NC win rates are dreadful

Aand we always have a few people like you!

Every single faction thinks they are the one's being double-teamed. Thing is that they are about equally double-teamed.

And even if it was true, isn't it a bit weird that the TR and VS win the most alerts/continents? I mean, if the TR is always double-teamed and still manages to pull even with the VS, then the TR must have a supa-dupa OP arsenal. And for the VS, if the VS and NC are supposed to be equally powerful, then why does the VS win more often, on every server?

If what you are saying is true, then the TR have the most OP weapons, then the VS have more potent weaponry and the NC is doggedly last because despite teaming up they can't even break even with the VS.

But ofcourse, thinking a little bit further and figuring out this obvious flaw in your statement is pretty hard...


For everyone thinking the NC is simply less skilled:
The NC scores almost the same with NS weapons, so their skill is about equal to the TR and VS. And the NC does work together, and as many of the people who play multiple factions have already attested: The NC, VS and TR all have about the same lacksness in their cohesion. At best there's one or two better-known outfits between the dozens of others that get confused as being the "standard" coöperative level of the entire faction.

It seems you subscribe to Explanation B, then. (NC players are statistically worse at the game than those of the other two factions)

Although, your reasoning as to why NC equipment is fine seems to be purely anecdotal. You called guns like the SAW "best in class", however the SAW is the worst-performing starter LMG by a huge margin, statistically. The AC-X11's average KPH is middle-of-the-road, at best, being outperformed by numerous other NC, VS, and TR carbines. The Cyclone's A.KPH is identical to that of the Eridani and the MKV suppressed. At best, one of the guns you listed, Cyclone, is tied for the title of "best in class". The others aren't even close.

I don't think it's a fair assumption that all the players that don't care about alerts and or winning somehow gravitated to one specific faction and that specific faction only. With the given all time statistics, NC had ALWAYS been on the losing side. There is no victim complex (isn't that what the TR, by lore at least what they're good at?) when the statistics given back up these claims.

2 out of 3 guns you mentioned that are best class weapons are not defeault weapons and require an investment, and the Gauss Saw is pretty much a skill weapon that is not new friendly.

And the thing with MBTs is that it's true, a 1v1 head on direct engagement with no exterior factors, Vanguard should win 9/10. But this is not the case. Battles are more complex than simply trading shots in the open. Maggies float and can be positioned pretty much anywhere at everytime. Siege Tanks ALWAYS have two shots and with a good enough aim, can rack up 2 kills per salvo. The Vanguard's passive is that it only deals slightly more damage and can take slightly more damage.

Sure, Vanguard shield pretty much makes it impenetrable for 6 seconds. Using stock numbers, realistically speaking, you only get 1 *free* salvo with a relatively long cool down. It's easy to get outplayed as you're literally giving the enemy a visual indicator to not shoot you once you activate the shield. I hate saying this, but tbch, Vanguards suck unless you're literally face tanking with no exterior factors

Looking at alert history it seems VS/TR are more inclined to go for ghost caps during off-hours whereas NC is not.

This, plus the more pronounced apathy for alerts(not just NC) leads me to believe just looking at alerts in terms of win % is not a useful metric. Looking closer you actually see there is not that much deviation in terms of alert score. Indeed, a lot of the alerts are decided by very small margins.

There is also a fairly usual pattern where the faction who has a lot of bases this faction actually end up losing because everyone attacks them. Once the zerg starts rolling...

These are just some of the factors so please do not fly off the handle because I didn't mention and/or covered every aspect of the game.

I would really tie a lot of this to higher level players having more faith in other factions Maxes and anti tank vehicle top turrets.
You can argue how the enforcer is on paper performs or how NC maxes are good sometimes but its really irrelevant in the end when it seems people just don't have faith in them.
The lowest effort way to advance in the game with with Vehicles, Good people tend to minmax their performance so obviously any good player would tend to prefer the other factions if they feel they perform better with the most efficient tactics.
Im not concerned with what stats you might have or what arguments of why NC specific gear is good and how. The very prevalent opinion other factions have Max and top turret superiority.

That right there.

I love to go Tanking, but your explanation is the epitome of how vehicle battles go. Magriders come out of NOWHERE because they can float over mountains with ease and their engine noise is barely audible. You have no idea you've been spotted by one until it's flanked around you and shoved an AP round up your rear, and it just becomes insulting if it has a Sauron gunner too.

Prowlers are just mean. Once they lockdown it's not even fair anymore. Twin barrels plus a rate of fire increase not to mention a larger ammo supply. And with gunners? Gatekeeper for long range and a Vulcan for short to mid. Both are bullet hoses regardless if it's actual bullets or rockets.

