What's going on with Alerts on Emerald?

VS wins the vast majority of alerts. Is this a game balance issue or did all the capable leaders decide to pool into a single team to be able to win more often? Or am I missing something?

Sad to say as a Vanu main, that they get swarmed with alts the moment they start winning, creating an unstoppable zerg.

Its not so much that Vanu actually gets immensely superior numbers - the que system sees to that, but much of the enemy resistance just drops off after a difficult to surmount advantage kicks in. Best I can tell its literally the enemy dropping more than its Vanu gaining numbers.

TR has some good coordination at times, but ultimately it isn't wide spread enough. Likewise, its good coordination seems less spent on making sure of strategic victory. Whats more, there is a semi-spoken pact between Vanu and NC to specifically attack TR for no terribly good reason.

I think a lot of this could be improved by giving better rewards for fighting a difficult fight rather than just winning. i.e. if underpopped you get bonus rewards for every capture and defense based on the relative size of the enemy force. You manage to take out a cap attempt that was averaging 2x the local population, you get 4x the exp or some such on success. Finishing the alert can be too hard, but there should be better rewards for trying every step of the way if you know you cannot get to the end.

Looks like that on Cobalt at times too...at other times you got no win for VS in several days. Especially during non-prime time alerts it usually only depends on smart or not so smart decisions by a single or a handfull of squad/platoon leaders. During prime time it usually is just (quick deploy)luck in which direction the zergs are heading. On top of that I do not think that wins are spread evenly on all warpgates...so it already matters which warpgate your faction got.

I don't think so. During the last 2 days VS lost at least 2 easy win alerts during the last 5 minutes cause only very few people cared to redeploy. If 150 certs, 200ISO and a reward do not encourage people to actually get out of easy farm situations then nothing will(and those that got enough certs, don't care for more anyway). All you could try is making underpopped chars stronger...cause that would discourage people from overpopping as their KDR would suffer.

It happens more often than not on Cobalt. There is no such thing as no win for VS in several days on Cobalt...I have literally never seen that. The simple truth is that the other two are usually fighting each other. TR is the most hated faction in Cobalt by far, mainly because of Zerg Russ I believe. They have a bad reputation and maybe even rightfully so. As a result, TR is most likely to get doubleteamedby by the other two. Sometimes it might be NC but almost never VS. That's the reality of Cobalt.

Ohhh I can guarantee that the bad reputation of 3EPG is rightful. I guess their own faction hates them atleast as much as the others. But in defense of Cobalt TR, we have some really good platoonleaders, that even manage to win alerts in the last minute, as happened 2 or 3 days ago. But yea, the TR double team is real, especially at the begin of primetime TR is getting warpgated, and in the afternoon, there is often 80% VS territory.

In defence of Cobalt TR you can have a good /yell chat with them while playing and everyone has a great time. VS just tell you to go higby yourself.

True and true.

Probably true - but NC on Cobalt have lost their way somewhat and just can't seem to take a major base, even when VS are also attacking TR. They then go and attack an underpopped VS just to get some territory.

VS have organisation but not the pop.

NC have the pop but not the organisation.

TR have the pop and organisation - ergo - they are doing very well at the moment.

That said, I am wondering if something is bugged for these reports.

I know for a fact TR just won an alert to lock Esamir, but its not listed.

On Emerald if you want meta you play VS and get into their clique and 4th faction with them.
I am sure they made "alts" in NC/TR for fun and testing themselves or just log out making it possible for NC/TR to win.
I cant speak to leadership as i never join a squad therefore never hear or see "Command".

Imo Leadership only works when those whom they determine to lead are in fact wanting to be lead.
Therefore those who are on either side of that relationship will tend to gravitate.

I use to play NC Engie regularly and finally decided on this "as far as supporting NC, I feel like a bra holding up an old saggy ***."
I have learned to recognize what NC can and cant do at any given situation to a certain degree of success and play accordingly.

Factional balance was tilted initially and imo created the issues we see today from an Matherson/Emerald perspective.
My 2 cents.

Seriously, what I have seen of VS had nothing to do with underpop lately. I saw 3 alerts lost in the last 2 minutes just because like 95% of VS have not been where it mattered. One happened a couple of minutes ago. It's like they believe they can play as braindead as possible and still win....then get beaten for it...and still don't learn anything. Even a horde of monkey would make better strategical choices just by chance.

Lack of balance in the game first and foremost, TR rocking that worst vehicles pro style which means we cant siege enemy bases and counter their armor zergs meaning we lose the offensive power.

Lots of VS on Emerald are cringe **** to say the least, #BWAE, they will play TR to start the alert so they can switch to their VS chars (maybe you get better rewards if you win Alert like that, dont know, maybe im wrong).

Lots of VS players are not from NA, they lag like ****, I was one shotted by a guy with Naginata while at full hp and shield.

