Why isn't there any disincentive to empire hop?

^This, i know a guy who as 3 game rigs all lined up, one for each faction, he just runs around killing objectives on each of his monitors. It's an issue for sure, but its FTP and that my cyber friends is whole new ball game compared to p2p.

What you are suggesting now is that SOE install spyware on our systems. That sounds like some pretty shady work you do there.

Anti-shady work actually.

Actually I'm having a hard time believing that your in that line of work at all but that's besides the point.

Also, I don't appreciate threats.

good thing you weren't threatened.

Just stating all these things can and do happen, regardless of your beliefs, sorry if you misunderstood.

My point is..

It's a simple matter to id pc's uniquely for at least %80 if not more of the player base and that would end the 4th faction switching. While I wouldn't care if the factions were locked, I understand the need to allow folks to switch, I also understand it would greatly help the game to have a timer.

That is all, and as you can't tell a discussion from a threat and insist on baiting and ad'hominums /ignore

I was. You just said that I have no way of hiding and that I would have a real bad day if I came across somebody like you.

I consider that very threatening, especially coming from somebody who appears to be a bit zealous in his beliefs.

It does - even if they're not great players, sheer numbers just changes the dynamics of a fight and turns things into a steamroll. I doubt if any of the more senior level players (ie. those with some level of time investment if not SC/etc) likes the 4th faction. Population imbalance on servers in general is just not good (did I just open another can of unaddressed SOE worms?)!

The 4th faction has little to no loyalty because their investment is significantly less - unfortunately that's the bottom line we have to deal with given the free to play model. The mass herds of lower BRs who may not have spent a single cent can easily switch sides. Even with timers, no alerts, etc... there's still nothing they have to lose by switching to whichever faction is doing the most steamrolling.

Population locks for non-members that keep any faction from steamrolling continents could work... basically people would have to spread out more across continents and if your faction has too much overall server pop then you'll just be stuck in a queue waiting to login to any continent even. They need to add continent level queues, so that say at some level - I don't know, 36%? 40%? if you reach that on a continent, people get queued even if the continent max limit is not reached yet.

37% of server pop, 40% of continent pop before lower queues come into play could be a way for SOE to work around 4th factioners causing steamrolling issues. If they can't play one faction (due to overpop) they'll just switch to another. Those with memberships won't be subject to these lower queues, so SOE retains their revenue stream, doesn't upset the paying customer, but once and for all, can actually start addressing population imbalance and 4th faction switching.

When the game first started, you could only have one toon per Empire per server. This resulted in a bunch of people registering multiple accounts to play multiple empires on the same server. In the end, the only people penalised were the people not willing to go registering multiple accounts.

For people living in the US and Europe, it might not be an issue - you guys get, how many servers exactly to chose from? 3 or 4?

For people not living in the US or Europe, many only get one server choice. Prime example is Briggs. Its been a while since a major MMO developer even created a server specifically for Australians, let alone actually PUTTING IT IN AUSTRALIA. We get one server with decent latency, so forcing us to play on foreign servers with 180 (West Coast US) to 350 (European) ping just to play a second faction is a little crappy.

Briggs doesn't just serve Australians, but also offers the lowest latency for a lot of players in SE Asia. So if you include just Australia, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and the Phillipines, that's about 500 million people. I don't think SOE wants to tell 500 million people they can only play with one character on one server unless they want crappy ping.

Adding to the issue is account wide unlocks. If they maintained the 'one empire per server' rule, then people in Europe and the US, who can happily chose from 3-4 servers without affecting their gamplay significantly, would happily be able to use their account wide unlocks across multiple servers with the same account, whilst people living in more remote areas would only be able to use their account wide unlocks on more than one server if they were happy to accept playing with a crappy ping to a foreign server.

Some good points all around regarding the lack of penalty.

However it really comes back to PS1's "smaller pop limits with more continents", which elegantly improves population imbalance and fixes this problem elegantly.

Basically each continent is a set of scales which can hold a certain weight of players (2000 players per empire, right?) The problem is, servers aren't large enough to fill one continent consistently (let alone 3). So any imbalance in population has an impact.

Meanwhile in PS1, the scales were much smaller (200 players per empire per continent), but there were more sets of scales (more continents.) This resulted in a lot of fully-pop-capped, completely balanced fights where population had no impact.

The big benefit of smaller pop limits (with more continents) is that it balances population.

How does this relate to a discussion on high-pop disincentives? Well a side benefit of this system is that the high-pop empire is most penalized. If pop limits are 200 per continent and empire populations are 1000, 1000, and 1500, then 3000 players are in even fights -- and 500 players in the overpopulated empire have nobody to fight at all. So the incentive isn't any arbitrary game resource, but fun itself. Which tells players, "It's more fun if I help balance the teams."

Especially if this is done in conjunction with a Mercenaries feature, where you don't have to ditch your main character in order to help out underpopulated players. Being a merc would be a toggle (48 hr cooldown) between mercs or your original empire. While you are assigned to the lowest-population empire and fight for them. The benefit is higher "pay" (XP, resources) than you'd regularly get. Weapon unlocks would each have an equivalency in the other empire.

Just as a final point to all those that think they're anonymous on the internet...

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/03/n...r-illegal-drugs-is-charged-fbi-says.html?_r=0

your not.