This is something we spoke about on this week's podcast. The larger your population imbalance on a continent, the longer your spawn time. The smaller your imbalance is, the shorter the spawn time. Ideas for numbers (obviously subject to change): Between 30% and 36% continent population has no effect Each 1% above 36 adds 1 second to sunderer/tube spawn, 10 seconds to beacon spawn, and 20 seconds to vehicle spawns (to a maximum of 150% normal spawn time. For example: 8 second spawn time at a facility would go no higher than 12 seconds) Each 2% below 30 reduces 1 second to sunderer/tube spawn, 10 seconds to beacon spawn, and 20 seconds to vehicle spawns (to a minimum of 60% normal spawn time) This means when one side is very outnumbered, they at least have a spawn time advantage. It also means that if you're on a continent where your side has 40% of the population, your waiting longer to spawn every time you die, and it's taking longer for you to get your vehicles. This is a strong incentive to go fight on a map where you are not receiving these penalties. Such penalties/bonuses would need to be prominently displayed. While waiting for spawn, it should be very clear that you are waiting extra time because your faction is currently overpopulated on a continent. Something might be needed to deal with the fact that on some servers, one side just flat out has more people logged in at any given moment. World population might need to be considered to adjust those numbers on the fly.
The problem with that system is you get situations where you have not many people logged on and a small number of people can massively swing the percentages. For example, you could have only one or two squads on Esamir or Amerish and that somehow gets you to over 50% continent population and now on top of having to spend forever roaming around looking for the handful of enemies on the continent to fight you also have to wait forever to respawn.
The needs of the many are greater than the needs of the few or the one. This is a great idea in my opinion! Additionally, there is a lot of complaining that Indar Is where the population pools. Why not also set spawn timers based on continental populations as well, to encourage players to go to the other continents.
Great concept; poor implementation. Sony is not going to punish potentially paying customers for playing the faction they want just because on that particular server the population is imbalanced. It is bad business. Now I don't have a problem with speeding up spawn timers on the faction with imbalance or even offering other bonuses, but punishing people because of what they want to play is bad business. You want ways to encourage your customers to play other factions - not punish them with the faction they do play.
