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1: NC

2: NC and TR

3: NC, TR and Vanu

[Flying Dice]

There's been constant bitching from all quarters pretty much since the beginning. The general dynamic is this:

NC: High damage, high recoil.
VS: No bullet drop (except for sniper rifles), mediocre everything else.
TR: High RoF

Naturally people whine about VS as if they were hitscan no-recoil, and people whine about the TR because they're bullethoses. :V


All kidding aside, the various guns are pretty horizontal. The main direct upgrade is from the standard LA/Medic/Engi carbine to the version with multiple fire modes and the ability to mount underbarrel weapons. Other than that, you tend to start out with middle-of-the-road weapons and can specialize from there, though there are exceptions; the Orion, the default VS LMG, is the best one in the faction. The direct upgrades are the guns for aircraft and the Lightning, as well as the secondary turret weapons, but most of those are irrelevant unless you play one of them a lot.

The thing to remember about NC is that of all the factions they're the least spammy; TR can hold down the trigger and probably get kills because they're spammy like that, VS because they've got fewer variables to account for.

[Aseaheru]

Hmm.
Must be fun.

[Sonlirain]

I wouldn't say aircraft guns are a direct upgrade. The AA rotary on TR aircraft starts losingg damage after only 100 meters compared to the needler that stays effective upto 300 meters... also then eedler is far more accurate.

[zombat]

If the think NC has it bad try TR.

Peashooters that fire so fast its near impossible to aim, pretty much all our 'upgraded' weapons loose rate of fire in trade for anything else - so we loose a lot of dps for a bit more accurate gun

[Knight of Fools]

Not this argument again...

[TolyK]

Not this argument again...

Exactly.

If you want to argue, use actual statistics from all the servers combined.

(And we all know that TR has the most population, right?)

[Toaster]

(And we all know that TR has the most population, right?)

I've noticed this depends on time of day.  Come late night US (after ~11 PM EST), the VS on Mattherson gets a population surge.  VS wins nearly every late-night alert- last night (or prior night maybe) they grabbed all nine biolabs with over half an hour to spare.

[Duuvian]

Late night on Mattherson is much less fun, you have to avoid the VS or at least find places where they aren't attacking in an organized way. I sometimes go to bases that are being captured by 1-12, that's about the only time I go after the VS that time of day.

On Mattherson what I've noticed is that afternoon and weekends NC sometimes has the most population. It's not terribly common, though I guess I'm not on at that time too often. TR and VS both have a good chance of having the most population at those times, but if whichever doesn't will be down in the 25% - 30% range.

Later in the night it's rare not to see 40%+ population on VS though. The best strategy when an alert is called when a faction has that much population is to go to a different continent and fight the 3rd faction there while the overpopulated one 'settles' for 10k+base capture experience. While losing the alert is disappointing it's not nearly winnable at that point and at most you can hope to defend one facility by stacking the whole realm into it and hoping you outfarm the over population realm and that the 3rd realm distracts them enough to keep them from getting 60%+ population in that facility. Unless it's a biolab alert, 60%+ population will win.

For example, one late night alert a few months ago NC was defending an Amp Station against the VS while outnumbered. Somehow we were keeping VS at bay, but then Dasanfall showed up and brought some Shield breaking sundies with furies on top packed with infantry. Now, since they can drive right into the main base the only reasonable way at low server population hours to beat that tactic is to tank mine all four doors they can drive through, including the vehicle spawn ramps, so we did that. After they lost two sunderers, some VS's NC alt logged on and shot out our tank mines, they drove in and took the base and won the alert.

In addition it's becoming more difficult to get your realm to commit once badly outpopulated, especially when it's VS that is overpopulated, because it's becoming known that it's best for non high population realms to just go to a different continent for the alert when one realm has 40%+ world population to get a reprieve while minimizing the amount the alert winner gets.

