I'm not sure that's the case. There are plenty of games that put faction restrictions in place. It's not something I can see being a 'make-or-break' feature for the majority of people looking to try the game. Old WoW did it, DaoC did it, Warhammer Online did it to name a few. I was often more surprised when playing games where there was no faction locking at all. In fairness, these games had multiple servers so it was possible to try out the other factions without hindering your 'main', but I think if you told a regular Joe on the street about this game, he'd probably expect a faction lock to be in place. Not being able to switch sides with ease in a massive player-centric war-game just makes sense. I really like this idea, and I think it could be a decent incentive if coupled with a 'soft' faction-lock that has a time restriction on it. There's only going to be one giant super-mega-behemoth server in EC.
Haha okay.. kinda embarassing, but I didn't know about that. In this case I'll vote yes for faction lock
At most i would have the lockout timer match the longest base capture timer. Events that reward free stuff for just being on like the alerts in ps2 are a horrible design flaw and i hope to never see them in EC. You should reward for participation in the event not just happening to be around when it ends.
Bold part is why I stand by my statement. We may not have multiple servers, so this would turn more people off. However do not read that as: The game is broken the sky is falling etc. I am not saying that at all. It may change my outlook on whether or not to play the game, and I am pretty comfortable being a lone shooter on that one. However I am absolutely not screaming fail game, etc. Not at all. Just standing by my personal preference.
What if, like Whiskey intimated at, instead of punishing people for switching (because that just won't stop people switching and will scare some people off) you reward people for faction loyalty, something simple like an RP generation for the amount of time that you are online in a single faction, the RP has a multiplier that gives more RP per 24 hours of online activity (this can be broken activity as logging off doesn't harm your faction) but if you switch faction you lose the reward for that 24 hour period completely and the multiplier resets. So in essence the longer you play a single faction without switching the more RP you generate, if you switch, you bank what you have but your RP generation has to start from scratch from that moment on (on the faction you switched to). This way you don't block people that really want to switch, and you encourage people to stay loyal to their faction.
There's not going to be a complete faction lock, or even a campaign length lockout. Which is an absolute shame but that's business. But at the very least we need some assurances that you won't be able to twitch-log to pick up faction victory cred, xp/rp earned on one toon should be non-transferable across factions and finally; screwing with a faction to aide another faction is an exploit and goes beyond griefing especially with FF active. It's an exploit pure and simple and there needs to be a rapid response system for players to report these people to a GM immediately and have repeated abuse ban-hammered. Swapping is going to damage organic content generation for the community, that's a guaranteed flaw with faction jumping, but any PS2/Rift style abuse of the faction system when it's the macro theme of the entire game will turn me off quicker than anything else.
the main problem is not the average joe that logs in for a quick peak at the enemies objectives (FL prevents this i' ll give you that )it is those people with 3rd party communication systems that stay logged as the "enemy" in order to feed their guild information in my opinion and FL cant stop them ...
Hehehe...what if we don't punish people for FF abuses but reward them for not killing your team mates? You know where such wishfull thinking mechanics lead to?
