obviously this is sort of new? but when one faction has ALL of the continent locking bonuses its pretty much a dead certainty that they will just continue to keep them all until the graveyard shift when its literally 1 v 1's at different bases. now literally all the bonuses on cobalt at least will belong to VS all of the time... I mean its a bit silly really.
I've noticed the exact same thing. The continent lock bonus is the only thing about this patch I don't like. We already had a problem with people faction hopping to the winning side, further increasing that faction's dominance, now they have 4 continent bonuses stacked to cement that lead indefinitely.
It's a little too early to call imo but I was thinking this may have played a part in how the population was distributed last night on Connery. Have to wait and see but if that does prove to be the case then I can't imagine anyone having a problem with it being reverted. I don't recall anyone championing this change in the first place so I don't know where the idea came from.
Connery was a joke all of yesterday, and I think the bonuses were a big factor of it. It did suck when your faction finally took the bonus you want, just to lose it in 30 minutes thanks to ghost caps. If they're going to keep it like this, then there needs to be more incentive to play for the team with the cards stacked against them, as most people just choose the easy way out.
I always thought that there should be logistical penalties to be applied to captures between continents and within continents. Namely by controlling for the rate of nanite deposits. For example, say that if a team has locked a continent, then they get a 20% nanite penalty. So instead of getting 50 nanites every minute, they get 40 instead. This increases their "full stock" time from 15 minutes to 19 minutes. If their faction has two continents locked down, that means a 40% nanite penalty, or 30 nanites per minute. Essentially, this simulates the added nanite burden of supporting garrison forces on captured continents. Likewise on a continent the amount of nanites received per player should be reduced or increased based on population. If there are a lot of soldiers of your faction on a continent, then each soldier will get less due to fewer nanites to go around. A faction that has gobbled up a lot of territory should also get a nanite penalty. The further you are fighting from your warpgate, the more costly it is to transport nanites to you. If you are pushed back to your warpgate, nanites should regenerate very quickly, whereas if you are locking the enemy inside their warpgate your nanites will slowly trickle in. Maybe in these last two cases the nanite penalty can be ameliorated somewhat by manually using ANTs. These mechanics mean that the winning team will have to win "fighting uphill", instead of snowballing to victory.
Only people that never ever leave their vehicle care about those bonusses at all... Yes, the bonusses on Cobalt will belong to VS all the time. Oh wait...currently 2 TR, 1 NC. Darn...
Locking continents already gave substantial bonuses, let alone all that stuff when you combine cheap ground vehicles, air, and consumables. It was a terrible idea, and shouldn't have been implemented in any way. Even worse, when the OP faction from your server (usually TR for American servers, VS for EU servers) gains control of the continents, people just leave due to the amplified zergs. It's just terrible for gameplay, seriously. When I log on my Miller main, and I see 4 VS locked continents, with VS at 35-36% pop, tell me why should I even play. Fighting the faction where every single BR 120 nerd goes is just not fun already, give them the ability to spam their crutches, and you can then start to watch any kind of balance crumble. I'm pretty much done playing until they're fixing this mess, like by reducing the bonuses to 25%, which would be a good start, and actually easy to do. Allowing only 2 continents to be locked at a time should've stayed that way, it was hard enough to fight VS already, even more so when they had Indar and Esamir locked, : making the lock stay longer is just making the fight for those bonuses harder for the opposing factions, unless you've got a sudden massive overpop on a continent, which is not meant to happen anymore. http://www.ps2alerts.com/ if you want to check the absurd differences on alert/continent locks per server/faction/continent.
It got worse. Now it's 4 NC. As long as you are not rolling with the vehicle spam zerg, the continent bonuses don't matter....and even in the big fights the bonuses don't matter as long as it's equal numbers on both sides and you do not fight on the open field. Continent locks hardly matter at all, that why you usually have no serious fight about who will lock the continent(you hardly ever see two factions seriously going for it. Usually it's one faction winning with a lead of 10+ points). That's how it is. If you claim that the bonuses matter then you should start fighting for them....as long as you don't do it they are not strong enough.
That would be unfair to the players that want to play that faction, penalizing your team captures demotivates locking in the first place since many players might not even like the bonus they get from it. Like nonflyers for indar, still penalized and pull slower tanks when they don't have esamir.
I agree, this "world lock" is absolutely stupid. That's why I'm all about starting my underdog air unit. A well organized group of just a handful of pilots always on the losing side could really help the population imbalances. I think it would be a great thing for the community. What you're saying, and I agree with, is that you pretty much just have to play infantry. That sounds like so much fun in a combined arms game.....
Last night the maps clearly showed 3-4 fights each of VS/NC v TR, and only one fight of VS v NC. TR double warpgated while pop was up. It's all good, I'm here to fight and one hex is as good as another.
That's true, but at the same time it acts as a new challenge for the winning team. "Oh, so you guys think you're so hot for capturing this continent, well now do it again with slower nanite resupply!" I think one thing that would need to be looked at are current costs, which may need to be generally reduced if both continent and population penalties were applied.
