Thanks, I'm sure bE will have thought of something similar themselves, but there's also the danger that they will cap faction populations or put their faith in faction alliances and enlightened self interest to balance things, and I can't really see either working.

Yeah zerg forces will tend to get less individual action (unless squads and strikeforces get the req for kills,) but I personally wouldn't expect that, or the cohesiveness of small kill teams, to have enough of an effect to counterbalance things.

In my experience zergs may not get as much action individually, and they may not get as many kills per zerging player as a smaller team, but they can bring much more firepower to bear meaning that they will find it easier to get kills.
Conversely a player in a zerg that is being focus fired on will naturally (i.e. without needing any special co-ordination by the team) retreat into the mass of his/her fellows making it harder for the opposition to get kills and the Req that come with them.


That 'zerg' effect will still be a problem even with a req boost for the low population faction, but on the plus side the req boost will amplify the effects of skillful play and good team work since they will get more req per kill and so their individual ability will count much more.
So even if it doesn't completely level the playing field it will put the emphasis much more on the individual player and team's success, which I'm hoping will give players in smaller factions the opportunity to feel 'heroic'.

Players have certainly become jaded when it comes to mmos and are much more likely to jump ship if they aren't feeling they are getting the excitement, rewards and camaraderie they're looking for.

The first few months after a game's release are critical to it's success and the bar is set much higher than it used to be, so for a game to become huge it needs to provide a very satisfying experience so that players become sufficiently invested in large enough numbers for them to attract more players (what I call the wow effect) rather than losing players en-masse through disaffection and boredom.

Since this window for success is surprisingly small and players are hugely influenced by the other players (MMO players are at heart social animals) this makes me wonder if games companies aren't shooting themselves in the foot by having long periods of open (paid) beta access.

Although this may seem a good idea to the money men who want to recoup as much cash as quickly as possible I think it may have a very negative effect overall, not only by pissing off players by being an obvious cash grab, but by setting up a situation in which the players who only wanted to try the game out because they are bored (i.e. the really jaded players) get burned out by trying to make the most of their 'head start' on everyone else, then to add to that they get annoyed at all the 'noobs' that appear right after the official launch date.
Since they are exactly the kind of player who gets bored easily they quit shortly after launch while creating a sh*7 storm on the game forums about everything they think is wrong with the game, which is exactly what the game doesn't need.
Admittedly this is more of a problem in a themepark game with vertical progression, but it's something I've noticed with quite a lot of the recent batch of MMOs.

I agree completely with the OP about buffing the resource gain of underplayed factions. I'm a bit cynical of the polling since I feel it could easily be abused, but I have no solution to that problem - perhaps double or triple polling in random intervals rather than three times a day around peak play times.

Instead here's how I'd feed the underdog and starve the zerg.

I'd feed the underdog in exactly the same manner; by giving them resource buffs but I'd require players to pay through the teeth with their resources to swap factions - and have major incentives to keep players on the faction and only switch once a day without having faction locking. To explain this further I need to explain how I'd run the economy.

Two Resources:

Requisition - Earned by owning territory and key points in the world. This is the resource that will receive rate buffs depending on how many people are on your faction. It is used to buy everything, from ammo, weapons, armor, and tanks.

Power - Signifies how invested you are in your faction and requires significant Requisition investment to put additional Reactors (Increases Rate of Production), Capacitors (Reduces Cooldowns on purchasing items and using supporting abilities), and Batteries: Storage of power. Power is constantly being collected and stored, when you are in the game, and when you are not. The longer you have been playing a faction, the more power you will have at your disposal, and therefore more ability to change your tactics, armor, and even deploy rates.

The Maw of the Warp - To signify your breaking of allegiance, when you choose to switch factions, all of your other characters power is reduced to 0 as you warp out of your character, and above Akrohma as the next character's warp in and your craft will restore its power supply at the rate that you have invested into it. This makes sense, after all, warp drives require almost all of a ship's power reserves to travel within the empyrean.

What this means: A you have a vested interest in your character, you will not only become more and more flexible, but also more resilient to defeat. Switching factions will allow you to join a zerg as the most basic trooper for a limited amount of time before more and more power is generated; costing valuable time. Should you have stayed on your own faction, you would receive bonuses for being the underdog, carry your best weapons and be able to replenish them quickly if you died, redeploy quicker, have quicker ability cool downs, and even possibly be able to field more tanks than the enemy.

You should really think about putting that forward as a suggestion in it's own right.

