I don't disagree that overwhelming numbers in one faction is a bad thing. But with the playerbase being very small, I think it's probably better to stick to only two factions rather than insisting on four different ones. And this is effectively what we have at the moment anyway. It would just be a matter of cosmetics at this point to remove BB and Family all together and forcing everyone to play vtec or lawyers. At least as far as PvP is concerned.
Of course the balance between factions has always been an issue, it's something that potential players typically bring up or ask about, and that skeptics are, well, skeptical about. And for a good reason too. I think the best we can do in this aspect is to encourage equality rather than enforcing it. We never wanted to block certain factions or force people to switch, or at least that was always the "worst case scenario" in terms of what to do if we have 100 vtecs and 5 in each of the other factions. But again, with such small playerbase, four factions doesn't make sense anyway, and it's not like vtecs vastly outnumber all the other factions combined.
As for ways of encouraging balance, let me go through your suggestions:
- Better individual score if you are in the team in lower number. Lower if you are swarming. (ZC)
- Lower condition on things you loot if you are swarming. Better condition if you are swarmed. (ZC)
These could be done, especially the first one (a variation of it already is in place: you get better score for shooting people in good gear and high level, though this could perhaps be accentuated further). But the main problem here is that ZC itself has to be meaningful for the change to have any impact. If nobody cares about the score or the zones (which is largely the case right now), then these suggestions will do little to help.
- Short term alliance during ZC. Faction A & B team up for a specific ZC. They share benefits of that zone and it shows no contest while they are together.
- Medium term alliance. Faction A & B are officially allied for one week or one months. Every members of both faction should be aware of this (ingame message displayed) and would lose rep if they shoot each other. If faction A make a temporary alliance with team C, it should include team B.
Like I said before, alliances and treaties were in fact planned, and the backbone for letting individual players from one faction temporarily join another for the duration of ZC is even in place. The problem was how to facilitate the actual alliance. Somebody ought to accept or decline an offer to help in ZC. Who? If you're in BB and want to help family take a zone, who to you go to, what do you do exactly? There just seemed to be this big practical issue about how to actually form such alliances that we never really got to the bottom of, and then the whole thing just sort of fell out of memory I guess. Anyway, something like this would be cool, but there's a lot of design behind such a system if it is to be any good, and we're pretty far from having a good concept for it. (Indeed, if you have a good idea for how to handle this, I'd like to hear it. Maybe post it in the suggestion forum). And depending on that concept, actually implementing it could range from really easy to excruciatingly hard. Typically with stuff like this, an idea sounds awesome and you think you have a pretty clear vision - until you sit down to actually code it. Then you realise there's a ton of things you hadn't really thought of, and the whole thing becomes a mess. Planning it carefully in advance is really the hard part.
- No sworn enemy faction. I am not sure it is the most logical thing to do to destroy someone at the other end of the city, while your closest neighbours constantly threaten your territory.
I kinda agree with this, but it seems to me like the concept of intimate enemies hasn't really had any major impact on how people behave toward one another anyway. I could be wrong though. Personally I'm not really a fan of the concept anyway. Not sure it would make a huge difference to even out the faction numbers though.
- Having simultaneous treats, randoms events, weak-spot to deal with, the more active players you got logged at the same time, encouraging you to split to seek those events.
- Overall, having much more things to do, several for each kind of activity. Even if your faction has 3 players vs 50 you would still have things to do instead of just log off. (would only come over time)
This is hard because, well, to "maek moar contant" takes time. We are adding things bit by bit (the new upper levels of the core maps is the latest in this), but just adding more content is not particularly easy. There's also a balance between keeping a focus on PvP and the core, and having other stuff that sort of detracts from that. Particularly when the playerbase is small, we don't want the few players we do have to all be doing their own thing in their separate parts of the map.
- More mechanics to make even easier faction switching & alting, by moving storage from room/platoon to another, or free XP for making a new character in overwhelmed faction, ONLY if your faction is overwhelming. So not only regular could alt/switch, but also casuals.
Faction switching should be made easier, with that I agree. There are also a bunch of bugs related to switching factions that needs to be fixed. This is something that we'll probably fix pretty soon, and which may or may not be present for the next season. Sort of a temporary fix, I mean. Free XP sounds like a bad idea, and tying it to the faction of your other alts is basically impossible without some major additions to the engine.
- Salary & rewards becoming frozen if the gap is too high.
This would probably just make life harder for casuals/noobs in the numerous faction, whereas the people who are better candidates for switching would likely just whine and not actually do anything. So I dunno if this would help honestly. At least it should be relatively easy to do though.
- Risk of being permanently expelled from a faction if you do team killing while being in an overwhelming faction.
I don't see how this would help.
- Having some ressources depending of faction trading system. People from faction B having to buy some stuff from faction A, which would be possible with consent of both sides.
I'd like faction trading to be a thing, but unfortunately I think people just make alts in the different factions to get the stuff they need. We made the merchant stocks depend on the zones you hold, but people bypass that easily by just having alts, so that didn't really work out as we wanted. Perhaps if some items were
only available if two factions cooperated to get them, but I'm not sure what that cooperation would look like, or if it would lead to any actual cooperation, as opposed to the same group of players just having temporary alts in another faction for the duration of that cooperation.
Anyway, I think the direction we're going in at the moment, and which I think is really promising at least as a concept, is to have a more well defined tech progression throughout the season, and allowing different factions to be gaining "tech" at different speeds. Connecting the zone control to this, as well as special operations that you have to do inside the core to gain tech (ie unlocking better gear). This would make ZC very important, which would stimulate PvP. Like we've touched on before, if people care about ZC, this would go a long way to naturally balance the different factions. If one faction becomes too strong, others will form alliances to defeat them, if not for their personal gain but in order to stop them from becoming even more powerful. Explicitly supporting such alliances is not strictly necessary I think (though it would be a nice thing to have eventually).
Ultimately, the tech progression would reach a point where the only way to advance further is to eliminate other factions. In a way, this is kind of the opposite of encouraging balance between factions, but I think the effect would be very interesting, especially with a larger playerbase. A weak faction would be a target for a strong faction, but at the same time, a strong faction would be a target for cooperating factions.
There's a risk of course that the "swarm faction" would gain a tech advantage that further perpetuates their lead and ultimately just crushes everyone. But I think the competitive nature of the core playerbase would go a pretty long way to try to prevent that. And in any case, as smaller factions get eliminated, those players can join with the next weakest team to give them a boost in numbers. It might work out rather nicely, and the dynamics of the server would change rather drastically across the season.
Personally I still feel like there are a few things missing, but I'm not sure what. Anyway, this is the direction we're currently headed, so any input or feedback on that might be useful.
To summarize, the issue of balanced factions is not an easy one, particularly if we are to let people choose for themselves how to play the game. And ultimately, part of the allure with fonline to begin with is the openness of it, the fact that you can do almost anything you want. Don't really wanna mess with that. So the only thing we're really left with is to try to design the gameplay in a way that it sort of magically balances itself. But particularly with a small playerbase, even small absolute differences in numbers amount to large relative imbalances. And you can't really split a prime.
