Balancing Faction population.. with online player caps / queues / waits.

[Silas Farseer]

As I'm sure people know, PVP2 has been losing players like crazy to PVP1.  I believe this stems from an unbalanced player population, where US players greatly outnumbered  the other factions who felt it was a slippery slope into oblivion.

 

I believe a solution (albeit somewhat draconic) is to enforce online player caps based on each faction.

 

I see two ways to do this..

 

One is a hard cap, where people could not join the server of a capped faction until someone else left.

 

Second is a "increasing wait" penalty.. where players will have to wait extended times in order to join the overpopulated faction, but were guaranteed to get in.  The waits would probably need to be pretty high (30 min, hour, longer?) to ultimately be effective but it is somewhat more hopeful than a hard cap for players who want to join.

 

These caps could dynamically grow and shrink based on overall population.

 

If you would also be able to see a list of factions who aren't at max population, that might encourage people to switch sides.  If you could make this easy/free to move from a high population side to an underpopulated one, then people who aren't truly determined to be a particular faction will likely be encouraged to help balance things out.  Perhaps even a cash bribe to sweeten the deal.

[Diemos]

This would decimate the population of people who only have a limited time to play.

 

ANYONE who buys the game should be allowed to play ANYTIME they wish, and on WHATEVER side they wish, unless limited by hardware.  Period.

 

Thanks for listening... 

[Heibges]

A lot of games just use a Bonus/Penalty to xp to "encourage" players to switch form or to particular factions. 

[CptEdwardKenway]

This would decimate the population of people who only have a limited time to play.

 

ANYONE who buys the game should be allowed to play ANYTIME they wish, and on WHATEVER side they wish, unless limited by hardware.  Period.

 

Thanks for listening... 

I guess you never played counter strike

If you keep this going we will loose more players. Many people are moving from pvp2 to pvp1 because of an overpopulated supernation and pvp1 is loosing players because of an overpopulated supernation/coalition.

There need to be limitations for balancing. There is no reason to let players still join the supernations.

Imagine a counter strike match 20 vs 1. Impossible. This would go for maybe 3 rounds than you would have 20 vs 0. Nobody would like to join the other side and so the 20 will get bored and leave the server too.

You see you let players do what they want where they want

[Diemos]

But a Counter Strike round is a few minutes...  There are no "rounds" in this game, and preventing someone who may not even wish to participate in PvP that day from entering the game won't encourage play of any form...  If you have a hard cap on factions, you could prevent someone from logging in for hours!

 

I can see an increase in reward for joining an underpopulated realm, but to disallow play will not have the effect you're looking for (if I'm understanding this post correctly)...  Instead, you will have players quitting the game altogether...

[Jomppeli]

Absolutly NO to waiting times and hard caps, that would ruin the game. If something must be done, do some sort of xp/gold-boost for underdog-nations, like Heroes & General uses in War-gamemode.

Edited March 28, 2016 by Jomppeli

[Migui]

I don't understand why a game with such a little player base has this many servers.