Shock and awe if NC won something..

There aren't, it just seems like that when you're losing.
And if there is it's because people like to join large fights. If there are only good fights on the NC border than everyone will go there, most people don't like ghost capping, going base to base hoping an enemy will spawn. It's not because everyone hates NC.
Also I don't play during primetime, 48 vs 48 fights are rare except during alerts.

I never play during primetime. The night might be different, but during the day everything is balanced, nobody is gaining up on anyone. Usually I see TR has the highest population when I play, and for some reason the NC will go after us, so TR dominates.

And here the NC situation makes me think of this song:

I just wanna add that last night on Mattherson during the Biolab alert, even though we tied with the NC at the last second, it was AMAZING to see us come together to totally obliterate the VS. My whole platoon was literally cheering that we took a win away from the VS, lol.

Then again, I didn't see a jump in VS population during the alert like I usually do.....hmmmm.....

Saurva 2013 buddy. You should have seen it. NC went ape-$hit when we took the Biolab, against all odds. And then we went ape-$hit again when we tied with TR. I don't think Saurva will see that many fireworks in its dome again for a long time to come.

Mattherson NC won/tied alerts yesterday and today both in primetime. Can we please stop acting like it's impossibru for NC to do anything?

After rage quitting PS2 last year and deleting my BR 80 TR character (Yeah i know stupid), i have came back to try the game back out. Tried all 3 factions and i feel NC is the best for me. I play mainly medic and have been having great success with the defualt medic gun. I learned very quickly that i will have a better chance of success killing enemies from a distance and letting the HA do the dirty work and just revive them when they die. So far so good.

Well, our tanks apparently are better than TR and VS, at least that's what TR and VS regularly argue on forumside.

Problem with NC is their fire rate to miss ratio. They may hit hard, but if you miss, well, every missed bullet punishes you harder than other factions. On data, damage looks balanced across factions what with RoF compared to damage per bullet. The problem is, the lower rate of fire on NC means you have to get really good at leading and determining where your enemy will be. If you don't, most of your bullets are going to miss. And since there's a lower RoF and clip size, it means making assumptions a lot more so than the VS or TR. You may do less damage per bullet as TR or VS, but because you can fire faster or can fire for a longer time without reloading, you can more easily tell where your bullets will be in comparison to your targets allowing for at least some damage.

For example, a vanguard missing its only shot means waiting 4 and doing lots of assumptions before taking another shot to see if you made the right corrections. Its bullet speed helps, but you still need to know how to aim. If one shot of a prowler misses, your brain can quickly determine the correction needed to hit with at least the second shot and then it's a 2.5 second reload before being able to fire again. Similarly, the VS Magrider gets several shots which between each shot it can make corrections to hit with the next volley before its 3.75 second reload. Though it actually fires the slowest, its maneuverability helps it avoid other tank fire.

Also, lately NC on Connery has been winning alerts. Up until last weekend when that event happened, then the VS surged and rofl stomped a lot.

Apologies for the late reply on this one, but...are they serious? Refusing to balance an entire faction due to the performance of a small amount of players kind of seems off-setting, doesn't it? Not only that, but the more they refuse to address the issue, the more dangerous it becomes. It'll continue to grow untill the faction's learning curve becomes blatantly unappealing to new players. If they fix it then, said faction will become a nightmare, balance will be nigh-impossible to achieve and they'll end up losing more business. Why aren't they considering small-scale tweaks then? Wouldn't it be easier to test and see what does and does not work rather than ignore an issue and hope it goes away before the players do?

Granted, the NC is my faction, so i may be biased. But the way the game is rolling now, it seems like the whole system revolves around whichever faction doesn't suck rather than which faction suits you the best. If the current issue is like this, just homogenise the weapons from the get-go and work from there, since balance seems to be nigh-impossible to achieve through the 'balancing' acts SOE has been trying to pull. As far as i can tell, everytime they 'balance' weapons it seems they also alienate more players.

My apologies for the rant, but quite frankly, i sank alot of time and money into the NC, and now it feels like SOE doesn't think i should even be rewarded for my patronage.

I can attest to that.

Yup NC won 2 alerts out of a possible 100 alerts a week on Mattherson and only because the vs ignored us and fought the tr in a biolab. NC winning a alert is like the 4th of july everyone is so happy cause its so rare, something is wrong with that. Wish the devs would post the average alerts won across all servers last time there was any data on it nc had won under 14%. But to vs/tr players 14% is plenty. They don't want any buffs to ruin their fun farming.
Doesn't really matter I have been (sadly) getting my vs toon leveled up cause playing my br 100 is just painful now. The sv88 is ridiculous and easy mode. If nc had guns like that I would probably never complain again.

“If you were reading around, you'd have noticed that the devs are reluctant to give NC a boost in some areas because of the turmoil it would cause. Top NC players are there because they are really good, and any buff would push them over the top. Players are used to low BR NC being farm kills and if that were to ever change, the rage cries would be crazy.

Its going to happen though. Its a crap sandwich and SOE knows it will have to take a bite eventually. Probably small bites at a time with something to chase it down with.
”
This was proven to be complete bull btw, top 1000 players data on k/d ratio was 3.82 for vs, 3.80 for tr and 3.45 for nc.
So basically Higby was making excuses because frankly the other 2 empires are balanced on the high end and nc still lags behind. The statement he made was that nc was infact not balanced but it was lessened at the high end.
The data shows no matter what situation nc are always behind. I personally think with the layoffs, omfg and Christmas etc they simply do not know what to do and balancing takes too much effort.
I personally have loved this game since ps1 but have finally lost faith in the dev team, ps1 was far better balanced imho.

It's mostly I think they were scared of the NCs popularity in PS1, and have been worried about that, but although it might sometime be like an oil tanker to turn, game balance always eventually comes around (as I think it probably is about to do soon).

Heh, "Soon". Its been roughly a rough year of mounting, convergent evidence.

'Soon' was their response to the changes to the Phoenix days after if was released, when it probably shouldn't have been released at all. This is entirely something else, they genuinely believe that NC design doc is not flawed and is thus is designed in a manner that is cohesive with the whole and have for some time.

We know the concept of the NC is attractive to players and we know that in practice they are a miserable failure by objective metrics - between concept and practice lies implementation, that is the Devs purview. Plainly, that is a bitter pill for them to swallow, so while the wallow in that mire of indecisive action to correct their assumptions, the game loses players.

Yeah it's been a while and it will likely still take a while, but at least if the ship is turning it is turning (as opposed to steaming onwards straight ahead).

But yeah, this should have been happening in at least July this year, not having to wait until now.


SOE certainly can be slow, but they usually get their in the end, they even repealled the EQ1 monk mitigation nerf evetually, albeit it took them 18 months to do so.