Honestly, anyone in favor of a faction lock that is even a quarter of that length should be swatted upside the head. ^See, like this. This is reasonable, and would address most of the concerns that are causing folks like me to clamor for faction locking.
From what I can understand (do correct me if I'm wrong), he means to say that faction locking will stop players from switching to an alt, log into the faction that they have something against, get a tank and run over their defensive lines, for example. That's one way of griefing, I suppose. Iirc, the advantage of doing this in PS2, at least when I played, was that you could run over infantry but they, in turn, could not destroy the vehicle that was tk-ing them. Don't know if they changed it now and never tried it, so I can't say for certain.
All the concern with faction locking is because of how terrible PS2 is. You can literally be mid battle with a server pop that is relatively even, say 30% pop per team, and within minutes the team with the "advantage" will have 50-60% of the population.
Yes you can certainly kill anyone in your faction in ps2. There are a couple of issues in your scenario. A new character will not be able to pull a tank in EC. That kind of specialised equipment will have to be certified into. Secondly this isnt an arena style game. This is going to be a persistant world. You will not be able to chanhe your name. If someone purposefully griefs a bunch of other players there will be many consequences to that action. You will most likely be temporarily banned for harassment. And you will be known as a faction traitor. I can think that if you get known as a double agent in the community your game life migh be pretty hellish.
The faction lock would have to maintain offline. This would prevent things like if i log on for ten minutes then have to leave i shouldn't have to play that faction for the faction lock time minus 10 mins if i come on the next day. If that is how it works though with a faction lock of about an hour and a half then im all for it.
Here's my solution after watching the back and forth of this topic with my bag of popcorn. The solution lies in the meta. Be forewarned, my solution alienates those who refuse to be active community participants or refuse to join guilds/chapters/clans. No lock. Just balance combat in such a way that strike forces can deal with unorganized threats. VD's tend to be smaller groups of unorganized zergers... If the game balance strongly favors dedicated Strike Forces that can hold out against unorganized masses, in MY opinion, the VD threat become a moot point. The dedicated players of a given Strike Force just farm the faction hoppers and you call it a win. Caveat, have enough mods to track login patterns and create running rosters of Aliases. Make faction hopping a cloak and dagger game where if you get caught you get put on WANTED posters with a bounty on your head. So, use the dynamic to create a beneficial aspect for the seedy players and the loyal players. If you can't avoid a dynamic like this it's best to turn it into something good.
Sorry I'm late to the party, I kept reading "FL" but I can't find out what does it mean (that requires me to read at least 40+ pages <.< ) Can someone tell me what FL stands for ?
Geeez, don't you guys have no imagination? Say your original faction is SM and you're in the middle of an intense battle against Chaos. You lose a lot of men in one area due to several Elite\Hero characters, so you quickly switch with a couple of friends to Chaos faction, choose havocs with plasma cannons or lascannons, get close to the afore mentioned characters, wait for a proper time and shoot them in the back. You can do this simple trick solo or in an organised group, use vehicles to ram your 'team mates' or even orbital strike if you manage to be persistent and climb high in the enemy chain command. Several hour FL could easily prevent all this maybe not totally but at least griefers\trolls\spies wouldn't be able to do that at a precise moment whenever they need to.
