When people complain about population, they're probably not talking about world population.

A system similar to PlanetSide 1 where XP is not rewarded based on individual performance, but based on team performance, with a few incentives for even populations.

• XP earned is added to a pot
  • Similar to the 10,000 XP pot alerts have, but it is cumulative based on total XP generated by your faction
• XP is awarded when a battle finishes
  • Uses the same qualifications for the end of a battle that scoreboard refreshes use
  • XP is distributed evenly among all participants
  • Offline players are rewarded just the same as online players provided they contributed at least 1 XP to the battle before logging off
  • Create an algorithm that rewards bonus XP for even fights and XP penalty for uneven fights for the overpopulated faction
    • Highest population during a battle is used in the algorithm in order to prevent sore losers from griefing by mass redeploying after a base is lost to hurt or prevent XP gain
    • A perfectly even fight would grant a 50% bonus to XP
    • Each percentage point of imbalance reduces the bonus XP by 5% until 60/40 or the three-way equivalent
    • 60/40 or the three-way equivalent provides normal XP
    • Each percentage point of imbalance beyond 60/40 or the three-way equivalent grants a 2% penalty to XP until 100/0
    • 100/0 would grant zero XP
      • Punishes ghost cappers and people avoiding battles

I believe this would encourage people to actively seek fights where their faction needs help and prevent people from doing the opposite as they receive less reward for their efforts. Everyone benefits from the sweet spot of 50/50 while nobody benefits from jumping to advantageous fights around the map.

Facility defense bonuses if the enemy has held the point for at least 1 minute.

And a F***ing MASSIVE bonus if it's defended against 2:1 odds or more.

I think one of the core issues is that communication between players is actually quite difficult, so requesting reinforcements is not working at all. You tried to have us organize around the leader channel, but this just doesn't work well.
What I think you should do is:
1) Keep the leader channel as it is, that is only squad leaders can talk in it, but make everyone who has certed that be able to read it, no matter if they're squad leaders or not.
2) Add another channel, call it the Intelligence channel for instance, in which all the players who have certed the leader channel can talk freely.

You could have territories highlight for particular outfits / platoons and offer members of their groups that fight there additional certs. So for example:
You have a VS Platoon that has had at least majority cohesion (75% of its squad leaders within 1200 meters of the platoon leader, with 75% of squad members within 600 meters of the squad leader).
Platoon leader sees a notification that there is a "beachhead alert" or "mission impossible" alert. When they click on it, they are given a mission to capture a particular facility. Maybe one right on the border, maybe one a few facilities into enemy territory. He clicks on accept and starts to get his platoon over to the new area / continent.
While fighting along the lattice line towards the target, XP is buffed and resources earned are multiplied to help their push.

Meanwhile, a TR or NC commander in a similar situation to the VS Platoon commander, gets a notification of a "hold at all costs". They must hold the ultimate destination target of the VS commander for 1 hour or two hours. Every 15 minutes that they hold it, they get an XP reward. No additional XP earned, but for every 15 minute increment they hold out, they earn a reward.

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Might want to bring Auraxium back as a resource but make it only usable as a substitute currency for things on the refer-a-friend list. You only earn them every 15 minutes you are in a "mission impossible" / "hold at all costs" fight. This means you could only earn 4 Auraxium per session. If you want to insist that people bring in members, then Auraxium is traded to reduce the tiers of RAF items. So something that was tier 5 would become tier 4 (at lowest) with some amount of (20 to 40?) Auraxium points.

This is basically what my point was. Communication between decent sized outfits is hard without having to use thrid party chat programs and organize outside of the game. Larger forces need to be able to understand eachother without having to filter out the spam of some nerd that has 4 people in a squad telling a platoon of 48 where they should be. Thats why only allowing a platoon leader or representative of a outfit should be allowed to use speak or chat in those channels.

We need to also be able to see clearly who we are talking to and the size of their platoon so we can avoid using a hammer where a small knife would do the trick. This last point is we will need some incentivising through diminished xp gains from using excessive force. Some other have potential good ideas inthis thread about that. Make the XP hex dependent so if you are in a huge zerg with 4:1 odds you get next to nothing for kills and on the other end you get huge bonus for being outnumbered in a hex porpotional.

People are turning this into a cert farm COD killwhore game which is always a bad thing. You need to highlight community and teamwork which is what this game is about and will bring a long lifespan. I dont want to have to farm certs constantly. Please dont falll into that trap of making everything pay to win or a grind to just get compettive with other players. We need a game where people enjoy taking bases simply to get revenge on a rival outfit that they hate etc. No because its a chore to farm certs to unlock some stupid weapon or ablity. Thats the core of a game the players making a competitive environment with eachother. The best way to do this is give us tools to communicate and organize which will bring about faction loyality dedication.

There is already a good incentive for playing defense/the underdog, in the form of the existing xp bonuses. These are (finally) of appropriate and noticeable values, and make a closely-contested-but-outnumbered fight really really good for the defenders (this situation seems to be Future Crew's bread and butter, for instance).