For example during the last double xp weekend, there was an alert to take all of Amerish. Goon made an attempt at a biolab but were evicted by VS immediately. Then VCO tried to get NC to go to Amerish but Goons went to Indar and fought TR instead. We warned VCO on Leader chat just to leave Amerish to VS or get farmed, which VCO responded with 'This is why NC loses alerts' while disregarding the 40% world population of VS. VS won a dominating victory on Amerish with like an hour left while I drove a lightning with HE shooting down on a swarm of BR 2ish TR at I think it was Xenotech Labs (if that's on Indar, I forget) and obtaining a silly amount of certs while sitting in the same spot next to an ammo and a repair sundies.

[Ozyton]

The thing to remember about NC is that of all the factions they're the least spammy; TR can hold down the trigger and probably get kills because they're spammy like that, VS because they've got fewer variables to account for.

Like I said in my last post, I may be crazy but I like the recoil on the NC weapons because they 'feel' more like an actual gun firing bullets. This is a sci-fi game though so I'm not saying that laser rifles and stuff are dumb, just that I prefer the more 'bang bang' weapons myself.

NC can also get some pretty fast firing weapons, I just don't play any of the classes that really need them such as light assaults and sneaky bastard infiltrators. You also have to take into account that if you stop firing for just a split second your gun's recoil and bloom will reset and you can fire again with first-shot accuracy once more, which is the tactic that NC weapons are supposed to use. You can't hold down the trigger, which means the other person will be able to probably get one or two more shots off on you, but if you do hold down the trigger you're punished by the higher recoil. It's pretty situational and you have to decide which course of action is best. This is of course offset by the much higher damage. Once upon a time I would use my Reaper DMR in closer quarters, and if I remember correctly you can kill somebody in about 5 body shots, fewer with headshots, but the magazine is only 20 rounds and the fire rate is pretty slow. You won't be winning duels against someone with an SMG unless you catch them off guard or get lucky headshots, but that gun is great at longer ranges as the DMR tag implies. It is... maybe somewhat silly that 'scoped' weapons have sway but if you have no scope you can aim as if you were a statue, as I can aim at someone then fire every 0.4 seconds and get consecutive hits on them no matter how far away they are. Also, many NC weapons have <=> recoil pattern.

Honestly, the only real VS specific complaint I have at the moment is maaaaybe the ZOE Maxes, but even those can be countered with direct-hit rockets but it is still very dangerous (as MAXes should be). You can run away from any other MAX but a ZOE will probably catch you regardless. Speaking of MAXes I should try playing them more, the aegis shield seems like it could be fun to use but I've only had major success with it once or twice, the main issue being coordination with other people.

As for population... on the server I play (forget the name, probably mattherson. It's one of the east coast ones) the population is usually fairly even, and I've even seen more NC on than other factions many times. Could just be the hours I play though.

[LeoLeonardoIII]

(And we all know that TR has the most population, right?)

I've noticed this depends on time of day.  Come late night US (after ~11 PM EST), the VS on Mattherson gets a population surge.  VS wins nearly every late-night alert- last night (or prior night maybe) they grabbed all nine biolabs with over half an hour to spare.

I agree that I mainly remember the times when I'm on and there's a huge population disparity, because it's then that you see huge zerg disparity and thus huge pwnage disparity. If I'm always sticking with a buddy and we always encounter 5-7 guys, of course we're gonna have a hard time.

I find that on Connelly (am I getting that right? I never look. I'm west coast US) late at night, which is when I play, it seems like there's always a buttload of VS, only occasionally a buttload of TR, but rarely a pop advantage for NC. And when I think about it, the times my NC has totally wrecked VS and TR it's been when we had an overwhelming, sickening, apocalyptic majority. Otherwise we get shitcanned because we got no pop.

When you start to look at the pop as the issue, I guess everything makes sense. I feel like I'm getting sniped with impunity by VS ... but actually it's just that there's like 20 VS snipers hitting this base and 4 were watching that doorway. If I hop out and shoot, only to get blasted by several tanks ... well if we had pop it would be 4 of my guys hopping out and blasting one tank.

Consider my argument withdrawn!