Then here I am in my giant Vanguard, no gunner cause I don't have friends. And since my aiming apparently sucks I constantly lose long range engagements and even in close range popping the shield everyone says is OP doesn't save me cause the main gun just does not reload fast enough and usually the enemy tank has a gunner and the incoming fire is just too much.

Poor NC, no freedom for you.
Even when NC has overpop, they dont play and win alerts. Maybe the farm is too strong. At the moment alerts are just a timed phase of regular play and it's only purpuse is to lock the continent. While it is a motivation to have your color on that landmark, due to the rapid locking /cycling it does not feel worth. Better have a nice fight.
I am looking forward to the new locking mechanics, because the promote playing the alert (That 5k XP currently is nice, but a good fight gives much more...)

Alerts are a strange thing. They take people away from what they're doing and making them do what they're already doing but somewhere else. What they do not do is adding layers on top of what people are already doing and enhancing their experience.

I mean, as a designer, alerts make no sense. It actively goes against players and hinders their experience. No wonder people go, "yeah, no, not going to bother with that anymore."

Looking at PS2alerts you see the same trends, i.e. alert apathy, as the result seem completely random. The only real pattern being both VS and TR seem a lot more interested in ghost alerts during off-hours.

Which is, by itself, a great reason to take any statistics with a grain of salt, as anyone who has actually played using it, or against it, knows it is a force to be reckoned with.

Sure, it's not the best gun for new players, but how is that in any way a fair argument? It's a good gun. It's the players' problem if they can't use it effectively.

Take for example the Solstice. It is a decent enough gun in the hands of a new player because it doesn't kick too hard, has decent velocity, and decent enough TTK. It's also available on a class which frequently outflanks its opponents, which can make up for its mediocre TTK. Compared, however, to the mercenary, it's complete garbage. It has one of the highest FSRMs of any carbine, even ones with a higher damage model, it has terrible recoil consistency (recoil amounts are very randomised and the CoF blooms a lot on each shot, making consistent headshots difficult past 15m), comparatively poor TTK in CQC because of a limited RoF, and fairly sharp damage drop off which punishes long range engagements. It doesn't even have the extra 10 rounds per mag of the Trac 5 to compensate for its garbage accuracy. All it has going for it is a fast reload, and moderate recoil per shot. It's outclassed at every range by the Mercenary, and outclassed by the Trac 5 in close to mid.

You say the NC has a poor range of starter weapons? They are the only faction which starts off with a BASR, the Mercenary is unequivocally the best starter carbine, the Gauss Rifle is nothing to write home about, but it's a good middle of the road gun and their starter pistol is quite good. The only starter weapon they have which is even remotely questionable is the Gauss SAW, and then only because it isn't the most new player friendly, not even because it's actually a bad gun.


As for the guns I mentioned requiring an investment; the AC-X11 is a mere 650 certs. A new player can easily afford that by BR15 if they want (they shouldn't really need it though, the Mercenary is very definitely serviceable). The cyclone, while it does cost 1000 certs, is also available to all classes, so is a good investment for a new player wanting to try their hand at everything.

If a tank is better on paper, then the only reason you will lose (in situations that are actually tenable) is because of user error. The magrider can climb ****, sure, but with the new handling changes, the Vanguard is a good bit faster with Racer, and with Rival is about the same speed as a Racer mag. This allows you to fairly easily outposition a Magrider on most terrain. The handling changes also gave the Vanguard the ability to climb faster and to new areas.

Prowlers can be very deadly on open ground, but to be fair, this is as much a problem for the VS as it is for NC. A prowler will die to a vanguard that flanked it just as easily as to a mag.

The ability to tank an entire extra salvo is something that no other tank has. Simply dismissing such an ability is pretty stupid. The other faction specific MBT abilities are both very situational, while the vanguard shield in it's current state (pts version requires better positioning) is simply push F to gain an instant advantage.

"The stats are wrong, because I say the gun is good."

How far do these stats go back? If they're accurate, then NC needs a buff. It can't be just a coincidence that NC has that low of a win rate on EVERY server. NC is almost always the underdog on Emerald except when VS is chronically underpop.

That's a very common mis-understanding / mis-conception of statistics, probabilities and so on.

I just wrote a wall of text explaining things but in the ended decided to delete it and leave it at that, you can google this kind of question if you're really interested.

NC are often advertised as the good guys, and so they attract a lot of new players but the NC weapons are mostly not new player friendly. If these new players are just getting stomped everywhere they go, do they keep playing? Seems like a horrible business decision from the designers. For the health of the game, I’d like to see NC look darker and edgier, they can’t just be the freedom fighter faction, they need to have a darker mercenary/money-loving motif.