It may not be entirely workable in it's current form as it could conflict a bit with the planned EXP based progression, but there's no reason it couldn't be made to work, either parallel to that, or superimposed on it.

Secondly Requisition already carries with it a natural aspect of what you are calling 'power' in that it limits how quickly you can respawn with better armor, but as bE have already stated that some spawns will have cooldown timers it could well be used to speed that up.

Either way it sounds interesting.

Simply put, no. I understand wanting things to be balanced but I do not feel like punishing a faction because they are attractive. I do not want someone to have a better chance of discovering something because they do not have as many friends as I do... fk that. Your suggestions are noble but lets not take this out of proportion. I believe the devs will have this sorted out if they are able to successfully implement the 1 "Server to rule them all" ability. In other words, there will be SOO many of each faction online at a given point in time, it will appear to be balanced. Not everyone will want to be in one spot fighting. Not everyone will be doing PvP at any given point in time. I know, this means that a faction can have other people go do other missions/stuff if they had higher numbers but to be honest.. that is part of life.

I look forward to the challenge, no matter what may come. I prefer a balance of abilities/characters. I prefer not to receive a message at start up saying "Hey, you have to be Ork today because you didn't log on early enough and SM or CS is currently outnumbering everyone else..." We have to remember, this is supposed to be oen server for multi-platforms. Lets have faith in something being accomplished that has yet to be accomplished.

Frankly I'm surprised that there haven't been more dissenting opinions - I was getting worried

Now I've no problem with dissenting views, and if they make sense I will even change or amend my ideas accordingly (as has been the case previously) however I would prefer it if you had actually taken the time to read and digest my suggestion before replying, not to mention providing some rationale for your views.

For instance the above is based on little more than blind faith and if you are basing your argument on faith I doubt that any amount of reasoned analysis will sway you, but I should point out that rather than helping matters a single server can actually do the opposite, It effectively places all the developers eggs in one basket, meaning that the game will succeed or fail as a whole rather than one piece at a time as is the case with a multi instance game.
Whereas a multi instance game can offer the promise that another server may be more balanced, this game cannot, which in turn means that faction imbalances could easily be the death of the game - for all the reasons that I and others have outlined previously.

Now you appear to be suggesting that having more players somehow lessens the impact of population imbalance... Frankly I don't even know where to begin in dealing with that sort of belief, but I would start by asking you how you think that would happen? By what mechanism does a larger population offset population imbalance?

Beliefs aside, for a real world illustration of how population imbalances can and do affect a multifaction game I suggest you follow the link I provided to an example of this in Planetside 2.
Having done so you may now imagine a situation in which you couldn't even switch to a different server to get a fair fight as those players can, because that's exactly what will be the case with a single shared world.

Is not even vaguely reasonable as an argument as it is overall military might that is being compared and which will win the day in most campaigns. Campaigns I might add that will have multiple battles being fought on many different fronts.

There may well be small skirmishes where the larger faction has less forces present than a smaller faction, but these will not be common and certainly won't do anything to counter the overall population imbalances in the larger conquest side of the game since such occasions are just statistical blips.

Is truly facepalm worthy as a statement since we are talking about a game that the Devs have described as being 90% PVP, and where territorial conquest is the central aim of the game and the route to victory.
Additionally the PVE side of the game is tied to the PVP side, meaning that the relative proportions of each faction engaged in PVE won't matter since they will still benefit their faction in PVP even though not directly engaged in PVP battles.

I wonder if those people who play the lower population factions who are constantly getting steamrollered by larger factions due to a clear and obvious lack of balance will share your complacent, laid back attitude? .. will they just laconically say "C'est la Vie" or will they rage, switch to larger factions making the situation worse and eventually quit?

And this is exactly what I mean about how it would be nice if you had actually taken the time to read my suggestion.
If you had done so you may have noticed that I am actually suggesting a way that factions can be balanced without imposing population caps, infact I've gone on record as being dead against that.



Just as an afterthought is "but I do not feel like punishing a faction because they are attractive." a good argument?
After-all it ignores the fact that we aren't talking about ways to punish the larger factions, but rather ways to help smaller factions stay competitive.
Which I may add is particularly ironic considering the fact that by my suggestion smaller factions will still be weaker overall than larger factions since they will lose out on the buffs that come from being able to hold more territory.

