Population Balance 101

This is an open thread to the Planetside 2 Developers.

Yes, there is population imbalance in the game, it is a real problem and it is ruining the competitive nature of the game. However, your "answer" to it is so jacked up it is beyond belief.

First off: Pushing a massive buff to VS as well as a cosmetic change to VS in order to try to drag 4th Factioners away from them? Stupid stupid stupid... You are fixing a symptom but not the underlying cause. Try ONE CHARACTER PER SERVER. It's simple, it's easy, but you can't quite figure it out for some odd reason. Let players become invested in their particular server/playing group as opposed to popping around trying to be on the winning faction.

Second: On the topic of ascetics... Yes, all the factions need a graphical pass. The whole "let's strap a different mask onto a helmet and call it done" approach is old and busted. More helmets, more armor, let players customize their characters. Oh and one other thing, give VARIATION for how characters look. I recognize that there are primary design elements you like to push, ie the goggles for the TR... Try expanding beyond that. Give the TR a one piece visor, try a futuristic sunglasses concept with the VS, and give the NC something that looks positively military surplus. Once you expand what players can do with their characters, you will see more character loyalty as well as more financial gain.

On this note however, do NOT allow the ascetic passes to favor one faction more than another, or at least BALANCE a perceived benefit. For example, the new coloring for the VS gives them even more of an advantage at night... So give them higher muzzle flash or more visible tracers to compensate. The NC currently have large very visible tracers, made worse by their relatively low projectile velocity... This compounds the fact that they have bright yellow helmets.

Third: Make incremental changes, not huge sweeping changes that cause a knee jerk reaction which has you trying to balance a swinging population pendulum. Also stay away from the stealth changes that many people have noticed.

Hire this man.

VS weapons were buffed because they were complete trash in comparison. They did less damage due to bullet drop "compensation" which isn't even really an issue unless sniping. Now with bullet drop levels in beta... I understand it, but come on.

They were brought on par; not made overpowered. Want to see OP, look at the guass saw.

Honestly I'm surprised there hasn't been more QQ however. Some players just aren't used to VS infantry weapons being as competitive.

They didn't change the damage dropoff as a solution for population imbalance. Also, if they allow only 1 character per server, or make a time limit that prevents people from changing factions quickly, people will just use multiple accounts. It won't stop them.

Yeah, I don't think you actually have any grasp on how to fix population imbalance, and are ranting just to rant. I have no idea why you think ONE CHARACTER PER SERVER would have any effect on the 4th faction.

edit: noted exception, sometimes seeing people log off and switch characters at the tail end of an alert to collect a couple thousand extra xp. That's an issue, granted, but I think a timer of a couple hours if you want to switch between factions on a given server is a better option than deleting a whole bunch of characters that people have spent time and money on. Another PS1 idea that could improve PS2, holy ****.

massive buff?

is one less shot to kill people at 150m and increasing magrider strafe speed now that the rest of the world finally has tools to deal with it really a massive buff?

this forum confuses the **** out of me.

Honestly the moment they allowed multiple characters per server is when they shot themselves in the foot. If from launch it was one character per server people would play that one character and get invested in that character. So when nerfs and buffs happen they would say "man the other faction got buffed i'd like to play as them, but i've spent so much time and effort on my character" I'm sure you'd have people switch but a majority would stay with their current progress. As it is now you can have all three characters going at once and they simply just play whatever faction is doing the best when they log on.

Horse****. That's a hopelessly idealistic view of how different the situation would be. Rather than having a character of each faction on a server, the player in question would instead have a character of each faction on three different servers, and the outcome would be the same in the end.

VS weapon change, was a fix more than anything, it was a huge disadvantage in a few situations.

Tanks were *slightly* buffed mobility wise since they were severely nerfed by faction specific rocket launchers that completely counter it 100%.

Notice these are hot topics discussed by the community for a long time and im glad the Dev's finally took notice.

