My clan is a Space Marine one, but I am a fan of Orks, that said I would like a soft lock. As I sorta mentioned in my earlier post maybe a cooldown on faction swapping can be done especially during "alert" like scenarios. For those who never played Planetside 2, Alerts are big missions that all the factions are given to fight over usually for an hour and a half where the objective leader wins and gets bonus XP. Unfortunately they dont have a system to protect against what those in Planetside 2 call the "fourth faction" in a 3 faction game. The fourth faction is when a significant amount of players from all the factions log out and back onto the winning faction or the faction that is known to win during these alerts. The game goes from being relatively balanced to imbalanced because people will pretty much do anything not to "lose" not even just to win. So IMO after seeing the reality of a massive fps game with multiple factions have this problem because they have total freedom, I would vote more towards factional locks or cooldowns during alert like scenarios...thankfully we wont have to worry about people server swapping due to their pikko setup.
Again, any faction lock will hurt the game sales as you will be able to purchase a single faction instead of buy the whole game, if there is going to be a faction lock a lot of people will not buy the whole game, they will buy just 1 or 2 factions. It will hurt revenue.
That would entirely depend on the time limit, say I log onto my Ork, there isn't much organised going on for Orkz and the day is a touch boring, so I switch to my Chaos marine, as I heard that there is a siege going on between Chaos and Eldar. But wait a second I hit a lock of a few hours, so I'm turning my computer off disappointed and that's going to hurt the game.
Assuming they have alerts like Planetside 2, which I hope they do, then that would be the only time to use it...during "downtime" all factions should be open. During the main event people should pick their side and stick with it until the end of that event. So if that event, say the siege you hear is chaos vs eldar, is about an hour long event driven by a game system then you should be locked onto Chaos for that hour to prevent you from being a bandwagon jumper and show some heart for your faction you chose to represent during that event. It is more disappointing to go through an hour long battle that is even population only to have internet bandwagon jumpers flip over to the winning side and steal victory from your faction that was possible until the end. There has to be a compromise between total faction lock, and total freedom that causes imbalances. Only thing I can think of off the top of my head is the factional cooldown.
Well Gary that's why it would be a choice and I'm sure there will be something going on at all times weather it would be pvp or pve some how I'm sure there is a way you can alway help your faction.
Free range to exploit greatly harms retention, both good-will and future content purchases, and turns off new post-launch clients. It's a difficult situation with sacrifices. Not saying you aren't equally right but there are more than a few difficult considerations on the table. There is no total-win to be had, only mitigating the restrictions either way. Edited: my typing sucks donkey tozzle today
Faction lock would be very bad, for a few reasons, one would be that hardly any players are going to play Eldar, quite a few will be playing multiple races and will want to play Eldar. Having them locked would mean they will stay at a low percent and wont win any campaigns, its best if we keep the races open for all to play. Orks will need hundreds and thousands of players, for every reason, if they are locked then what fun would that be? I wouldnt be able to have a serious gaming session with my friends then go play Orks just to have fun, speaking of which, if factions are locked, I wont be able to play with my friends who like eldar and orks, I would only be able to fight them. Besides all of this, tyranids are still the worlds balance, they will go and buttpound the most populated faction, so having each one locked would be annoying. Edit: This is a single server world wide, when the hell will half of those players switch to a winning side? Since there are so many people playing at once I dont think it would even matter.
Well Cupcakeunless this isn't a permanent faction lock but a time limited one like what Planet side 1 had in place now I'm not saying copy the length since it was a 24 hour lock then after the time was up you could choice another faction to lock into for another 24 hours or just choose the same one you have been playing. Not having a timed faction lock in place leaves it wide open for those who wish to exploit it look at planet side 2 for a instance because there is no faction lock that gave birth to the fourth faction that swaps to what ever flavor of the month they deem it to be, thus destroying any real population or faction loyalty or even gameplay emersion. If people don't want to play Eldar that's there choice we shouldn't sacrifice quality mechanics.
