Ugggggh. (Emerald NC)

So I jumped on Emerald tonight on my main (see sig) to try and get him BR 69 and ended up first on Indar, then on Hossin. In general, it was, in language my WW II vet father would've used if it ran through the PS2 filter, "a Higbyshow."

Pops on Hossin were roughly 33/33/33 (give or take one or two percent) for the night...and the VS had 71% of the continent. SEVENTY-ONE PERCENT. Now granted, a lot of it was because we and the TR were having some epic throwdowns in the narrow strip of lattice down the east side of the map, and because even when the VS started to get in danger of taking the map, the TR continued to push us extremely hard instead of turning west. But that's OK. Everybody gets 2v1'd in PS2 from time to time, it goes with the territory. That's not what had me frustrated.

What had me frustrated was getting steamrolled by the VS. Base. After base. After base. Put us even odds with the Emerald Vanu, we are almost certainly going to lose. Even if we push them back once, they will come back and with more people and more tanks. Just this big purple-and-teal swarm with their magic dancing Magriders and sparkly pewpew and spandex. Like locusts, only more fabulous.

It is an incredibly frustrating experience to constantly feel like you're on the back foot and to go into a fight feeling like you're going to lose because there's a swarm of familiar squad tags and BR 100s rolling into your base and brushing aside anything you do like it's nothing. And even when we did get an attack going, they were usually stalemated into a meatgrinder while other Vanu groupings were gobbling up lesser-defended bases. It doesn't help that I'm kinda not good at the game myself, although honestly, I **** myself in gunfights because I insist on playing engineer support and run Flak Armor instead of Nanoweave so I'm down a few hundred health to everybody else. But hey, I can run across the occasional mine and not die. Yay? And I'm just one guy in amongst 48+ anyway.

I know a lot of other NC are frustrated as well but damn all if I know what can be done about it. It's been like this forever back through the history of Mattherson, but it's gotten worse post-merger with our Vanu getting the influx of Waterson refugees (who honestly must feel like they've died and gone to heaven, eh?). Our overpop, which isn't that "over," doesn't seem to help us much if at all. Hopefully the NC summit on the 13th will help because right now it just feels like we're an amorphous mass with no real power or ability. I daresay in your average 50/50 base fight with VS, we'd lose 80% of the time right now.

And the thing is, there isn't a game solution to this. This isn't a balance issue, it's a people issue. I mean, yeah, at night on Hossin VS are basically invisible up to fairly close range thanks to dark default armor and the fog, but so are TR. But that's not a balance issue, not really. I'd be happy if I never had to hear another PPA ever again because that's all I heard at most of the doomed defenses I was part of, the "pewpewpew" of PPAs and the "squicksquicksquick" of Lashers and MAXes. But the PPA doesn't explain why we're doing relatively poorly right now.

Sorry for the whine. I love playing NC (and TR both, really) on Emerald and have no plans to stop. It was just one of those nights, I guess.

Purple is the color of royalty, filthy NC peasant.

But really, the skill level pound-for-pound is about equal, the NC is just slower to react due to less coordination. Hopefully the summit helps you out.

Look at it this way; at least you're not the TR, getting rekt non stop

The NC and TR aren't slower to react, it's just that nobody wants to fight the VS. It isn't as fun fighting the VS as it is the other guys. There are so many reasons I could go through, from general VS coordination, to Magrider PPA spam, but the reality is now that the ingrained mentality amongst the NC and TR of Emerald is to just avoid fighting the VS. Unless it's an Alert, people just don't care enough to sit through all the crap.

Personally I don't mind fighting the VS, but that's because all I do is killwhorre and attempt to maximize my XP gain through other mean; For example I just logged off after having a Sunderer up at Tarwich Depot for the past hour or so in a fight against the VS, and neither I or the rest of TR actually made an effort to break the stalemate until we had a ridiculous pop advantage. The only reason I logged off is because I lost 2 Sunderers in about 5 minutes, after having one up for an entire hour.

But, asides that, I never see anyone go out of their way to attack the VS, and I don't blame them.

This frequently leads to 2v1s of either TR or NC, and generally it's the NC that comes out of the whole affair worse for wear.

Pretty much ^that^. VS isn't fun to fight. They always have bulldog gals, bulldog sundies, and PPA's out the ***, and when they aren't in vehicles half of them are MAX's. Couple that with how easily they kill our sundies, and you just say "screw it, I'm out"

I think a large part of our struggles right now are due to organization, the VS from Matherson were renowned for being a very organized group of players who regularly dominated. The VS from Waterson suffered from underpopulation for a long time, which I would guess drove them to play in a more team oriented manner to be able to get things done. The NC from Waterson generally had pop advantages and would often use that as a main advantage, organization on platoon or squad levels was pretty hit or miss, and even if you managed to find a solid leader it was often difficult getting all your squad/platoon members working together in an organized manner, and trying to get them to move as a squad was (and often times still is) an exercise in frustration. From what I've been able to gather of Mathersons NC it seemed to suffer from the same disorganization that Waterson did, though I will say Waterson NC's leaders in Command Chat had been working hard on coordinating and great improvements were being made shortly before the merge.

