Hey guys, I'd like to talk about the - in some cases - quite severe population imbalances on certain Servers. For example Primetime yesterday on EU Woodman saw 26% TR. My no. 1 gripe with the game right now is the pop imbalance on certain Servers. There's only so much you can do when you are outnumbered, even with superior coordination or "tactics". After constantly fighting retreating battles and getting your *** whopped you can't help but get a little frustrated. Server transfer tokens hopefully will help (I'm sure SOE will create them in a way that you can not transfer to a Server where your population already is in the majority. That would mean anarchy ^^). I'd really like to see another system besides the XP bonus for the underpopulated factions though. Because the current system apparently is not working. So my question to you is: What do you think could be done by SOE to provide enough of an incentive for people to balance the population on Servers naturally (as in by themselves)? I'm not really creative myself (hence this Thread to ask you for input ) but what I came up with personally: All of these things would probably send some players on the virtual barricades, please note that I'm not asking to implement EVERYTHING of these points, but rather toss out some ideas for a single thing that could be implemented: - Instead of a XP bonus to the underpopulated faction, give the overpopulated faction a XP penalty - Give overpopulated/underpopulated factions a health bonus/penalty - Give overpopulated/underpopulated factions a damage bonus/penalty A measure not to provide an incentive to balance population but make fights more even rather: - Increase Spawntimers for overpopulated factions and/or overpopulated hexes to give the underpopulated faction a fighting chance TL;DR: Population imbalances are becoming a growing problem in my opinion. Do you have ideas to counter population imbalances?
The health bonus/penalty is the only thing needed, we can't have these massive swings in balance like we did in beta and early release, it has to be gradual now.
Giving an exp penalty to the overpopulated faction is a ridiculous idea. It's a hardcoded disincentive to play the game. If my faction is overpopulated, it's not my fault. I only have one toon; why should I be penalized because I'm loyal to one faction, one server? A health bonus/penalty runs into the exact same problems, plus some. This game is supposed to be about asymmetrical balance and skill. Why should I be at a hardcoded competitive disadvantage because 3000 meters away there's a large zerg? The health bonus will just turn out to be farming tool. People on the underpopulated faction will take their health bonus, find battles with reasonable odds, and just farm the Hell out of the unlucky saps on the other team. Penalizing people for being the overpopulated faction is not the way to go. You're forcing people to take strategic disadvantages (or less character progression) or not play the game. Many will choose the latter. Maybe good for the underrepresented population, but terrible for the game as a whole. This is all supposing that population imbalance is a pervasive problem in this game--it isn't. There will always be some population imbalance in this game. In fact, this game HAS to permit population imbalances. The point of this game is epic combat on an persistent open world. It's not a round-based FPS. If you want to play against a similar-sized opposition, you can play practically every other FPS on the market. You can't force population parity on PS2 because the very point of PS2 is that the battles aren't defined by a rigid map-based ruleset. World population imbalance =/= no fair fights to be had anywhere. Very, very rarely do I ever find a global population imbalance large enough to cause the overpopulated faction to have a decided advantage across every continent. (In fact, such an event will become ever rarer as the other two contents get the lattice and new continents are released.) You can find a good fight despite a global population advantage, but you may have to go to another continent; or simply another place on the same continent. A zerg generally clumps--avoid it and you'll be able to put in some work. Or you go to a continent you are underpopulated on and enjoy the target rich environment and traffic jams that allow you to pwn armor. TL/DR: The proposed solutions cause more problems than they solve, population imbalance is a necessary evil in PS2, and population imbalance =/= no fun, fair fights anywhere.
We are not talking about some small 3% or 4% less population for a faction here, we are talking about factions where at prime time has at most only about 26% of the population. You, as a Waterson TR, knows what I'm talking about. Face the facts.
I still say all they need to do is make vehicle spawning a faction thing instead of an individual thing...this way an overpopulated faction would have the choice of being a ground pounder or going to a less populated faction to play a vehicle. I really think this would go a long way on balancing things out.
Underpopulated faction gets faster re-spawn timers and more available locations. Overpopulated factions get slower re-spawn timers and less available locations.. This changes dynamically as population changes. It's one way of helping with it. I don't think there is a silver bullet to this problem, it needs a combination of dynamic mechanics to keep a lid on it. [EDIT] Forgot to mention that the change in timers includes squad and beacons.
I posted a thread offering ideas towards pop inbalance as well the link Is in my signature, pop inbalance is something that's been widely discussed through yell chat, reddit, tells and over the forums, one of the things that is mentioned on reducing timers is that its exploitable. And of course it could cause conflict between outfits where outfit 1 shouts at outfit 2 for affecting the timer. Now the problem I'm seeing with server transfer tokens is how do you monitor which faction is over popped or under popped, could it be exploited? the potential for the 4th faction to jump between servers is also a grim one. I disagree with forcing people to do stuff they don't want, but encouraging them to do something that you want, and in planetside empire specific ideas like giving one faction something that's considered OP isn't the right way to do things.
It was exploitable when it applied to everyone, underpopulated and overpopulated alike. What you want to do is give the underpopulated faction more options to be able to try and counter the overpopulated faction. DYNAMIC spawn timers is one mechanic that can be used to do this. Remember I'm talking about this being dynamic, changing as pop balance changes. I completely fail to understand what you mean by the outfit comment. Both outfits would be affected the same if they are in the same faction..
I agree with the dynamic balancing of the bonuses working in a way like the population bonus does which is what I was wanting. The outfit comment was something I saw someone had posted on reddit and apparently highby had commented on it aswell, its that one outfit might be trying to take advantage of the lower times and when a second outfit decides to join them in the lower popped area and the first outfits bonus gets diminished it might annoy them. Personally I think most if not all people would just rather have the even numbers and the good fair fights.
Yes, exactly the way the pop bonus's work now except applied to spawn timers as well. The amount of incentive/penalty is topic for another time. Ahh I see what you mean by the outfit comment.. But I think that is a "people being idiots" issue not a game mechanic issue.
Just logged off from an alert, with VS having 51% World pop and 67% alert continent pop. Granted, it's early morning hours, but still... kinda frustrating.
Yep, I can relate to pop imbalance frustration, it's just one thing that's causing frustration amongst players atm . One thing SOE should avoid is frustrated players, because if frustrated players stay frustrated for too long, they will seek enjoyment elsewhere.
Yes, population imbalances can be rather pronounced on Waterson (and it isn't always TR--NC seem to have more pop these days--and it often is a different faction on each continent). How is that the individual player's fault? Why should the game actively disencourage people to play their game?
Maybe a solution could be some sort of cross server intergration for alerts like they did in WoW with xrealm zones dunno how feasible that would be but eg when on Miller as TR you warp for the amerish alert you would end up fighting alongside the TR on Woodman as they are under populated and ofc it would have to be coded for outfits so all tags go to the same server
My2cents: Actual you see that even +50% XP bonus won't help to switch anybody to the UP faction! Health bonus/penalty would imbalance this even more What SOE has to do is to merge more servers or a respawn bonus/penalty system AND/OR the new resource revamp! UP faction should be able to spawn more MBTs, MAXes, ESF where the OP faction get the resources slower and can't pull those things that fast as the UP does