The trouble is there's a tipping point where one side is outnumbered by such a large margin, all they can really expect to accomplish is huddling in a spawn room picking off any attackers dumb enough to come into line of fire, or die near-instantly upon poking their nose out of the spawn shield. It's a situation that's frankly little fun for both sides.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure there is a fix for that problem, at least none that aren't horribly draconian and just as not-fun.

500-1000% XP bonus should do the trick. Yes, I'm serious. For a player base such as this, losing is painful. The only thing that is going to offset that perception of losing is a ridiculously high benefit. And as usual, the answer for "what would you like for Christmas?" is the tried and true "CASH is always nice."

Truthfully the only real way to solve it would be to reduce or remove any possible reward for sitting in the spawn, as well as people getting wiser in realizing that the fight is more then just one base.

That being said, Perhaps some gentle perswasion in the form of a "Recomend redeploy" when the odds are heavily against you ( could be based on your forces being stuck in the spawn as well as time to resecure ( if the majority of your forces are in your spawn room for an extended time the game starts to recomend that you redeploy to a diffrent location, perhaps point to the Hotspot ones). Idea is more having the game sugest an action without forcing them as a way to help guide them to a better battle.

Frankly, the reason we find ourselves in the current situation is due to a number of different factors that add up to this problem.

1) There's no command/control/organization on a continental scale. There's no way for senior leadership and regular troops to get a good strategic overview of the map, troop movements, enemy movements/concentrations etc. There's an entire metagame opportunity here built around recon and intel gathering etc. Anyway, I digress.

2) Spawn room/base design. It sucks. The current designs promote the current tactic of "gain numerical superiority (10:1 ratio), swarm base, camp defenders in spawn room, cap base, rinse, repeat." This really sucks. As much for the attackers as the defenders- I hate that the fight is over in two minutes and end up sitting around most of the time waiting for the base to cap. I don't get to shoot very many people per base capture because the fight is over too quickly. And if I'm not with the "zerg" then I'm on the receiving end of the same situation. It's a lose-lose.

3) The lattice limits our options. It forces fights to funnel into just a few points, instead of allowing multiple small fights to break out over a broad front.

4) No option for old school PS1 tactics: dropping gens, dropping spawn tubes, cutting off bases from their nanite lattice supply or linked base benefits. There is/was tremendous value in the ability to do this in game, allowing for small "special forces" teams to deploy to the enemy's rear and disrupt their logistics/support.

5) Too much focus is put on gaining XP from kills and not enough around base captures, support efforts and so on. There are no bad players, just bad game designers. If the players are doing something that isn't intended/resulting in bad game play/experiences, that's not the player's fault, it's the designers fault for improperly incentivising the player goals/rewards.

A little "realism" in this game would to it some good- add some complexity and larger over-arching things to consider when playing the game other than just hopping from one base to the next, collecting XP. I'm talking logistics, communications, command and control, tactical and strategic planning tools etc.

The only way to truly keep populations balanced is to shoehorn players into the right factions by having a queue to get into that faction on x continent but that's annoying

There are four easy ways to fix this and most people will hate them.

Option 1. Further gamify the senario: Outnumbered? faster respawns, more health, more damage, lower resourse costs. Just over equip the 6 defenders they can hold off the 300 zulus with nothing but thier godlike equipment. I should mention this option is absoultely terrible.

Option 2. Give the outnumbered force an out: A.K.A go back to the hex system. Instead of defending or attacking the piece of dirt against a force they can't beat, they can just choose to leave and backcap or ghostcap to contribute to the health of the empire.

Option 3. give an ountumbered base an Orbital Strike. Think the annialator from Monday Night Combat, where you could break a stalemate by getting the annilatior. A big impressive boom that decimates the larger force. this can almost be as bad as option 1.

Option 4: Dynamic lattice; as a force gets too large, lattice links disappear. Maybe it could even be algorithm driven that will force 2 equal size forces towards eachother. Downsides are obvious: further degrades the contiental strategic meta game, reduces the need for commanders and the fact that multiple forces may work togeather and then want to split appart after taking the lcoation but can't.

Now for the hard, and right ways to fix this.

First understand why people are playing the game, as Greenfrog pointed out different players want different things out of their game of Planetside, or in Magic the Gathering terms, you need something for your Timmies, Johnnys, and your Spikes. Lets be very honest about the Zerg, its primary motivation is to maintain it's momentum; under the hex that means it just goes down the path of least residence and on the lattice it means it never leaves the lane it's chosen. In fact budging a zerg from it's chosen lane is harder than making it attack a defended location in the hex system. There is pretty much nothing that isn't a stick that will force a change in a zergs behavior. From the outset this game has been about the sheer numbers, to solve the distribution problem you will have to radicaly reproach those numbers. In otherwords, solve the underlinying problems of the hex system that you thought you could just cover up with the lattice.

The more outnumber your faction is in a hex ( location ), the more XP penalty you will receive.

