I was, well .. I am one of those people who believes that the time it took to start an Alert previously was way too short. Like, very short by a lot However, I'm one of those people who believes that the time it takes to start an Alert now is way too long. "OMG THEY ARE NEVER HAPPY FFS" (I can hear them say). But wait, let's be reasonable for a second. There's a world and a half between the time it took to start an alert previously and now. Basically, previously, it was however long it took for a faction to farm enough cortium, or, if they had the cortium but not the territory, it would trigger if they got the territory. If your faction got the 41% or more, they'd be like "time for HIVES" and HIVES would pop up everywhere and it wouldn't take more than an hour to trigger the Alert. Now, there's a 4 hour charging time. 4 HOURS !! (and I'm not even sure how it works, does the timer start ticking as soon as the warpgates stabilise? Or is it only once a faction has a certain % of territory? I honestly don't know). Regardless, it's way too long. IMO 1 hour was too short, but 4 hours is too long. (not to mention that the Alert itself is now 1h30 ((which I didn't mention because that's fine by me))). TLDR; I WOULD LIKE TO SUGGEST REDUCING THE TIME IT TAKES TO START AN ALERT FROM MORE THAN 1 HOUR TO LESS THAN 4 edit, just realised I forgot to say why I thought the current 4 hours was too long, but now I can't be arsed, so if anyone cares, ask me and I'll tell you
Well these charging things are just to ensure everyone gets the chance for an event, unlucky enough Noone cares about them, maybe besides air abnormalities, but even those get mostly ignored, who has the first zerg there gains after an half hour an auto win. Unfunny achievements there are some kind broken, sometimes you get something sometimes not. Furthermore this is true for any event. Even continent locks with full participation lead sometimes to nothing. Lol. So air events are boring for the most time, I don't get the point why the needed points there are not connected to server pop, ceres never gets more than 6000 points even when most players do work for the event. Well in the end I don't get the point about any fraction gets the 41% territory triggers the continent lock, plus the events happen in parallel, so if you ignore the event but help at the alert you do something useful. In the end of the day on ceres vs just ghost caps, every good player doesn't care about any event, alert or so, but farms kills. This is the devs goal?
Air anomalies are a good source of interesting gameplay for most players. For the most part during this event I am actively improving my ESF flying skills. The reason why Zerg always winning anomaly lies in the fact that unlike conventional inactive groups they seek to participate in the event. Yes, they have almost no normal formation and they often lag behind in execution of orders (the main reasons for which they are so inefficient at active assault of bases) but in a case with this event they also do not need to be engaged accurately in discipline.
THIS! 90 minutes are WAY too long. 1 hour would be more than enough(as we almost lost an alert which started at 100% capturable territory on our side) in less than 1 hour. So 1 hour is enough to turn anything around that happened before the alert(which as such means that anything before the alert does not matter AT ALL...which is not exactly very motivating for the time in between alerts). So no need for alerts longer than 60 minutes. On top of that shorten the time between alerts to 2h or maybe 2:30h. Shorten anomalies to 20 minutes(usually anyway snowballing and the fun got sucked out of it for most players by now. Either due to overpop or due to unfair anomaly spawning and spread of air pads)...and base capture events to 30 minutes(anyway almost always either end in a draw(which sucks big time) or the winner is clear by the 30 minute mark), and last but not least make the stabilizing of unstable warpgates like 2 minutes(no need to keep people waiting there). That would help players to not get stuck on the same continent for several days during their playtime...and it would help players to actually see the end of an alert they fought for before they got to log out.
On briggs it is definitely the opposite. admittingly I was hopping on every hour or so to check for alerts so heres what I experienced Pre patch: Factions would try so hard to stalemate the planet at <40%, during this time there would maybe be 1 hive on two factions and it would take 18 hours or so to reach 20,000 corticum at which point the other teams would send 12 man squads out to kill just about any hive made by that faction and make absolute sure they never reached 40% population again as to trigger it. Then often NC since they often couldn't be bothered making bases would just sit happily on 50% territory or around about there with 0-2000 corticum level and nobody would contest that as they didn't want the alert. Then some desperate warriors might start up a few hives around 9pm as NC then trigger the alert somewhere between 10pm-12... Then NC would go from 50% continent dominance to like 20%. Then the next day it would start all over. post patch: You have 3 alerts a day, one alert a battle for capping >2 tech/amp/biolabs, then a second one an aerial anomaly, these usually happen at about 6 and 9 pm not excact but within an hour or two of (not sure if these are always in perfect order or if they alternate). But then by about 11pm you have a third alert to capture the most territories. To my knowledge no alerts trigger during the under popped times between about 1 am -> 5pm where the is just lightning round, lightning round and more lightning round, can you say lightning round enough?
I'd also like to see the time between alerts shorten. Most of us aren't going to be playing this game 6 hours a day, so you don't get the experience of capturing or gloriously failing to defend the continent on a nightly basis. Personally, my preference would be for some sort of alert (even the facility alerts are better than nothing) to be running almost constantly on maps that have sufficient player population, but the alerts for the continent shouldn't be the rare thing they have become.
Alerts should be much more frequent. Other, unique alerts should be added that vary gameplay and offer more meaningful rewards for participation. The old facility alerts are a good touch, but I don't think the rewards are worthwhile for the time invested in pushing that one lattice lane. Air anomalies are imbalanced because they don't often spawn in territory easily accessible by all three factions. It also doesn't help that all the best pilots on Connery are TR, who regularly pull roaming Mossie squads to farm in any territory they please. A pseudo-Sundering alert would be interesting. Have Meteors fall across the planet, filled with Cortium for bases or some other substance that each faction needs to collect with ANTs and deliver to a single collection node in the middle of the map.