I've been paying close attention to the NC's recent struggles on Emerald, trying to see exactly what they are, and how to remedy them. A couple of things that have jumped out at me are squad level organization and the use of armor. When the Vanu make a push to retake a point, or set up to cover a point such as a choke or jump pad I notice groups of 6-12 players working together a lot. They don't often seem to trickle in a few players at a time, where as we NC seem to often suffer from a charge in 1 by 1 mentality. The VS also seem to use a lot more armor here on Emerald than they did on Waterson at the very least, there generally seems to be way less NC armor rolling around than VS armor, as alluded to in the OP's post, those darn PPA's never seem to stop. I think I might start having nightmares about that noise .

None of this is something we as NC can't overcome, but it's something we need to work on at a squad level, we need to encourage our squads to stick together, as our friends from [RCN6] always say "Teamwork OP!", if you don't believe it check out some of their videos, or go fight some Vanu, you'll eventually start hitting some of those organized squads and see how effective it can be. I'm also sure that if we work on it, and encourage (not belittle or demean) each other to be more organized in our play style we'll begin to see much more success and see the fights less lopsided like we have seen in some cases. The NC isn't terrible on this server, and often times we do hold our own, but I'd say right now the VS does have the edge on us.

Lastly, we should really leave the poor TR alone more. Those guys are in a tough spot with population and as an empire in general right now, if we start to focus a bit more on the VS the TR likely will also and this 3 faction system will work for us instead of against us.

Personally, i just cant stand the PPA. Its far too cheap, and far too easy to use. So its spammed to no end 200+ meters away by some guy side strafing on the side of a hill. After this 2x xp weekend is over it will be interesting to see how many certs were made of that thing

I used to play VS on Mattherson and since Emerald happen, i switched to TR. They need all the help they can get.

It boils down to Emerald NC often refusing to pull enough if any maxes. Plus the few that do are too busy stroking their farming boners to hang back and be alive when a real push comes in.

I'd pull more myself but Maxes are insanely resource heavy and I'm not currently paying to win with boosters.

VS have more easy mode weapons than NC and TR at the moment. Figure it out from there. Zero fun to fight and dodge endless PPA / Saron Spam. Among other VS items.

I think it's more of the issue that VS knows how to use their weapons effectively vs the NC/TR. The only nerfed weapons on the TR side is the striker and possibly marauder. They need to be reworked. C85 still needs some more data gathering though,

Not quite. The Marauder, Striker and Vulcan are all garbage. You can act like it's VS knowing how to use their weapons.

But how do you have to learn how to use a hitscan AV weapon or a large clip spam hose? Why do all VS act like they are just good with their weapons when they have easily the easiest and best options?

By all means buy the Vulcan / Marauder and try to "learn how to use them" You basically have to enter into decimator range to have any effect.

Currently, the VS are far more coordinated than either of the other Emerald factions. I don't know if this is also true on the tactical scale, but it would seem from an outsider's perspective that they do. I see the VS do things that the other factions don't have the ability to do, simply because we don't have their kind of numbers working in a way that supports each other. So far as balance goes, it's not in a place where any faction has a clear advantage over the others.

I was soooo close to taking this post seriously. Then I noticed the OP isn't in an outfit.

Want to know why Emerald VS are so good? It's not balance, it's not over pop, it's not the ZOE or Magrider or Orion. It's the fact that they have good outfits led by quality players. They have players in voice comms telling their players to group up, assault as one, sometimes even flank around corners so that they're not running straight into a wall of gunfire.

And what are you doing? Running around on your own, lamenting the fact that nobody on the NC works together? And therein lies the one and only limiting factor for the Emerald NC - lack of experienced, quality leadership. I joined a [BL] led platoon last night that had members of it's 4 squads split across 3 different continents, and not a single person piped up when I asked if anyone had a mic. Then I joined a [PHX] platoon on Indar, the leader of which insisted we pull Vanguards to assault the next base in the lattice. The next base was a bio-lab.

Does that mean all hope is lost? Of course not. There are plenty of quality outfits out there, some big, some small, but you've actually got to go out and look for them (they certainly advertise enough on the outfit forums). They're the ones that go toe to toe with the likes of BWC, TEST, VG, NNG, GOKU, etc. They're the ones that hold bases against overwhelming odds, crush enemy armor at choke points, and clear the skies with some well-placed anti-air nests. And they're the ones that aren't on the forums every day complaining about what's OP and who's Overpopped and how the NC is such a cluster-****. Why? Because they're in game winning battles and turning the tide of the war one base at a time.

