JR writeup from Devchat and Interview!

[CutterJohn]

Originally Posted by basti

Yesterday was my outfits outfit night. I wait for this every week, because it always is a blast running with 2 full platoons dropping in galaxys with maxes and Heavy assault guys, taking territory far behind enemy lines, defending against double amount of enemys trying to kill us.
Sadly, i couldnt play with them, Vanu pop was above 36% for the entire night, so i had to switch to a different empire and play AGAINSt my mates.



Seriously, are you crazy? NO NO NO to several empires per server. ONE EMPIRE, ONE SERVER!

The empire hopping killed the fun for alot of us people loyal to their chosen empire. It sucked every time seeing the pops shift because one empire was loosing. It somtimes got to a point that you lost a SINGLE base after a long and hard battle, then quickly getting pushed back to the next base, just to get raped by all those empire hoppers that left your empire. Caused more people to log off to avoid being completly frustrated, causing a chain reaction sometimes ending up with one empire at 10% global pop.
Empire hopping is one of the things that destroyed planetsides playerbase. It should be banned, forever.

I said not allowing empire hopping to the over populated empire. Other FPSs use team balancing mechanics all the time, though generally are more hamfisted in their approach. With enough players, you leave it open to be an option, if incentivised properly.

I'm sorry SOE didn't think on the matter for 5 minutes and implement the easy solution. Sucks that it ruined the game for you. But that is no reason to abandon it. The solution IS easy. Give incentives to shift character to low population empires. Give disincentives, or block entirely, jumping to the high pop empires.

I'm not you. I don't feel any brand loyalty for a color. Yeah, I had a favored set of weapons, and plenty of friends on one color team, but its just a game. I don't care about the RP or anything. Victory for my color was not a source of pride for me. Its meaningless blather. Video game nonsense. I played the game to have fun, not see my team win. If the guys I played with won, great. If not, great.

People with loose affiliations can be easily accommodated with a simple set of rules and incentives to balance the populations, and it would benefit the game, by balancing populations in a straightforward manner.