We need some type of faction auto-balance or strong underdog incentives. Why?
Most of the servers are ending up 2 sided with one faction controlling nothing. Some servers have one faction controlling almost everything. This is a fatal design flaw. No one wants to be on the losing side.
These servers didn’t all start out this way. On my server, yellow controlled two territories. They lost both to the greenies, which resulted in all the big yellow companies rerolling to purple. Yellow has not won a single war since.
How is server transferring going to fix any of this? It seems like minority factions will just leave, making things even more unbalanced for whoever decides to stay. How is PvP going to work on servers that are mostly one faction if the minority factions leave?
I see countless players falling for the “grass is greener” fallacy, where they think transferring to another server will somehow fix everything. It will not. It will devolve into another two faction server or end in one dominant faction.
As others have also suggested, this needs to be solved BEFORE server transfers start.
Help raise awareness and leave a screenshot of your one-sided/two-sided servers bellow!
As much as I am against the idea of artificially stopping people from joining a dominant faction, I strongly believe that positive motivation is the right approach. Greater mission rewards, higher farming yields, % multiplier on Influence gain, boosts in PVP… take your pick and discuss pros and cons.
Another option is also to allow players to switch from the dominant faction to the underdog “for free” without putting them on the 120 day cooldown. This could lead to entire companies of “mercenaries” who change sides based on who the underdog is, and enjoy maintaining the balance - and earn greater rewards (as mentioned before) from everything they do.
I think this is an actuall and serious issue on multiple servers. Please @TrevzorFTW pass this on to the game management team, we need a solution that will address this.
There has not been an MMO that has factions that I can recall which added incentives like this to create balance successfully.
The only way these issues have ever been solved is faction specific queues, which I do not think would lend themselves well to this game.
Dominate factions exist in MMOs because of population imbalance, and people would rather take the safe bet after they’ve found their comfortable spot in the dominate faction than take minor incentives to try and balance it out.
It’s hard to come up with anything short of forcing balance on players that will completely fix the issue. With how PvP centric this game is, I think they kind of have to though.
I mean one way that isn’t too invasive is that when server merging happens eventually, that they hand pick servers based on faction population. So you would end up merging a single-faction server with another of a different faction, or a high population duo-faction server with a medium population single-faction server of the minority faction on the duo-server.