The simple reality with this game is: Every single time where I've turned it off because it was just pissing me off to keep playing was for one reason: Because my faction was outnumbered on every continent, pushed near the warpgate, unable to get resources, unable to break out against a massive swarm of enemies, and at that point I just see no goddamn reason to spend the rest of my night being an XP Pinata for another faction. If your main character is stuck on a server where your faction faces impossible odds every night you might as well just quit playing at this point. You're not going to have any fun. The devs need to wake up and fix this. The population balance XP bonuses are a total joke. If I'm outnumbered 3 to 1 I should be getting 3 times more XP than my enemies as well. What the heck am I supposed to do with a 3% experience bonus? At least make it worth my time to get stomped on all night. The pop bonus should also be based on continents, not on servers. Also, finally give us server transfers. This is freaking 2012, I don't see why I should be playing with the same idiotic server restrictions as I did in 1998 in Ultima Online. What are you gaining by not allowing people to switch servers? What good does it do you? It screws you over if you learn a friend has been playing somewhere else for a while and you want to join them, it screws you over if the server you're on gives your faction no fighting chance, it screws you over if you want to join a cool outfit you've seen but they are somewhere else... Just get rid of that stupid restriction and you'll see that you'll have better player retention. Just make characters not server bound and implement serious XP bonuses for playing where you are most outnumbered. We will then finally see a game where population balance is a real possibility. People who want to get certs are going to always head to the places where they are most outnumbered, and we will finally see a game where you have a real 3 faction war, not this stupid thing we get right now where it's almost always just two factions on a continent and once one of them gains the upper hand everyone runs for the hills because fighting them is pointless anyways. Rant over.
I agree that some more work needs to be done on balancing populations. I like the idea of dividing the XP bonuses up by continent. This would provide a faction real incentive to move more people to that continent and take it back. At the same time, I'd also agree that the bonus amounts are a bit silly. They don't make a huge difference unless the population imbalance is huge server-wide. I also dig the idea of server transfers, if not for free then maybe for a small fee. This would (I would hope) appeal to SOE for money making purposes, while giving players the ability to make a move without having to start over/pay more for the same stuff again.
Server transfers should not carry a fee. Allowing people to go to where their friends are or where they feel they can have the most fun should pay for itself simply because people will enjoy the game more that way. Charging a fee for server transfers would be like charging a fee for traveling between continents. By purely looking at the profit potential of it you may be able to justify it, but simply giving people the best possible play experience is going to go a much longer way towards keeping the game profitable long term. I mean, let's be realistic here, in another month or so nobody who was playing from day 1 is likely to buy a lot more station cash, since they will have unlocked everything they want already, unless they start adding a lot of new items that are somehow better than the old ones. If they start going that route there will be massive power creep in the game until it becomes flat out pay to win. The only other way to keep it profitable is to transition people into premium memberships and to keep growing the player base. It's ultimately raw player retention that makes those two happen. If less people leave than come in the game is going strong, and letting people play where they want and with who they want does help to make them happy. The XP bonus IMO needs to be really substantial, like +10% XP for every 1% difference in population. It needs to be so big that people really take notice, and that its their primary consideration when they think about where they can get the most XP. You will only get people to balance the population themselves if the XP bonus for being undermanned is so huge that seeking out lowpop continents is the number one way to get your cert gains up. The whole point should be that you learn through adversity, and fighting under extremely adverse conditions should give you extremely good XP.
I haven't been on in the last week or so because of the holidays. I was eager to get on tonight because I bought station cash for my wife for Christmas. We logged on and it was rough. It was more imbalanced than we had even encountered earlier. We logged off in frustration as each continent had a faction with at least 74% of the population. There has to be some element of competition for this to be a game...
I hear you man, when you have one faction dominating each continent it's bad enough, but it turns into a real nasty piece of business when you're on a server where one faction is so much smaller than the others that you can have a situation where they can't even get their one zerg continent where they are in control. Either way, it's boring. Lowpop needs to give such amazing rewards that people go out of their way to balance it out. That's the only way we will ever see this game be fun.
Agree on all of it. I'd thought before of XP bonuses on continents where players are outnumbered, figured I wasn't the only one to have that idea. IMO it would be a great help if there was up to -20% exp, and + 100% exp depending on how outnumbered you are.
I made a very similar thread, as I am experiencing the same issue. It is simply no fun to get stomped by superior numbers all the time.
