WDS Preseason and Upcoming Changes

btw im still wandering right now why nc become the most underpop faction of all,i mean i joined them cause after testing all three their gun felled soo good it got weight,recoil,and damage. and most of all nc have blue and rock and roll what so bad about nc anyway i wander, is it just the stereotype of NC is space bandit that make no one joined,i mean really nc fighting for freedom.

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Pretty much this. I'm not so optimistic looking at the proposed changes, as I can't see how it will help in balancing the population.
Another problem I see is this: an overpopulated faction could easily nullify the bonuses for long held territory of the other two factions, while mantaining it's own hexes close to wg with the long held bonuses. The overpopped faction just have to zerg and warpgate one faction, then do the same with another. Combined with the alert bonuses and weekly continent bonuses it will just encourage even more zerging from overpopped faction. And we all know that no matter how many points the scoring system will promise you to award if you going to beat the incoming zerg, if they outnumber you 2 to 1, it won't happen and as result the underpopped factions just won't get their points.

TL;DR:
Territory Value Increases with Time Held -> BAD, it benefits overpopulated faction.
Alert Victory Points ->BAD, it benefits overpopulated faction.

I like all the ideas except for the alert related ones, because they'll always benefit the overpopulated faction.

I forgot to say that I have to agree with others saying that pop balance would not be solved by this:

"Population Imbalance. We will be changing the scoring to scale with enemy population on a per-continent and per-empire basis. Underdogs will earn more points for their captures and holdings."

The fact is, like other have stated, that if I'm underpopped I simply cannot capture or hold. I just can't. If I try to I get steamrolled by an horde of enemies everywhere I go. So if you give me bigger reward for doing something I cannot do it's like not giving anything at all.

The only way for a strongly underpopulated faction to caputre something is by ghostcapping, but you said also this:

"Off-Peak/Ghost Capping. We will be changing the scoring such that it scales with total population, so continents with many foes will be worth more, empty continents will be worth much less"

This is awesome.

It's a nice compromise: WDS becomes somewhat more fair, and SoE doesn't have to take their eyes off of optimization to go do balance fixes.

This will need to be considered carefully. It would be easy to create a situation where you reward switchers to stay with just the dominant faction for longer making the situation worse. It's already a fair bet TR will win week 2 also.

If people understood how the reward for this week worked i.e. play a TR alt for 2 seconds then you get the reward and can put that reward on a char from another faction, then there would be less reason to faction switch. If switchers understood this, they would not need to play TR (or any other winning faction) all the time, they could just login on an alt, then play their usual faction and still get a reward on their usual faction - hopefully reducing the high numbers constantly playing the dominant faction.

Still no change to winners rewards being account wide i see, so doesn't stop me logging into TR for the win, then log into my NC-VS and claim the booster reward..

some good ideas and changes i am seeing here, but i have yet to see anything that promotes a small squad/tactical balance for an under dog faction.

Even when I am playing on the higher populated faction; I still don't like the idea that the factions we are beating to an endless pulp have no chance in hell on strategically jutting out from a "Cave Warpgate" as in planetside 1 to lay foundation to a surgical strike on any given linked base.

to put it all in a nutshell and not to get so offensive with my post as i have before, let me repeat myself that there were things in planetside 1 that made a lot more sense and seems to not put your players in a "bang your heads on a wall" fight to the death to break out of a Warpgate.

I think the only answer to balancing out a low/high pop faction server problem is to give the underdogs the ability to surgically strike a big dumbheaded faction zerg...

last time im posting this idea-
if nobody agrees i give up..

Points ≠ XP

There is only so much the developers can do to offset over population, since the problem is is a combination of community issues and game play that favors the over pop faction. The developers can make adjustments to the game play, but there is little they can do to change the fourth faction culture of their players. If they applied these same measures to alert XP as well the 4th factioners might be discouraged from faction hopping if they could get more certs/XP playing the under pop faction.

I'm a make dude for WDS, may as well get as much certs/xp/rewards as you can. There is not much here to keep me on the NC faction, makes me a sad panda especially since winning reward booster is account bound not character.

I really like the idea of increasing the value of long-held territories. My only concern is transparency: when I log in and start fighting, I have only a vague inference of how long a given territory has been in X faction's hands. It would be great if there were some way to see the current value of a territory (to either defend or attack).

Thanks for your efforts, SOE. Things are getting better!

This all sounds quite nice.

I agree with everything in the OP except for this:

It simply serves to reward the overpop faction again.

Other than that, bravo for listening and making changes as necessary.

I really do think that bonus xp really isnt tbe solution beacuse there is already bounus xp for under pop empire and if u go to a continent that has 70% pop and try to take terriory back it usually ends up ghost caping until u suddenly meet a full platoon and they spawn camp u all the way back to the warp gate and u dont really get any xp because your not killing anything and are unable to hold a cap long enough. So why not give underdog empire xp just for being there trying to hold the swarm off. Or mabye implement a lock for certain empire when they have more then 20 percent population that would make it much more fair and gobbally balance population between all continents.

Considering that the TR have had the best WG-positions for months (especial the WG-position on Indar!) , I dearly hope that they are fair enough to let NC and VS have that WG-position just as long, a few months each, and let the TR be sad in a corner.

months? u joking? untill GU13 or 14 it was VS who held the NWG on Indar not the TR

"TR have best weapons"
"TR weapons are better than NC"
"TR have best warpgate"

All nonsense and biased opinion from a vocal minority. It is a shame that these guys will get weapons that are very well balanced, and in most cases purely not that good at all, looked at because of flavour of the month, being striker.

They will moan Fractures are OP, when they are truly just good. They will list of a bunch of random weapon names they can remember like Carv, which is just good, or Jaguar, good in close range, not as good as an smg, mediocre/ok at mid range.

Then when you start to say Orion is the best gun in game, Mercenary is best Carbine, they bring up stats that dont consider a ton of factors and claim it is the be all end all of balance. Also the Prowler isnt that great, no it cant instant kill infantry any better than the others, and all vehicle stats are diluted by striker.

In effect, please remove striker and give us a fracture type ESRL. This will fix a lot of empire pop problems and hopefully reduce the TR OP bandwagon.

Thanks for posting.

Some good ideas here but I can't help but feel you're throwing too much at it to see what sticks and some of the ideas seem like they might cancel each other out.
For example the idea that linking point scoring to population is a good one in terms of ghost caps when hardly anyone is online. However, if you then make things like alerts contribute points and these alerts happen more often in the off hours then surely the overpopped ghost capping empire will get just as many points as before as they'll win all the alerts?

My other concern is that whilst things like the bounty system and more xp for the underdog sound good and promising, it has to be said having the potential to get more xp when you're outnumbered is all well and good, if you can get out of the spawn room to kill people in the first place.
At the moment the empire with the most population wins most of the time, population has no downsides it doesn't mean you run out of resources more quickly and can't pull tanks if you have too many for example, more people is more power and it snowballs from there, if anything the only downside I can see is lack of targets.

Sure adding some of these measures to help the underpopped sides out in terms of xp and wds points is a good thing and will make some people stick to their empire rather than rolling TR (or whoever is winning) but I don't feel it will do very much to correct the imbalance itself and when the numbers stack up to a certain level and you have organised oufits thrown in on top of that you can have all the xp bonuses in the universe and the underpopped faction won't benefit very much at all.

So whilst I'm sceptical about how much benefit we'll actually see from these things, it is good to see you're actually thinking about them.