Other factors against the NC faction are:
1) Larger bulky vehicles are easier to hit.
2) Bright yellow colors are easier target identification before an enemy is even spotted. Making NC easier to fight in large chaotic fights.
3) Slower hard hitting weapons niche is medium and longer ranges but the base designs favor close combat. Also, at longer ranges it’s easier to get away or behind cover and then there are also many more weapons and vehicles involved in this range outside of the bases.

If implemented as promised in the new Critical Mass Update, the new population balance locks should give us a true indicator if any particular faction continues to be worse. I am looking forward to seeing PS2alerts after the Critical Mass update... I predict we will still continue to see NC at the bottom.

The weapons are so closely balanced I can only hazard a guess that the reason is that NC still draws more new players to the game that don't understand teamwork... Plus the upcoming Vanguard shield nerf... Just saw Lamat's post above, and he gives very valid reasons why NC is suffering... VS is almost invisible at night.

On Emerald we are already seeing a shift to the other 2 factions. NC used to be overpopped all the time, now they have lower pop then VS at some points. VS and TR still dominate alerts.

If the devs see the shift they will address it, I just hope they fix it before we lose too many players.

Most competent infantry players will agree that the Gauss SAW is god tier, but hey, just keep toting your faction bias around like it's something to be proud of.

The Solstice is better than or identical to the Mercenary in almost every way. The only ways in which the Mercenary is better is in stationary initial CoF, horizontal recoil, and damage.

The Solstice has a better RoF, projectile velocity, (without drop as an added bonus), shorter long & short reloads, larger ammo pool, strafing initial CoF, smaller bloom per shot, and lower vertical recoil.

Better watch where you swing that victim complex, you might break something.

Source: http://planetside.wikia.com/wiki/Carbines

Vertical recoil is a near meaningless stat for anyone who has a pair of functioning brain cells to rub together (I also suspect that the vertical recoil per second is very similar between the two guns, and the merc only pulls more per shot to compensate for it's lower RoF. CBF doing the math for this one.). Same goes for bullet drop and lack thereof, as well as projectile velocity (in any case, a 15ms^-1 difference only amounts to about a 3% difference anyway). As far as ammo pool is concerned, the mercenary actually carries 30 damage (basically nothing) more than the Solstice, due to it's higher damage per shot.

Both guns have a near identical DPS (mercenary wins out here by another insignificant margin - 7damage per second - though to be fair TTK is a little more nuanced than this due to time between shots and BTK. Velocity is also a small factor as well ofc)

The mercenary's more controllable horizontal recoil, lack of horizontal recoil bias, and lower FSRM (1.75x compared to the solstice's whopping 2.8x), make it a more controllable gun overall, and actually allow it to possess a modicum of usefulness at range thanks to it's ability to burst fire effectively.

It's like you read through the statistics on the Wiki, but didn't actually comprehend any of their implications.

As I said in my original post, the only real advantage the solstice has over the Mercenary is it's reload speed, but even then it's only a 0.15s difference on the short reload, and a 0.47s difference on the long reload. In any case, the mercenary compensates by having ~17% more damage in each magazine - a stat which I think most people will agree has far more bearing on whether or not you actually kill someone.

It's also worth mentioning that while the solstice is supposed to be a midrange carbine, it hits its minimum damage tier 10 meters before the Mercenary does.

Now who has the victim complex?

Sources:
- http://planetside.wikia.com/wiki/AF-19_Mercenary
- http://planetside.wikia.com/wiki/Solstice_VE3

The value of the differing stats is subjective. However, that's not really the point.

You said previously "Compared, however, to the mercenary, [the Solstice] is complete garbage." However in the quoted post above you state how insignificant (in your opinion), the majority of the differences between the two are.

Thus, one such as myself might come to the conclusion that you do not believe the Solstice is terrible or even bad compared to the Mercenary. (Of which it most certainly is not.)

In my opinion I prefer the Mercenary over the Solstice, for the higher damage. However the Solstice has greater versatility and carries a number of benefits to make up for the slightly below average TTK.

A victim complex is standard issue for all Vanu Sovereignty personnel.

That was somewhat hyperbolic, but even so, the mercenary is statistically superior to the Solstice in every way that matters, except reload speed - and even then it's only beaten by a smallish margin. I'd say that warrants saying that the Solstice is comparatively garbage.

It really doesn't. You know how I mentioned the solstice has faster damage falloff? That's only one of the ways in which its versatility is reduced. It's poor accuracy overall makes it very bad past close-mid range, while it suffers in CQC due to poor rate of fire compared to many other options. It's impossible to use at long range due to it's inability to burst fire effectively. It is only useful within a very specific range envelope, and even there is outclassed by a number of other options, namely the Pulsar C, Zenith, and to some extent even the CQC carbines.

Name them. You have yet to provide any evidence in favour of the Solstice being good.

Way lot of words. The most people wins.