A better question would be.. What do you think is more important? That larger factions have an overwhelming advantage at a detriment to the game as a whole, or that the game was slightly more balanced so that the smaller factions at least had a fighting chance, provided they tried really hard?

ugh... Your filibuster wins. I have heretics to squash *flies away*

To be honest, I am not sure exactly HOW it will be balanced but a few ideas as to how large populations could balance themselves out would be, for example: A particular war zone has reached cap. Meaning, the server will allocate a certain amount of slots per faction for each potential "war" zone. Meaning that after 100 or 1000 of each faction has entered that area, than that area will be off limits for others of the same faction. or with a few hundred CSM and SM slugging it out in one area, hundreds of eldar hit one of them from another angle. I am just thinking that if you have a lot of each faction on a server, and people log on at different times and w/e, than it would sort of balance its' self out. I understand everyone's concerns on overpopulation by one faction. I watched the videos and listened to the complaints.

In one game, Maple Story, you had a few "worlds". I think each world was a server. On those servers were different channels. Now, it was possible to switch channels on the same server (world) in a moments notice. Meaning that maybe they could implement a "channel" feature into EC. Where as people could switch channels while being on the same server and than continue on their quests or battles. That kept the servers balanced because people would, in Maple Story, go to different channels if one channel is over populated. Each channel is the same as another. So, if one faction is getting beasted on channel 2 than they can reinforce their brethren on channel 8 and win by numbers or be comparable in numbers. I DON'T KNOW. I'm just saying. lol

They may either quit or go to the forums and, through many announcements and w/e, become larger. There will be many people playing different races, it happens ALL the time. I will never, EVER play as Chaos but I may play as Eldar. If Orks are fun/funny enough, I would play as them also. To be honest, I have honor, so if my faction was being beaten down than I wouldn't quit it and join the winning faction. Many people do, shameful. However, that's their choice. I would love for things to be balanced but not at the expense of boosting another factions resource rate; That's just me. Maybe give an incentive to start the weaker faction character off at lvl 5 or 10 if someone makes that character.

I think the best thing for the game would be to have a balance. To answer your above question within the context that it has been asked: I think that the game should be balanced so that smaller factions had a fighting chance. I admit, I did not read all of your post, I was tired. I offer no excuses but only explanations. I read the stuff which I did not particularly agree with and than answered. lol Guess my "Red Thirst" kicked in and I left the advantageous position I did hold (to read all of your statement) to charge the field and address what was currently within my field of vision (the points I saw that I did not particularly agree with). Either way, I came back to talk about this because I did not want to disrespect the time and effort that you took into posting. Thank you.

You think I was trying to put off a vote or obstruct a parliamentary procedure by talking at length?

Writing carefully and clearly in order to best explain a position is not Filibustering and neither is taking the time and effort to actually examine your 'points' in order to explain why they aren't logical and have no supporting evidence.

hehehehe I was just messing with you. Besides, i'm trying to go back and read ALL of what you first wrote...

Did you miss the part where I pointed out that the campaigns will be fought on several different fronts?
It doesn't matter if 'war zones' (which incidentally haven't even been mentioned as being a thing) have a population cap since larger factions will still be able to field decent sized armies in more war zones than the smaller factions and hence will still win more battles.
Chopping a problem up into chunks doesn't solve the problem since it's the weight of the whole that counts.

Furthermore this idea of population capped war zones conflicts with the whole point of using pikkoservers and imposes a very obvious gamey limit on battles of exactly the type you were grumbling about in your last post.
"Sorry you can't join that battle, population cap reached!"

How on earth do you expect factions with wildly different populations to be balanced out by random players logging in and out at random times?
Again that's not a rational expectation, it's just wishy thinking!

But EC isn't using a standard instancing system with separate large servers that each carry their own 'channels' 'shards' whatever, instead it has a single shared world with a whole bunch of little servers that all pull together to help carry the whole.

So in effect you are suggesting that they abandon using pikkoservers and go back to the normal MMO server system just to brush the population imbalance issue under the carpet?!

Let's flip that over.
Why do you feel that smaller factions as a whole should have less requisition than larger factions?

I guess you are probably a 40k player so let me ask you this, Have you ever had a tabletop game that wasn't balanced on points?

And yet you spend so much effort in arguing against one way to even the balance?

What would you prefer, that smaller factions did more damage or were buffed?
Since you clearly believe that there should be balance how do you think smaller factions should be balanced against larger factions?

But clearly not so long as it involves anything to do with having equal requisition as a faction because that is essentially what I'm suggesting.

If faction A gets 5 req per player and has 20 players it has 100 req as a faction.
If faction B gets 4 req per player and has 25 players it still has 100 req as a faction.

I appreciate you taking the time and your sarcasm was a particular delight.