With the advent of the alert system, the population imbalance has become exponentially worse. For the last few days I have been watching the population flow on Helios, Matherson, and Waterson during alerts. The results point to one obvious problem: Allowing more than one character per server. It seems alot of people have one character for each faction on a single server. When population hits 50% for any given faction, or any faction has 50%+ of the territory durring the alert, that population spikes by a minimum of 10%. Helios and Matherson are seeing a massive spike in NC players halfway through an alert and Waterson is seeing a TR spike. It seems SoE has made it easy to farm alert points by simply changing characters/faction when it is clear who will be winning. This is a big problem, because as more points are farmed by the fairweather folk, this means the farm character will rapidly become the preferred character since they have the most certs/ranks. In turn, this pushes the population balance issues even farther out of whack. NOTE TO SoE: Only allow one character per server. This doesn't fix the population problem, but provides a stable base start from while working to fix the other problems. Without this first step, any balance fixes will be in vain and the population will unbalance just as quick as it can be fixed.
Remove alert exp rewards when they end. Still mark the victorious faction, but base it on more than how much they captured. Raise alert exp bonus during the alert. So basically, if you're in the horrendously overpopulated faction, you'll steamroll more bases but there's less things for each individual player to kill. In effect, you're more likely to have opportunities to kill enemies playing the faction with population disadvantage. Yea its harder to stop them but in the end its definitely more things to shoot at than rolling with a zerg where 10 people are trying to destroy 1 target. This would also destroy the whole "Let's break off the big battles an ghost cap as much as possible at the last minute" thing (lattice would probably do that too, but SOE seems to want to work on that a little longer).
My Point is that there needs to be a 4th faction deterrent in there. 1 character per server= no alert farming= populations will balance easier.
