Watching my faction get reamed by the two others is a great way to make me log out.

It's the same damn problem on a different day. This isn't a 'my faction is the whipping boy' thread, but more of a general situation that happens so much that it's sort of defining the meta.

It's basically a function of the logical way to 'win', IE, the alert, or simply just territory. It's easier to engage the same faction your enemy is. They cannot afford as much resources to fight you as you can them.

It not only produces steamroller fights that are boring for everyone, but the more 'fair' ones where the populations are merely 60ish percent in the attacking empire's favor. That is the typical fight that produces the 'good game' feeling. You aren't stomping them into the dust, you're merely grinding their nose closer and closer. It lets players feel good that they're not actually producing unwinnable situations for a solid third of the current players on the time.

It's the reason why people log out. Or switch continents. It's actually one of the reasons why the Emerald NC are so 'bad'. The phenomenon known as 'two factions fighting you'. Why take the alert seriously when you have TR platoons rampaging your tech plant and VS platoons kicking down your warpgate door? You can't fight them both. You can't win. So why try?

So, basically, you have players doing the logical thing. Hitting the faction that's the weakest is the most sound way to achieve victory. Too bad it screws over people, but it's going to happen. This wouldn't be horrible if it was a once in awhile thing, instead of most nights. I can't even remember how many times I've logged on to see my faction's territory at 10% and the other two split evenly between the rest...and my borders on fire.

And this is coming from someone who's played from release. I know what to do, and I know how much I can do. As a new player? It's hopeless.

The kicker is that there's no easy solution but perhaps continental lattice. Then we could actually have two faction fights per continent, allowing easier division of these things. There's less easy incentive to just pick on the weak guy of the hour.

If the sides are even on the server, not sure what else you can do.

But if your faction has less people, then I've got this thread going with a suggestion to help --> https://forums.station.sony.com/ps2...the-biggest-problem-with-planetside-2.203389/

That might solve the problem a little, at least you will have extra help on your side.

Well, you can gain some territory by fighting the other loser, which improves your position, but your position relative to the winner improves twice as much when you take territory from the winner. So the optimal strategy *should* be for both of the weak factions to gang up on the strong one. However, most of the people on the map are just looking for a good fight and don't care a bit about alert strategy.

yeah too bad we don't have defensive tools like the PS1 AMS, pS1 mines, PS1 spitfires, PS1 motion detectorss

or able to make Alliances...but that may mean more factions or rather sub-factions in which the theme is already set with outfits / platoons etc.

when i read about 1 faction having 10% and the other 2 evenly split that is exactly what it sounded like to me ...an Alliance.

The issue is that can simply reverse the situation. I mean, damn do I hate Emerald VS, but I'm not going to pretend my fun is more important then theirs to the extent that I wish them being warpgated.

Not that it ever happens, really, given the dynamics of the server.

The fun part is when an alert starts like we had today:

Capture Amerish or maybe it was Esamir I'm not entirely sure anymore.

VS 50+%
NC 20~%
TR 13~ %

That's how the stats looked at the beginning of the alert...

In the end it mostly comes down to population, while it might not seem like there's much of a fight going on between X and Y while you're playing Z it's usually nothing like that at all.
They do actively engage each other but because they've got more players online at that time they can afford to have a stalemate at base A while also terrorizing your faction which has less players on.

It sucks and makes me wish that they'd just release 2 factions at launch but there's not much that can be done about it now, the population will never be truly balanced so instead of seeing "we've got the most land" as your victory goal you should just aim for annoying the enemy faction as much as humanly possible instead, it's way more fun.

Mining vehicle pads, Stalker cloaking, sneaking around the back and going HAM with an AV harasser, ramming Galaxy farmers, ramming Libs, ramming ESFs, terrorizing spawn Sunderers with a wraith flash. Those things are a lot more enjoyable to do instead of fighting over some random base and it sure does help me get rid of some frustration.

What I don't understand is why the faction with the smallest population almost always seems to attack the faction with the second smallest population...and hence allowing those with the largest population to first rip the no 2. apart(untill many of those quit cause cause fighting a combined 65-70% pop ain't fun), just to turn around near the end of the alert to steamroll no.3. If the smaller ones would take on the big one that might become an interesting fight...but no...they essentially take each other out.

I've not read your post. I'm only going off the thread title.

Question I would like to ask is, "why does it even matter?"

It's only a game. Log out then. Stop playing altogether. It is only a game...

...which means what when you're outnumbered in a hex, your local area?