I had an idea back in beta for how servers could work to help prevent server imbalances. Here it is. (though some of it is already implimented or comes with it's own flaws)

`````````````

A) Get rid of specific servers.

B) For example change the servers to a priority system. Everyone default joins server #1 (Let's say Waterson) until it's at something like 75% capacity(To allow for continent population maneuvering) or unless they choose a different server manually.

C) Each server is only allowed X many TR/NC/VS globally per server. So for example , on server 1 (waterson) you literally cannot ever be outnumbered by an enemy in a global pop sense unless people are actually choosing to go elsewhere. IE global pop would always be very close to 33% / 33% / 33% unless people choose to que to server #2. EX Server #1 cannot ever exceed 4500 TR, 4500 NC , 4500 VS. (1500 per empire per continent)

C) Allow people to choose to que to any server they want. So if a group of people do not want to wait in que for server 1 or server 2 they can go help out at server #3

D) Make faction switch timers so that you cannot jump faction for an hour after you've played another. (yes alt accounts can get around this, but it's something) This allows you to jump character from one server to another (provided it's not Global pop locked) but puts a small hinderance on jumping faction.

E) XP bonuses are completely global and not at all continent related. If NC is down 8% on Matherson, they get the pop bonus on any continent.

This allows most players to be able to better migrate to fill up existing servers and in theory causes the faction imbalanced servers to be limited to the "last in line"


This is an old suggestion that i'm trying to remember so it's not really ideal anymore, some of it is already implemented and comes with it's own flaws but i'm just trying to go from memory.

The rule of thumb is that a if a buff is applied to a faction that is not yours, then it is massively overdone and needs to be rolled back.

And if your faction recieves a nerf, percieved ot otherwise, then you start threatening boycott.

Faction switch timers...one charcter per server...pointless when multiple accounts can be created.

True. Hence why I thought of removing server boundries and making it so that everyone can pile into servers on a sort of priority system as I wrote above.

Far from ideal, but it's something.

QFT

Faction imbalance will swing and rotate like trends in fashion. In short you'll get your turn.

There's really nothing that SOE can do outside of stopping character creation for the overpopulated faction and/or freezing people from logging in if their faction is "too high". Even then...it's tricky as you could theoretically achieve a perfect balance at "prime time" but hav a horrible disreprency in the "off" hours and create a lot of angry players.

Few pvp games can get 100% balance. Even one the classics for a three way war (DAoC) had its issues (hell even games like World of Warcraft pvp servers).
Discrepancy

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ascetic

I think you mean aesthetics.

Does anyone think there will be a day when no one complains about anything on the forums?

Free to play, multiple accounts, server merges yada yada. Old hat.

Imagine ending up on the leftover server. The other servers have a couple thousand players. Yours has a hundred. And it's all NC.

I know, that's one of the flaws. But in theory it could be alleviated a bit with better done XP bonuses so people would self migrate to low pop servers.

And perhaps the XP bonus system could be done in a way that it would encourage the underpopped empire to spread out somewhat evenly across servers to not make it a big deal on any particular server.

Problem with a lot of the ideas presented are that they won't fix the population issues in the long term, except for one that someone mentioned above regarding having no individual servers. First of all, I agree with making VS more attractive as their aesthetics are just not going to attract the core FPS audience in the United States. They need to look tougher, less purple, less spandex, and less alienish. People playing these games tend to pick characters that they either feel are more like themselves, or characters they wish they could be. It's true for FPS games, it's even more so with MMORPG's. Improving VS aesthetics will go a long way.

But to fix the population problems in the long term, instancing and server clustering are the ways to achieve it. Without instancing and server clustering, every server in the game will have 1 faction that's the overpopulated one, and 1 faction that's the least populated. Over time, this gets worse as new players logging in will almost always pick the highest populated faction. This is proven psychology, gamers are fickle, they don't want to join the losing team or fight the hard fight. They'd rather join the winning team, or the team that allows them to have fun in the game. Being outnumbered is never fun in a FPS game.

This is why successful FPS games and PvP MMO's these days are all utilizing instancing in one form or another. This is how the games balance things out, by forcing players to only battle in a relatively even populated battles. The idea mentioned above is on the right track. Eventually SOE will have to do away with servers. You would login to your account, and the character you wish to play. The character is then logged into the next balanced instanced server/cluster. There will be no more Helios, Connery, Mattherson, etc.. There will be you, logging in to the game, and getting dumped into the next most balanced server.

It will be much like someone logging in to their BF3 character, then picking a server and start playing. No matter which server they change to, they're playing the same character, working up the character. You'll notice nobody ever picks the servers with little to no players on them. People also don't pick the losing side on a server, especially if the score is very lopsided and that you login to find yourself spawn camped. These are all issues we see here in Planetside 2, but the difference is that we can't just take our character and play elsewhere. Our characters are stuck in individual servers.

This is why instancing and server clustering will be needed for the long term. You'll be logging in to your character, but you'll be given choices of the instances you can join that are fairly balanced. Imagine pretty much being able to play 33/33/33 alert continents, but on a 24/7 basis. I think that's where we are headed, at least if SOE is smart and are serious about fixing population imbalance issues.

Are there negatives to server clustering & instancing? Sure of course. For one, SOE will have to find a way to fit large Outfits. This is going to be an issue as some Outfits are honestly too large for their own good. And secondly, you do lose that server feeling where you get to know your friends & enemies. But honestly, I think people will more than willing to lose some of that for the sake of even balanced battles. I will say that one thing SOE can do immediately in the short term, is to get rid of the faction pie graph at the character creation screen. This will stop making new players from rolling the highest populated faction automatically. When new players login to create a character on a server, they should be more focused on what they want to play, not what faction is dominating and has the most population. The server faction population on character creation is swaying new players, and it's only making the matter worse.