of that, triple all underpopped exp bonuses and apply them to server and continents. So a 20% exp bonus on a continent becomes 60% and if it was underpopped by the same amount on the server, add another 60% so the bonus is 120%. Crazily underpopped factions could see a 300% bonus total, coupled with member and boosts to make it +400%. So when you kill someone, you get 2 certs

Course if you kill someone that underpopped, you deserved it. And it makes the underpopped faction really desirable to play. So much people will switch back and forth until things even out.

That's how you balance it.

The problem is people play to win, and generally with the least amount of effort.

Plaetside 2, by design as an open world MMOFPS, will always have the problem. Any MMOFPS that is ever created will have this problem, and it's precisely why the 2 big wigs in FPS (Activision & EA) won't even touch the sub-genre with a 10ft pole.


I do still love the scale and epicness of PS2... but i'm pretty much convinved that fundamentally the game design behind MMOFPS is just such that it will always suffer from zerging, and there is no systems that could ever be made to really fix it.

The issue comes down to the unorganized group of players, and the lone wolves. These are the players who cause the issue and experience the worst of it first hand.

Lonewolfing isn't a terrible thing to do. But too many expect a grand experience from PS2 when they do it. They want 'good fights'. But they have no control over the flow of battle. They're slaved to the unorganized groups (the zerg) and the organized players (the more effective 'zerg') playing nicely in even fights.

Joining a squad is an easy way to fix the issue, but isn't a cure for it. A bad leader just turns the squad into a somewhat better zerging force. Platoons increase the chance of not having a bad leader, and outfits increase that a bit further. But they're nowhere near a permanent solution.

So what is the fix? Discarding the genre isn't a fix. That's admitting defeat. I think our best chances is for each server's factions to start alliances of Outfits. Alliances that can ensure decent leadership in tactics if not strategy, and ensure everyone has a decent time. Of course it depends on the other factions doing the same thing so you're not steamrolling.

This is a player effort though and considered 'taboo' since its easy to blame devs. Or more specifically the devs of a big business. Hating big business is one of the few things more popular than hating cops or military.

But I don't think its impossible. And this isn't suggesting creating super zergs. Its not about combining numbers, its about combining talent in the avenue of leadership.

I've seen some great leaders. But when they run public platoons they constantly have to weed out players who don't stay on the same continent. So this would make their jobs more tolerable by giving them access to people who want to play as a team. And those who want to play as a team but don't want to or like me are too abrasive for most, to play with a team with a set of leaders.

Right now if you look at the outfit browsers, many outfits can't field more than a squad, despite having hundreds of members. Now imagine if you took a group of 6 outfits who all have enough members online to make a platoon, and between them have a good PL... they could make the game enjoyable for 48 players. That's huge.

It would also have the benefit of helping retain new players. Anygame can loose players if players don't feel invested or feel like they are part of something. Its a MMO, it needs to act like it. Massive battles is only a small part of that. It needs to have a heavy social atmosphere.

Daybreak can help by giving more tools. More stuff for platoons, squads, outfits. Maybe add fireteams. But Looking for Squad from PS1 would be a big boon.. but at the end of the day, we gotta make it work too.

Call me a cynic, but that's why it won't

I get that, but that's why 'we' don't deserve it.

That's not a fix in the slightest. When populations are balanced on a continent but troops movements are such that there are no even popped fights, neither lone wolfing it or being in a squad is going to fix that situation, unless moving a squad is enough to even out the population of a fight but then... the squad has to want to move.

Seriously, the only thing gained from squading up is maybe having a leader to follow if One is in need of direction. Squading isn't a fix for anything otherwise. I've seen squads full of lone wolves, and organized squads that can't change anything simply because they're still outnumbered and out gunned. And then there's that... entire outfits dumping their entire roster on a single even popped fight, ruining it completely.

World population is a whole different ball game, and dependent on if it actually spills into the game (22% TR, 35% NC, 43% VS? Still 33/33/33 on a continent somewhere.) That can't be fixed. Denying people access to an empire will more likely cause them to not play than to settle for another empire, especially now that there are PLENTY of other fresh titles in the FPS genre to choose from.

So uh, yeah... DGC needs to look into the lowest level of the problem (populations fighting over a base) before going after the world-sized problem (server-wide empire numbers.) Keeping the world pops 33/33/33 isn't going to fix an abysmal experience of unevenly popped fights at the ground level. And no, "strategy" or some other BS advice isn't going to fix this... going to Star Wars Battlefront 3 will however. It maintains balanced numbers fairly well, which makes for a better overall FPS experience. No one really gives a **** about herding cats to ensure a good fight. That's asking far too much of the player just to make the game fun and fair at the most basic level.

If the foundation of a game's game play is a pile of unstable rubbish, the rest of the structure can't possibly be any better.

well 12 to 1 is quite a population imbalance thanks for making my point!

so... I redeploy and your squad of 12 sits in my base for 3-5 minutes to get 300 XP or whatever...
now that's a battle that completely sucks for everyone !!

you made my point for me again... thanks very much !!

casual players are the majority of your base players and almost all of your new players...

by designing a game that is unfriendly to casual players you're dooming your game from the start (witness the severe population drops in all PS2 servers). your basic argument, if accepted, means the game is unfriendly to casual players.

Anyway, what do you do when your server has no active squads or platoons that have any leadership at all? half the squads don't even set waypoints, let alone have any kind of organization. playing loan wolf is much more fun that playing in a squad that has no idea what the heck is going on... as server populations drop dramatically, the number of squads drop and the number of casual players increase... making your argument all the more untenable. I've played alerts on miller during prime time that had no platoons at all playing the alert.

sadly, i agree with this assessment