[Knight of Fools]

Someone posted some numbers on the official forums a few weeks back, right after the event where you had to gather points for your faction by holding territory. It measured kills and deaths in some way. VS was slightly better than TR, but they were pretty even. NC was significantly below both TR and VS up until about rank 50, after which they began to balance out and became even with VS and TR around rank 60 or so. The conclusion was that NC weapons have a higher skill ceiling but are initially difficult to use, but I suspect it was because higher ranking NC have access to a wider variety of weapons, including weapons that compare to VS and TR default weapons.

Another interesting set of numbers was the comparison between faction MAXes, and the differences were even more pronounced. VS ranked higher than the NC, and the NC ranked higher than the TR. Can't remember how much higher, but VS won no contest.

Both of these numbers were from across all servers. I'll see if I can find the posts, but they're probably buried somewhere.


Really, though, like Leo said, everything's pretty moot until SOE sorts out the population thing. I think that should be a priority before any major overhauls.

[Ozyton]

Was playing yesterday and had an amazing time with an Indar alert on Waterson server. The outfit I joined recently had some great leadership and we had a lot of people doing what they were meant to be doing instead of going rambo.

I am getting kinda sick of Indar though, it seems there's never any alerts anywhere else.

[TolyK]

Strange, I rarely get alerts on Indar.
Then again, getting 2 alerts in a row on two different servers did take 4 hours of my time... >.>

[Toaster]

Mattherson has had a lot of biolab alerts, at least when I'm on.  That and Amerish.

[darkrider2]

@Duuvian: DasanFall should not be ranked among the VS regulars. These guys play really late into the night and like to employ any and every tactic, even on bases they can't capture (also using an alternate character that way is just about as low as it gets). One night we were fighting TR at Reagent Rock, there were like 5 different sunderers deployed, DasanFall dropped in, eliminated all NC sunderers, and then just left.

A couple nights ago NC took saurva biolab, held allatum, and TR held rashnu, on the entirety of indar, VS didn't have a biolab, this cut their infantry resources down a lot, and made pulling their max en-mass impossible. That fight lasted for like two hours, they were just utterly incapable of taking the base, despite hitting 60% pop on saurva alone at one point (granted, it is a biolab).

There were shouts of PRAISE HIGBY all over yell chat, regionsay filled with "PULL MAXES NC", and I got something like 80 kills on the god-SAW that day. It came as a total surprise to me when I saw the vanu acting genuinely unorganized in the offense on saurva, when usually I expect vanu to have every contingent covered.

There have been many times I've tried to exit through the tunnels in amp stations just to find 4 people sitting there at the exit (any exit) ready to kill anyone who comes out, is this smart play? No. These people are BORED, they are doing absolutely anything they can to get some points since the ZOE max is so efficient at cleaning up infantry, they just don't need to be there. That's why the vanu always have more spawn solutions, more vehicles, etc.

It was only later into the night when a lot of TR logged off, VS hit 40% server population, at 25% TR, VS took rashnu and not 10 minutes later, a swarm of 50+ ZOE maxes descended upon suarva and capped the base in a massive slaughter of the NC.

Someone posted some numbers on the official forums a few weeks back, right after the event where you had to gather points for your faction by holding territory. It measured kills and deaths in some way. VS was slightly better than TR, but they were pretty even. NC was significantly below both TR and VS up until about rank 50, after which they began to balance out and became even with VS and TR around rank 60 or so. The conclusion was that NC weapons have a higher skill ceiling but are initially difficult to use, but I suspect it was because higher ranking NC have access to a wider variety of weapons, including weapons that compare to VS and TR default weapons.

Its good design philosophy to make a weapon that is very difficult to use, very rewarding for those who can (this is why the elite pilots of planetside exist, the air game fits this method of balance perfectly). While the NC guns fit into the category of difficult to use, they are not massively rewarding for doing so (god-SAW excluded), on a pure stats based analysis, our guns are no better DPS wise than any other faction, so the reward for getting better is basically you get to be just as good as someone who just picked up the Orion/T9 CARV.