Why isn't there any disincentive to empire hop?

Discussion in 'PlanetSide 2 Gameplay Discussion' started by VoidMagic, Sep 23, 2013.

  1. VoidMagic

    Originally, I was going to ask why Empire switching is allowed at all, but I guess that genie is too far outta the bottle to deal with. Then I was going to ask why there isn't a weekly empire switch timer and eventually I argued myself down to a 6 hour and then finally just an Alert empire switch timer... Eventually, I had to ask myself, why there IS NO DISINCENTIVE to 4th faction band wagonning at all? Does this make anyone truly happy?

    /discuss illuminate explain
    • Up x 1
  2. Tommyp2006

    Because they don't want to prevent players from playing whichever character they choose. Even putting a timer on switching wouldn't do anything, because you are allowed to have as many accounts as you want. In the end, they don't want to say to their customers "no you are not allowed to play this character right now"
    • Up x 3
  3. KenDelta

    Look @ it from this point of view.

    You play NC Connery , you feel that NC is lacking in this server and want to try other prospective , you join TR Connery and randomly fall in love on how they roll.
    Or maybe you have some friends that you discovered that they play on the otherside and wanted to join them.

    SOE doesn't want to limit your gameplay experience to 1 faction.
    • Up x 2
  4. Andehh

    Ask the 4th faction on Miller, alert happens 15% of the global pop joins TR!!
    • Up x 1
  5. Copasetic

    Because this is Free To Play, Your Way!™
    • Up x 1
  6. SolLeks


    This could still be done with a timer, it would just force someone to take a break for x amount of time.
  7. KenDelta

    I totally agree to be honest , based on how people abuse this and thus we get "4th factioning"
  8. chrisbeebops

    Because it doesn't matter. 4th factioning is a symptom, not the sickness.

    The real problem is that there are greater incentives to join the higher population side than the lower population side.

    Why would you want to fight out of your warpgate with no resources to pull vehicles, aircraft, MAXs, or consumables when you can play on a team that controls the map, has a larger army, has a larger selection of battles to fight at, and much more resources to pull vehicles, aircraft, MAXs, and consumables?
    • Up x 3
  9. SolLeks

    yep.

    and honestly if someone is dedicated enough to make a 2ed or 3rd account just to faction hop, I don't think there is anything we could do to stop this, however if it just was not as easy to do (Press logout, click toon, press login) then many less people would do that - and I do have toons on the other 2 factions on my server so I can fly with other aces, and I would not mind giving that up to get rid of most of the 4th faction.
  10. KAHR-Alpha

    From Higby: https://forums.station.sony.com/ps2...ou-who-are-sick-of-4th-faction-alerts.150807/

  11. SolLeks

    • Up x 2
  12. Profileiche

    How about adding real resources to the games? Right now the resources appear out of nowhere, travel over a magic link right to the pad, or tank spawn or infantry terminal. ANT would be a clever step back to having an incentive to cover your backland (where the resource transport rolls) and an incentive for flanking attack to cut off resources on the main zergs.

    Limit the power of extra territorial combat (zerg rushing to the next base) by increase resource cost for every repair, reload and sundy spawn at the adjacent friendly bases, depending on how far the support action is away from friendly territory. (We already have number for that; Influence)

    Also add a handicap / support modifier on repair and heal actions. So it reflects the difficulty on spreading support ANT to the troops by decreasing the heal / rep rate up to +100% if you are >48 in one area. (Maybe even take into account the overall number of resource in the area - 10x Flash = 1000 resources and so on...).

    With those modifiers, it wouldn't be dependant on how overpopped the faction is, but on how effective they deal with their resources. Large armies usually tend to WASTE a lot of resource. This would take this into account.
    • Up x 1
  13. Tommyp2006

    I would say instead of making it a timer based restriction, make it an EXP based disincentive. Make it so that after choosing one character, if you switch to another faction before x amount of time, you will only gain 25-50% of the normal amount of EXP. This way, players are penalized from switching factions too often, but of course are still allowed to play whichever character they want. If they want to stop faction hopping, IMO this might be the best way to solve it. This should also help stop those who switch factions for a few minutes just to TK a sundy or other players, then switch back to their main, because they would have that exp penalty on their main for switching factions twice.
  14. Ghosty11

    Meh, all SOE needs to do is tie the end of alert XP gain to global population percentage. AT 33% population your faction gets a multiplier of 1, every percentage point your faction is about 34% you get less of the total reward your faction would have earned. It wouldn't solve everything, but less people would switch if they could get as much XP as the overpop faction once the alert is over.
  15. Ruganum

    SOE missed the right time for the best solution, which is, to simply allow only one factions characters on each server. That way, the hopping on alerts, on situations, on massive zergs, would never have been an issue at all. Switching faction would have ment switching server to a complete different situation, so you would switch to experience something else instead of switching for the little edge of situational advantage. That way everyone could play every faction without penalties, giving the full gaming experience.

    But now it is too late for this, unfortunately.

    Btw: Giving penalties for switching servers would only penalize paying customers, since only they have an interest to stay on the same account. It would be a real bad idea to punish those, and those exclusively, who keep the game running.

    On the other hand: XP-gain penalties for switching factions too fast on ONE server (as described by Tommyb, slowly going up to normal over several hours) might come closest to the real solution, described above. People would start to chose their main avatar on each server and propably tend to stick with it.
    • Up x 1
  16. Andy79

    why was it allowed to make different faction characters on the same server ? who was the person that had the say in that decision
  17. HooWoo

    So Briggs players have to play on 200+ ping servers to play another faction?
    • Up x 1
  18. illgot

    why is it an issue? Not like you win anything for controlling a base.
  19. VoidMagic

    There are ways of identifying a players PC not their account. Pretty basic actually. I do it all the time. Win GUID ID, Hard Drive serial ID, etc..., heck just drop a few GUIDs in their registry, Win is so bloated you'll never find the right one ... all of this or some of it or any combination is darn effective at Identifying 99% of folks. You disable it, you get caught, you lose your character. BAN HAMMA

    It has nothing to do with super 1337 15 year old amature scrip kiddie's thinking they can outsmart ancient evolved security developers... lol... military hackers sure... kids... nope.

    It's SOE decision to allow it. As a paying customer, I'd much rather have a "game" where people defend their "faction" not their "cert grind".
  20. MarlboroMan-E

    Higgles said in an interview somewhere that if they did something (anything) to prevent switching, they'd only be punishing their paying players - who are generally going to use one account - and have absolutely no impact on F2P players that just fire up another account.