[Suggestion] Solutions for Waterson, a message to the Vanu

SOE, I want you to read this. Its kind of important.

Last night on Waterson something happened that shouldn't happen. The NC and the Vanu allied to smash the TR out of two continents. They succeeded, as far as I know, with one.


Why shouldn't this happen? At first, I was angry because I felt we had been given a bad turn, but when I told my non-PS2 playing fiance the story, she laughed and said "It sounds like some kind of space opera!"

Then it hit me like a ton of bricks....what happened last night on Waterson really was movie-quality levels of epic. It was a fantastic story, I was angry because I was the villan.

That's right, I said it. The TR population control of Waterson is unfair, though not so much to the NC. The Vanu, however, are horrificly outgunned in nearly every situation. I can't remember the last time the TR put serious effort into an alert that the Vanu even registered as a threat on our scopes. They had tactics, they had drive, they had no soldiers. They were no threat.

The Vanu are dealing on a daily basis with the soul crushing kind of defeat the TR suffered last night at the hands of two united empires against one. They go through that every day because they are often less than half an empire trying to stem a tide of red death pushing further each day on all three continents.

This needs to stop.

How do we do it? How do we fix this? Another part of the problem came to light when I made an NC and Vanu character just to try out their things in VR: Waterson wasn't on the suggested server list for either Vanu or NC character creation. So new Vanu often end up on Mattherson for a US East player. Its time to close, ENTIRELY CLOSE, new character creation for TR characters on Waterson for a while, and in turn promote character creation for new players joining Vanu to Waterson.

On top of that, I feel you should offer some kind of free faction change option. Don't offer it to the Vanu, or even the NC, offer it to the TR. Take my SC purchases, give me the Vanu equivelent of each, refund my Cert's, and I'll volunteer to move my main to an Empire I'd rather not play, just to help them fight back. The advantage we've enjoyed as an over populated empire needs to come to an end. I don't think you understand what's coming. Soon, each server's going to attempt these alliances against whichever faction is currently vilified for their numbers. Then, servers will smash one empire until people start leaving that server, or that empire entirely. Then you have whole servers with two empires, and one will have more soldiers than the other. What you'll be left with is an end to the infinite war. An empire will 'win'. You know what people do when they beat a game? They play something else. Time to wake up, SOE. Time to fix the Vanu problem, or more aptly put: Its time to fix the TR problem on Waterson.

I honestly believe that Jaegar & Waterson should never have merged.

You took two High NC/TR, Low VS Servers and smashed them together.

Jaegar should have merged with Sol-tech, Not Waterson.

Fourth Factioners aren't helping either.

The TR really do have an extreme advantage in numbers on Waterson. Your suggestion of stopping new TR chars being made there is a bit harsh but not one I disagree with. Waterson is clearly imbalanced. Just so long as we aren't talking about removing the ability for current chars to play there, I'm fine with something being done.

Everyone said pretty much that... but certain Devs were worried about the "waiting times" Mattherson might get if Jaegar merged. *cue eye roll*

Well, consider it this way: As a TR, you watch names just like anyone else. When DVS Gaming shows up to an alert, its time to worry a little. They are coordinated, they have good tactical sense, and they never stop coming.

But when Xen of Onslaught or Vanu Drop Squad show up even on non-alert fights, I don't care. Why would I care? They have equivalent levels of tactical sense and strategy, and XOO guys are arguably more skilled over all as players, particularly on the ground, but none of that matters. Even if they manage to weedle a few facilities out from under my empire, I still don't care. Hope swells in the Vanu ranks, they spread out to grab more, they still have no soldiers, the line thins out, we smash them into kingdom come. They can take, but they can never HOLD anything, they don't have the numbers. It shouldn't be that way.

This describes it perfectly,

You log in knowing from the start that you're going to lose. Occasionally you manage to take some territory, mostly because the two titans are off battling each other in the distance. But eventually your scurrying around catches their eye and the zerg descends. There's no stopping it. It doesn't matter what you do or how many you kill, there's always 3 more behind them.

without a 50% TR domination and single digit vanu populations it just wouldn't be waterson.



it's been like this for some time.....i kinda forgot what it's like to win a meaningful battle outside of ghost capping in off peak hours.....everytime i log in i feel sorry for the poor vanu......they are always way out numbered and usually just fighting from their warp gate. I have single digit percentile fight time with the vanu and it's because i refuse to camp their warp gate so i rarely get to see them on the battlefield.....I completely forget there are 3 factions to this game most of the time because they are just so vastly outnumbered.

I still am not seeing this TR pop domination everyone is talking about. NC and TR are pretty much equal pop with the VS(aka NC's reserve forces) being 10% behind.

Also when I play one of the continents is always 33/33/33.

I guess on the rare occasion I play in the morning or afternoon, I will have to log into my Waterson TR toon to check it out. I usually go VS or NC on Ceres or Briggs if i play during off peak times.

Your opinion has been noted.

The solution to the population imbalance problem is to make it easier to switch characters. It takes so long on the cert treadmill, make certs easy to cash back in and switch to the new characters so people will switch up once in a while and enjoy a change, I would if I wasn't starting over!

You must be new to this game. The VS and NC have always been playing together on Waterson. It dates back from release when TR always had a 50 % population at all times.