NC on Emerald are idiots, to put it mildly, even when VS starts the alert they will do their best not to fight them, if TR has a chance to win the Alert you will see in a second VS and NC stop fighting just to make sure TR doesnt win, too coordinated.

Continent lock alert started on Esamir (looks like it was TR) current pop is 37%VS 23%TR 38%NC.

Honestly, its fun to watch TR population dwindle, I hope more of them would stop playing since this fagging is going too far but since biased "devs" like Wrel are in charge I doubt anything will change.


Edit: its Australian trash messing up the server, /golfclap DBG

I always play the underpop upon login and this more often than not means VS on Cobalt. This also means more alert wins by default and a very enjoyable easy experience.

TR on Cobalt is a terrible experience all round and I hate doing it....

No idea what this means.

I suspect 4th (now 5th) factioners were always a thing in this game. Maybe NSOs will help. Not sure faction switching limits on the same server such as a 1.5h 'cooldown' period would benefit the game as players would probably log off instead or be isolated from playing with friends from other factions. It wouldn't prevent using alternate accounts, which shouldn't be restricted for shared IPs.

This would be managed by the overall population taking note of alert win history and focusing attacks as needed, which is why it's a 3-faction game. For whatever reason this doesn't really play out as well, but at least the game design for it is in place.

Indeed lately TR has been low pop, so I've had more reason to stick to my TR. Back when VS was constantly low pop, it did get boring having no choice, so made a TR, then an NC too. It's just a good idea to play more than one faction to have that choice.

No one but DBG would know that information. They, like SOE, appear to not care about players who undoubtedly exploit (cheat) their network connection deliberately, giving them unbelievable advantages. If one has low ping, I have no doubt they can leverage some artificial lag or packet loss or whatever else at will and toggle it on before peeking or attacking or if receiving damage.

Even with good ping I have noticed over time my character coordinates leaving a shadow behind (dying behind walls), which is normal, yet ambushing someone by peeking they can react immediately, which doesn't make sense. Killing poor latency players who are moving and one can observe their actual location since the dead player model teleports to it. Similarly, when they receive damage, their player model sometimes teleports between these locations, making tracking very hard. Damaging players also tends to lock them in place or slow them.

That's why I call this game half-finished, since a proper competitive game of this scale would be forced to adjust in-game values in real time to account for natural fluctuations, and monitor for deliberate exploiting such as correlating kills with spikes in latency (lagswitch) and auto-banning if this is well beyond chance over a very long period of time.

The end result is players repeatedly experiencing unfair encounters, getting fed up, and moving on to other games. I'm done with playing off-hours too since after months of noticing the same pattern there's no improving and fun competition. There's much more to it than network nonsense, but I'm done talking about that on these forums since it's the developer's choice, have a healthy fun game that attracts and retains players, or watch them move on.

Conspiracy! TR just lost on Emerald because of server regression....had 60% and then midway through the alert the server regresses and the TR did not receive a proportionate share of the territory. From about 2/3 to about 40%...and of course VS squeaks it out with a spare 3-4%...Is math really that hard for programmers?

LOL. Dude if you took the same data a couple weeks back, red was all over it.

But toss that screenshot up there and suddenly everyones faction opinions come out of the woodwork. Next come all the conspiracy theories....

When BWAE begins evening ops they'll choose the lowest population faction at the time they begin. Most of the time this means VS, but not always. They ran NC 4x in the past week and TR a couple nights ago.

If an alert begins they will not switch.

If population shifts they will not switch with one exception: If the continent they are on locks during ops, they'll reevaluate. If they have now become the high pop faction they'll switch to the low pop one. If a tie, they'll typically choose VS.

I've only seen them switch mid ops without a lock once and it was because pops were egregious (like 40% one, 20% of other).

Anything else you may have heard is wrong.

Nope. But especially during prime time the faction that strats the alert usually gets 2on1 ganged for the longest part of the alert and has likely the smallest chance of winning...especially if they start the alert with 41% territory.

Hm. Just one anecdote but yeah, TR did get dunked on pretty hard last night. from about 10pm-midnight. It was completely self inflicted though. They had 96+ on lithcorp central with NC for just no good reason while VS marched to their warpgate. The stomping at the warpgate was demoralizing and the TR population dropped from tops on server to like 28%.

I can't explain why TR was doing that. Not sure if it was individuals just failing to break away from a good farm, or really bad leaders driving a couple platoons there. I mean you'd think once the first warpgate territory got touched people would redeploy, but no... they let VS do a 2/3 cutoff then consume all the disconnected territory.

There is definitely a reason the VS win constantly on Emerald - it's way too consistent to be random. It is not population because that stays relatively balanced. It's one or more of the following:

1. Better leaders
2. Better players
3. Better gear
4. Better cheaters

5. Invalid assumptions about the win rate.