Why is Amerish so unpopular?

There is simple answer for this. Lack of people. Come on SOE, merge the servers already.

Amerish is the Air Map. Aircraft balance is a problem on every map, but it's the worst on Amerish.

It's less of an air map than Esamir.

Amerish is certainly NOT "the air map".

If a map that makes flying more difficult, is "the air map", then I guess you are correct.

Valleys, hills, and mountains force aircraft to take more predictable and dangerous angles for Air to ground combat. Anti-air infantry and armor have a much easier time focusing fire and deterring aircraft. Plus, most ESF pilots will fly into a mountain as soon as you start shooting at them.

Pro Tip: Flat terrain offers the most attack vectors for flying combatants. More attack vectors means more opportunities. More opportunities means more kills.

Translation: Flat maps favor Air-power. Mountainous terrain favors infantry and armor.

The only reason people are on indar is due to how friendly it is towards vehicle and air play. All the major outfits out there wants the most advantage they can get against the average player so they'll want to roll tanks and air obviously. The average player will not play on a deserted continent due to not being enough "action".

So to get people out of indar, we need to give large outfits an incentive to actually move to the other continents. Currently there is no incentive. You get more exp/hour just spamming grenades at spawn points even if you die every minute as compared to capping the entire empty continent. Currently the only incentive to do anything in the game is to get exp. More exp= more incentive.

Currently the population is low enough that i think 1 continent at a time should be locked after its been capped. This would force everyone else onto the 2 other continents. If you can force a ton of players to play on amerish, then i bet you that the average player will enjoy not having to deal with infinite mag rider spam, and a significantly less amount of noob rocket podders due to them crashing into the mountains/trees every minute.

This probably wouldn't affect the pro rocket podders or the organized tank outfits, but anything that cuts down on the vehicle spam would definitely be noticeable towards the average player. Forcing libs to fly closer to actually get clear shots at the spawn due to the mountains would allow the average noob player to feel like they're accomplishing something by "narrowly missing" libs with their default dumb rockets. Making players feel good about doing something is very important in keeping them around, and i'm pretty sure everyone wants more players to shoot at.

Having all the randoms on amerish would force the large outfits to fight on amerish which would then bring in more players because thats where the fights are at.

TL: DR the average player is pretty dumb, and needs to be herded like sheep to where the fun is at. They don't know where they can have more fun at without other people telling them.

A random dbl XP king-of-the-hill objective should pop up on the least populated continent from time to time.

That's not my observation in game or from comments on the forums. It's pretty simple really, Vehicles are OPed in PS2, and on Amerish ground vehicles (along with Infantry) are severely hampered by terrain, Aircraft are not.

Not really. Mountainous terrain makes it easy to break LoS with everything on the ground and makes it difficult for them to pursue aircraft. Flat terrain, the only thing saving aircraft from flak guns is the AA's shoddy aim and an overly mitigating composite armor. There isn't a point on Esamir where one can't see what is coming at them starting from maximum draw distance.

imo Amerish > Indar > Easamir on the scale of liked continents

Flat:
5 libs with daltons sitting outside of AA range can massacre ANY tank collum, no contest.

Mountainous:
5 libs have to get within AA range just to get line of sight. Tank collum wins.

That simple.

ESFs are not that big of a threat unless in large numbers. Large numbers of ESFs in one spot in mountainous terrain = lots of sucide, collisions, and confusion. Not very effective. Liberators are the major threat from the skies. They benefit most from flat terrain.

I like Indar because of the geographical variety.
I like Esamir because I get the best framerate there.
I like Amerish for its overall look, but I get the lowest framerate there. A Flash with an afterburner is a nice (and semi-suicidal) way to get over the hills.

I'm pretty sure said libs can sit at the flight ceiling and fire down on said tank column with impunity. It's possible to sit outside of AA range vertically too, not just horizontally. Since we're talking valleys here, there isn't a whole lot of directions for the tanks to go when they're under fire, and they're being funneled into tight quarters because there's no where for them to spread out.

Additionally, only on Esamir do I find waves of infantry successfully marching across a snowy field, simply because they can unload onto any aircraft with the only real issue being their missile's crappy pathing completely missing the target. It's the same way on the Indar seabed too. Flat land benefits ground forces more than being funneled into a 70m wide valley, which is nearly all of Amerish. It's all about cover, and mountains are an air craft's cover that vehicles and infantry don't have the luxury of quickly hiding behind. They're all fish in a barrel on Amerish.

Gun for a lib that sits at the vertical flight ceiling in Indar. Guess what you see? Nothing but terrain.

Gun for a lib that sits at the vertical flight ceiling in Amerish. Guess what you see? Nothing at all.

Seems some never even was on amerish, if they think aircrafts have it nice there.

Its easy to figure out. Amerish is the hardest cont to play on all around. You can just spawn 20 HA and 20 medics and use the crappy rendering to plow through your enemy then result to a pile of armor or air after when it falls apart.

I like it but nobody plays their....So it sucks because of that.

Indar is the best tho.

I go to Amerish, there's nothing going, it gets boring. I go to Esamir, there's nothing going on, it gets boring. I go to Indar, everyone is there, huge battles everywhere, I have to stay there in order to do anything, have fun, shoot at enemies etc. This wont change as long as SOE codes some game mechanics to the game that makes people change continents. Add XP bonus on under populated conts etc.

My biggest single problem with the game atm is that I'm getting bored of having to stay in Indar 24-7. Before "join outfit and go to other conts en masse" I tried it, so we TR, went with a large force to Amerish expecting some NC resistance since they seem to be keen on capping it, but we capped it in an hour or two with practically no resistance at all, woo how fun is that.

I believe there are a few reasons for amerish being unpopular.

The biggest is that the majority is just choke point after choke point for land vehicles. On top of that it takes forever for land vehicles to get anywhere. The routes aren't at all intuative (not that indar's are, but everyone "knows" the map).

There is also the issue of the positive feedback loop. No one is on Amerish, only time anyone goes to amerish is to mass cap it against little or no resistance. There is only so many times you can do this before you get bored of it. Despite the naysayers, Indar actually has a bit of a Meta game to it, Esamire as well to a lesser extent, Amerish, however, because of its unpopular nature, simply doesn't have the "global server interest" for there to even be a development of a meta-game.

I have had a few good fights there since live, but I don't think it will be a major player until until they develop some sort of "warp gate locking" mechanism that pushes players onto amerish from more popular continents, but they need sanctuaries and additional continents before they do that.

Removing the AMS from the Galaxy, as a whole, helped the game (it will be making a return), but practically killed Amerish. Air transport of Vehicles as well as the return of the AMS to the gal, in addition to that flying aircraft carrier might make it more interesting. The implementation of continent pop specific XP boosts may also help.

I strongly believe it should be redesigned. Have the mountain ranges closer to the middle of the map, the TR warpgate is currently easily camped because there is a huge "Bowl" keeping us in. It's as if you put Quartz Ridge from Indar right in front of our warp gate instead of a desert.

I don't know if the other two warp gates are like this.

This is actually a really good idea that I haven't read before. Once a faction locks a continent, the last one locked unlocks and it goes around in a round robin style.

I'd love this. You should make a suggestion post and cc it to the reddit r/planetside forums. Devs read there as much, if not more, than here.

It's not a permanent fix, but it would be a very effective and cool functioning band-aid until we get sanctuaries and more continents. I'd imagine it's also relatively simple to impliment, just prevent "recapping" of any points once the "Continent is captured" cue is triggered.

It's actually my favourite continent out of the three. Problem is, there's by far the least amount of players on my server. Capping empty bases is no fun. So I end up on Indar most of the time