And why shouldn't two factions ally themselves to remove the continental lock for the third? That's only common sense. They had a joint interest in neutralizing the continent so they both went after the one who held it.

It will only become a problem if they always do it even when the TR is at a great numerical disadvantage and even when we don't hold any land.

The NVCS went far beyond working together to neutralize Indar. They actively decided which faction would cap which continents between them. That is an ALLIANCE of the kind that should not be seen. It hurts the servers competitiveness and image.


I had respect for the VS before the last part of the arrangement the two factions made lastnight. Now it's clear VS are simply the NC reserve in the New Vannu Conglomerate Sovereignty.

The neutralizing I can understand, neither NC or VS could have taken Indar from the TR alone. But once the TR left to let ya duke it out between yourselves,(TAPS was played over our TS speech channel ) you decided to not fight each other. With close to 11 platoons combined, between the NVCS, standing in adjacent hexes around the TR WG!

A month ago you wanted to that scenario, you finally get it, then cut a deal???

Wait what???? This is the WHOLE POINT of having 3 factions. When one faction is to big or to good. The other 2 can team up and smash them into the ground.



But i do agree with everything else. Let people play on the weaker factions using the cert we have gained. I would love to help fix the population problem but I am not starting over after 55 levels.

Give us sample soliders that let us earn exp on our mains or something. I just want to have a way that when I play my exp still goes toward my actual main player


This happens in every single pvp MMO and is a major problem in every single pvp mmo and actually causes massive player loss and still every single one does not put in tools to deal with it. It's pretty silly IMO. Learn from problems in other games people

This is a complete contradiction of itself and I hope it goes ignored by any and all who matter.

Furthermore, the fact that the VS on Waterson has less than a quarter of the server population among the three factions at ALL TIMES is just disheartening. Our low population affords us zero success on the battlefield. A good fight for VS on Waterson is holding off a TR zerg for ~10 minutes. Our platoons go from chatty and hopeful, to quiet and desperate. I can't remember the last time we finished out an alert with 30% of the territory. The only time we are able to take a continent is when TR is participating in an alert, collectively earning tens of thousands of certs and probably hundreds of thousands experience, and all VS can do is hop from one facility to another on an inactive continent. This game is getting very boring, very fast; it makes me not want to play. It makes me want a refund on my membership. It makes me feel like I have been abandoned by SOE.

SOE, I am an angry, paying customer, and I am completely dissatisfied with your product.

Helios VS reporting in. Glad to know the grass is not greener on the other coast (Though in our case it is generally the NC doing the ROFLstomping).

This game seriously needs population control. I don't care how they do it. Most of my friends (6 out of a relatively small outfit of 8) have pretty much gotten fed up and stopped playing, and if anybody from on high is paying attention, some of them were paying customers.

Now this made me laugh. Every time I've fought DVS they're so mindlessly obsessed with one territory that we can leave ONE squad behind the fight the loosing battle and go cap half the map by the time they start pulling out. I find VS holding territories quite a bit better than NC who just caps them and moves on oblivious to back-capping.

On the main topic: TR pop advantage is really annoying, even though I'm playing TR. Sadly most people don't tend to look at the current population when they play, they just assume that TR always has pop advantage. Sure some of the fourth factioneers have returned to us because of the WG rotation, but quite a few stayed with NC and they're quite even with us in US daytime often. Biggest TR pop advantage is when all the US players are asleep or at work and the EU/rest of the world play on the server, which are mostly TR players sadly... I don't mind people playing on a server outside their "area", but when more than half of them are TR it gets boring quickly.

I do wish the VS would grow to be as big as NC/TR, but the way to get there shouldn't be buffing their weapons and vehicles. Each faction has their own traits, and there doesn't seem to be enough laser loving spandex users out there.

All this double-teaming exists on every server, and all the different factions feel double-teamed at some point. Having had a continent bonus for too long will make both the other factions itch to remove it, usually at the cost of one stealing it from the other (hey it's a three-way fight ).

Where is the contradiction? Are you having problems reading?

They've been doing that for 6 months. Have you been playing under a rock?

Why are people in this thread misrepresenting population and making out VS to be much weaker than we actually are?

TR have huge pop advantage only on off-peak hours. During peak, NC has the highest population. During peak, VS wins about as many Alerts as the other factions, maybe a little less.

Let me give a chronological history of the faction populations on Waterson:

Our pop has been screwed up since the beginning. First, TotalBiscuit chose this server, flooding it with TR including many European TR. That accounts for the off-peak huge TR population (theoretically they are Europeans playing during European peak).

Then the game became older and populations decayed, the difference being that VS did not get many replacements for the original VS on the server, many of whom were PS1 veterans who became upset at the differences between PS1 and PS2.

As time went on, NC grew in what can only be speculated to be due to the fact that TR were leaving after TotalBiscuit stopped playing, VS were stagnant/shrinking, and NC had FotM weapons (scatmax).

Finally, Waterson was merged with Jaeger, another server with the same low VS population. This compounded the problem and decreased the relative VS population of Waterson even more while adding many good players and outfits to NC and TR to which the VS seem to have had no equivalent on Jaeger (personal observation).

Now here we are.