So, you all, for the most part, know what it's like fighting an overpop faction. Amd most players blame it on 'The 4th Faction'... So, whether that is true or not, I have come up with an idea that'd I'd like to put up for disscussion. The idea is Nanite Mercinaries. This would litterally be a '4th Faction'. How would this work? Players have an option to turn their character into a 'Nanite Mercinaries' character. What does this mean? It means you have 'access' to all factions. "But, that makes it easier to join the winning faction!!!" Yup, that's likely. So once people log in they automatically send them to the lowest pop faction. "But how could they play with their friends? Join an outfit?" This is another big issue. But if outfits and friends are made how will they play together? Instead of the player being assigned to the lowest pop faction the outfit is assigned there. So they don't have to keep switching every few minutes it would have to be carefully designed what outfit goes to what faction and for how long. Friends would be primarly sent to the faction their friend is on. So, what do you guys think? This is a rough idea but I felt like this '4th Faction' required some attention, besides the complaints already mentioned in a seperate thread. Thanks for reading :3
Mercenaries will have own empire specific weapons and mechs (tanks, sundererd etc)? They will have own armor look?
I have seen this suggested on many MMOs. Basically you are saying you want to play as Y but you don't want to be Y. Everyone will want to be this new X faction and everything becomes bland. Also developers love the idea of distinction of factions. When you hear a hard thumping weapon, you know a NC is near. These mercenaries would screw up this distinction.
I think of it as them playing the TR character with their TR weapons. It's just an idea. Maybe an option to select a character if you find one you prefer.
I personally think this is an awesome idea! Details on outfit and friend placement can be thought later, but this is good in general. I just love the idea of able to play all 3 factions. I think how this work should be: (1) Exp gain is 3 factions wide bound to this NS Merc character. or (100% current faction, 25% & 25% other faction) (2) If you get assigned to TR, then you can't access NC nor VS weapons. etc. (3) penalty should apply if characters login, sees he is TR, does like it, then login again (4) Assignment of individual NS Merc ti factions should take past faction hrs into consideration to ensure player don't get stuck playing NC 3 days in a roll by some off chance. Again, I love this idea. Bravo to you! You have single-handed-ly solved faction population imbalance. Again Bravo!
When you log in you'd sign a contract for a minimum of 30 minutes with the lowest pop faction. After that you can switch, if some other faction has become lowest pop. Instead of weapons lock you'd turn hostile to every faction for TKing. You won't be able to spawn until the timer runs out. Getting to play with all the equipment would mean having to cert up a whole lot of stuff, though. Restricting you to just NS weapons might make more sense. Then again, there are no NS MBTs etc.
Actually there's already a 5th faction. You can find them wrecking havoc mainly on Indar and Amerish, not so much on Esamir. They're all in one outfit, called the NRO. They love to frag pilots of all the other factions for no reason. They can appear anywhere, especially when you least expect it. They are... the Non-Rendering Objects.