Continent locking and sanctuaries.

No but you can't reliably hold up 5+ more infantry than you with vehicles. I'm not talking about farming.

SoE have changed their mind before, I plan to make the case.

We have the ability to bomb, what im presenting would be very different (and far more inaccurate) than lib guns, indeed far more like libs used to be. .

Zerg is a very loose term in the context im using it in, it could be 4 outfits cooperating.

duh. Im using purely in context of massive numbers, coordinated or otherwise. (preferring the former)

It'd keep the global population balanced, but do nothing for the local hex population balance.

33/33/33 global population can very well be 50/25/25 on each continent. And even when continent balance is 33/33/33, you can still have big zergs for each that avoid each other ruining the region balance.

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If you want even fights you need make people want to join them, in PS1 all 3 factions would pile upon the largest fights simply because capping bases with few enemies didn't give much of a reward. Spawnkills also gave very little xp, so it wasn't worth while except for making certain a base cap went through.

Spawn shields are not working as intended, use painfield like in PS1. It allows you to go in and take control of the room but it hurts making it difficult. However it does not more or less instantly kill you like today. The spawn system today is pretty much set up to drag the fights out and promote spawn farms. I honestly do not understand why you have it this way.. Rescuing an overrun base should be done by regrouping, organizing and bringing inn armor. God do I miss the galaxy drop to save a base at the last second!

So like Badgered said, make the xp reward team effort based and a function of the accumulated xp the previous 15-30 min up until base capture. Also remove the spawn shield, implement painfield and set xp for fresh out of tubes = 1 or 0. This promotes organiziation by people squadding up, which is also needed if you ever want the "zerg" to move, and also make the large fights lucrative compared to small farms.

I know this isn't PS1, but why not copy a system that worked there? In PS1 the three factions could fight for days fighting for inches, the other continents barren only filled by less amount of players because the que for the main fight was too long (cont pop lock). Often fights would end/change because one faction would see a tactical advantage of attacking a different continent etc.

Point is, in PS1 we would actually move around organized. System worked, why change it?

Exp is the carrot. Maybe not for everyone, but for enough people to start the snowball effect that creates large fights. Alerts (specifically faction swapping due to alerts) taught us that plenty of people care about exp.

To go along with resources becoming more of a local thing instead of continent wide, making an exp bonus for local pop may be useful as well. I'm not sure if it's necessary to get rid of cont bonuses and would be in favor of adding global pop bonuses back in. Just because someone is currently at an even fight, doesn't mean they shouldn't be rewarded for playing the faction that's getting their face punched in at 7 other bases/has been warpgated off one or more continents because they don't have the population to sustain that many battles. Can weight the local/continent/global pop bonuses differently, since otherwise a local bonus may be too small to encourage going there.

Exp farming outfits will flock to outnumbered fights if they're getting a bonus for it, and once a defense has started more people will trickle in now that the odds don't look quite so horrible.

The exp does need to be obvious, though. Not just 'you are currently getting this modifier' like we have now but closer to the old 'you will get this much extra' that we saw on the login screen. Tell people they'll be rewarded for going there, not just once they get there.

Methods of breaking up offensive zergs are good. Lattice splits are surprisingly effective. Saw a 48+ zerg come into Snake Ravine a few days ago and utterly crush the defense. After the cap it seemed to split 50-50 between going to Allatum and going to Vanu Archives (each owned by different factions), which suddenly made the fight more manageable.


As a few have mentioned, needing to be in the zone to get rewarded for the cap just encourages sitting around/sticking with the zerg. If people could leave early once they feel the cap is secured, it could help spread forces out (maybe they go to the next base as an advance force and the defenders get to engage in a more even fight until the rest of the zerg catches up, maybe they redeploy across the continent).

I'd start with maybe being present for 50% cap time to get full capture exp. If the defenders recap, it wouldn't start lowering that total until they'd undid half the cap (progress bar was the defender's color again, essentially) so that people don't have to turn around to 'top off' if a defender jumps on the point for a couple seconds.


In the same vein, Alert participation is a bit strict with requiring a player to be online for 100% of the alert to get the full bonus. Login partway or get DC'd and you're losing exp. Lowering the amount to 50% (or some other number) for full exp would be nice (wouldn't say 1 hour, since domination victories can last a varying amount of time). I know that I pretty much ignore alerts now.


Some zergs you just can't stop though, especially footzergs. Saw a group defend Scarred Mesa Skydock, but afterwards the vehicle terminal had been hacked and blown up (but hadn't reverted faction) so they couldn't spawn any transportation. Over 2 squads worth of infantry just kinda shrugged and started running on foot across those two super long bridges towards Regent Rock. Could've just hit redeploy, but no. Those types of players probably rarely if ever open the map so it'll be hard to entice them.

There can be no restrictions on where groups of people choose to fight or where people move to. If someone wants to throw 3 platoons at one objective totally overwhelming the enemy that's life. Tough.

The day any artificial restrictions are put in will be the day I leave the game.