After about 2-3am EST, Emerald usually dies down to pretty much zero activity This period of zero activity usually last for several hours I have two suggestions for an easy way to fix this: Suggestion 1 - Create a very small map that's designed for about 10-50 players, so that we can still play the game while there aren't many people online. You would probably need to make it infantry only due to the small size, but that's a good thing in many ways. You could also have a couple other small sizes like 50-100, and 100-150, but that's not as crucial, and not an immediate need. There's almost always at least a few people on, so if we had a 10 player map to use during the off-hours, this game would immediately be free of it's largest problem Suggestion 2 - Let us log into different servers with the same character; this would at least make it so that I can use different time-zones, and have more hours during the day which Planetside 2 is active (maybe even 24 hours a day). Since making one or more new map(s) takes time, and hard work, perhaps this second suggestion would be an easier fix Any other suggestions would be great as well. I think that either of these solutions would improve the game greatly, and remove it's most problematic factor (dead server hours) What do you think?
Not sure about how letting people cross servers will go over with the ping elitists but that really hasn't stopped a west coast server like Connery from being flooded with Koreans and Japanese so I don't see why that wouldn't work. If we could host individual 20 or 32 player games and control who we let into it on a smaller type map that would be amazing. Just the possibilities of outfit training and skirmishes in these settings would be the tip of the iceberg.
Asking the devs to spend the time to create a new map for the 10 players with insomnia is a bit much if you ask me. If they are going to spend time on any map design it better be for battle islands or another new continent; you know, things the entire community can take advantage of. I have a perfect solution: 1. Open Ps2 2. Click Create Character 3. Select a server in a different time zone(Connery may be more active at this time, but your are probably better off with a European server) I wish they would just create new continents in stages. When Hossin was released I was shocked at the overall size of the continent. I would have been happy if was only a 1/3 of the current size. If they felt it needed to be bigger, add on to it over time. With all of the "Construction sites", squeezed in, I feel like they could have just downsized and gotten this out to us much sooner.
There's really not enough people on at 2-3 AM EST to justify doing anything about it. It's usually when the blatant hackers come out to play, too.
This is a low priority issue because, by definition, only a tiny fraction of the playerbase has it. I don't know why you expect lots of people to be playing games at 3 in the morning.
That's one reason you have the facility to create additional characters, make a second and work on it during the quiet periods.
That's not a solution at all, because I'd have to farm every item on a new character If I could log onto the other servers with my existing characters it would be fine though (as stated in the OP)
Well you can have fun on a low-cert character too. PS2 is pretty good at not being P2W or grind-to-win. I have characters all around the world for when I want to log on at crazy hours. You really do notice the lag playing on far away servers though. It's been suggested elsewhere that three continents should lock when pops are low, and I agree with that. That makes the game still be active with 100 or so total people online. If you have fewer than that then you have to accept that people sleep and a game that is geographically restricted (and a FPS will always be, because it needs lowish ping to be playable so we can't have a global server) will always have dead hours.
The solution is simple: Make pop-based continent lock trigger easier. As it stands even in the "dead hours" of the major servers (at least Connery which I play in), 2 or even 3 continents are open for playing, which spreads out the already not very high population further. Cutting down the amount of continents available should funnel the population into larger fights better. Of course, this does not help servers that don't have any real pop to begin with (I'm looking at you Briggs), but those servers have more problems than just off-peak suckiness.
actually Emerald has more players than Connery these days. On Emerald they have three unlocked continents whenever I play. On Connery it's usually just two... Even at the lowest times when there are only a hundred players per faction around, ideally it could still result in some good fights... that's 2 full platoons per faction. Unfortunately it seems the meta for this game is to "farm or be farmed". So when most choose the path of least resistance, they actually end up just ghost capping and spawn camping each other everywhere, instead of fighting each other somewhere.
SOE needs to be more aggressive about locking continents as populations begin to fall at the end of prime-time. Even if that means back-to-back alerts to lock continents.
If you're playing in the middle of the night for your time zone then play on a different server. That's why those people make their characters on servers that have people online when they are.
I play that time of day all the time on emerald, I play early mornings mostly like somewhere beween 1am-11am, the pops are fine. You can find 96/96 fights, you can find 1-12 fights, you can find 24-48 fights, there are all size fights that time of day. It is way better than either Waterson or Mattherson were in the early AM... Emerald: (I don't feel like taking new screenshots...)
Ah yes, the bane of an MMO, a lack of people. Its not an easy to remedy solution, so I would recommend just making a european or Connery character to play on during off hours locally. Or a briggs character, for lag wizarding hardcore mode :|
Not really... The game still functions mechanically, but you'll always be aware of the disadvantages. Some of them are raw numerical factors that are impossible to deny, like less damage resistance from Flak/Nanoweave armor, inefficient medical tool, etc