TL;DR - Get an outfit, get gud, stop whining. This game isn't won by the lone wolf.

The PPA and....what? Course pulling a PPA means you're effectively a free kill to most any other vehicle in the game.

The Saron is about as effective as the Halberd while VS has generally worse infantry and Max weaponry than NC/TR

lol

Most of our weapons are downgraded versions of another faction's weapons.

Prowler/Vanguard > Magrider

NS-11A > CME

Reaper > Corvus

Gauss SAW > Ursa/Flare/SVA

T5 AMC > Zenith/Pulsar C

CARV = Orion

Lockdown/Aegis > ZOE

Emperor/Desperado/Repeater/Rebel/Mag Shot > Beamer/Manitcore/Cerberus

The list goes on.

We're not gimped compared to the other two factions, but to say our weapons are better is to be disingenuous.

You guys didn't fall in our trap though. We were leaving the path to Zotz open specifically to get you guys to fall into the black hole of a Biolab fight so we could take all your ****.

Stop complaining and do something about it. Sometimes it sucks and its hard, but no one wants to steamrole something, that gets boring. BUCK up and join a decent outfit or platoon and rekt them. Have a bit of a brain and know when to push and when to pull back. You can cry PPA all you want, but at the end of the day if you arnt joining up with SOME sort of teamwork orientated group YOU ARE DOING IT wrong.

NC on Emerald are overall horrible, some very good players in a sea of WTF!?!?!?!?!?!.

These last few days remind me why I felt so refreshed leaving them a few months back

As an Emerald NC...
1.) I detest the PPA spam. Seriously, i don't think i've seen ONE VS/NC fight where it's not getting spammed at us and I can't blame VS for using such an effective weapon. Just realize that spamming it so much means NC won't fight you unless we know we can get an advantage on you.
2.) Fighting TR is 'funner' - Why? Because some of them are good, but either we have a bit of overpop, or the worst we have to deal with is the Pounder. The Pounder is acceptable because despite its power, it can't be spammed at the same speed as the PPA. Fights with TR are legitimately fun because it's very push/pull, not this "Spam at Range" BS that we keep getting from the VS.
3.) NC weapons are geared towards either short range overpower, or long range cherry tapping. AP Vanguard is nice, but can't deal with infantry anywhere near as well as an AP Prowler that gets 2 shots, or Magrider that can strafe. The NC Max either rips everything apart within 10 feet, or cherry taps with Ravens/Falcons at range. We have nothing really designed as an overall mid-range weapon on any of pure main platforms that isn't NS (Enforcer is only exception, and it's on a slow moving vehicle)

Our infantry weapons are nice, but lack certain things. Our hard hitting rifles and LMGs are nice and all, but we get rekt by Orion users that just ADAD and dodge our slow ROF. I don't think any NC or TR LMGs have .75ADS but correct me if i'm wrong.

Getting PPA spammed is one of the worst situations in the game. Why? Because you CAN"T wait for it to reload to move ahead, if you do, it'll cut you down literally seconds after you start running since it'll have already reloaded.

NC and TR do fight each other a lot. In fact they fight each other so much that VS gets to pick which one to stomp at their leisure. I've noticed this on both factions TR and NC, more so on NC though. They're scared of VS. They avoid VS in the most illogical of situations. They would literally rather fight TR for 2nd place than challenge VS for 1st. It's like "We're losing to VS, instead of giving them hard time lets reward them by fighting TR instead!". This idiocy happens every time. Do they think VS will just log off after you stop fighting them? Kind of like "Ignoring your problems makes them go away" type of deal?

It's akin to sticking your head in the sand. When you give up and stop fighting VS, they take more and more of your territory with fewer people. Then they have plenty of people to spare to attack the other faction, and capture more of their territory too. All because YOU are helping them not only by not resisting, but by actively attacking the other underdog. So to be accurate it's more like sticking your head in a pile of broken glass instead of sand.

You want to get better? Stop.... just stop... You know who is winning right now. Attack them, not the other underdog. If you attack the other underdog, you're not only ruining balance, you're actively being your worst enemy.

**** balance, I want to have fun sometimes.

I could talk to every TR leader I know and ask for a truce while VS are overpowering, but then VS complain "They're tag teaming us!"

Same with NC, I can ask them all to stop attacking TR and just go for VS, but then what?

NC did the same to VS/TR a few months ago on Waterson - we had overpop and we punished TR/VS really hard anytime they tried to fight us by redeploying either our best outfits to crush an attack, or the massive blue blob of grunts we've got. I'm not bitter at the VS, i just know that if I do fight VS it's going to be much much harder and sometimes i'm not in the mood for a hard fight.