Pilot strength imbalance

[Hawkenstein]

I've played both sides on my server, and the Republic has to fight itself, but the Empire doesn't... In other words, there is a pilot number imbalance, which is creating a pretty significant pilot strength imbalance.

 

Quite simply, the more you play and gain personal experience, the better you play. Additionally, your ships upgrade their gear, so your ships become stronger... much stronger, as my significantly weaker imperial scout is starting to get one shot, or so near it as I can't really tell. Thus, as a result of the presence of top tier pilots on one side, any random battle is much more likely to favor that one side, leading to a gear imbalance favoring that side, since new pilots on the winning side gear up their ships faster. Since the other side loses more often, some pilots on that side give up and switch to the winning side, assuming they want to keep playing GSF.

 

I don't think there's any fair way out of this, any method suggested to compensate is going to make people upset. Personally, I'm against adding, say, in combat force multipliers.

 

Instead, I suggest bribery. Since one side is consistently losing and, quite frankly, having less fun.. multiply their rewards by 4 or 10 or maybe even more depending on the level of disparity - ship reqs and fleet reqs especially, so they can upgrade quicker on that side, but also creds and xp, so it's worth it for their characters to play.

 

Any other ideas? Post em. Like I hinted above, you'll probably get flamed all to hell, but throw enough ideas at it, something good might come out and make it decent.

[silvershadows]

In Dark Age of Camelot, if one of the three factions had a severe population imbalance, they would get a realm point (kill point) bonus and a little extra cash/experience.

 

They could do the same here.

 

If there are, say - 15 Imperials queuing and 50 Republic pilots queuing, the Imperials could get a 5-6 percent bonus on requisition gains (ship and fleet or just ship). You wouldn't have to worry much about people switching around to get the bonus, since as more Imperials queue up, the lower the bonus would get.

 

It works fairly well, but has to be evaluated often - DAoC did it on a weekly/monthly basis, this game would have to do it on a daily basis or several times a day.

[mr_sim]

Typically the lesser population faction has an advantage thought this advantage does require a certain minimum number of players. the advantage has to do with the Veteran to novice ratio. A smaller PvP population should see more veterans in a match then the opposing faction.

 

I'm on Jedi Covenant and as an Imp pilot I'm quite happy hearing that our Pubs are seeing too much Pub vs Pub, especially since the opposite is(was) true with our Ground Pvp.

 

All that said eventually your large population faction will see more of those novices become veterans and thing should balance. I feel this has happened on Jedi Covenant though I admit I have no data to prove it.

[Kuciwalker]

Make ship unlocks/upgrades legacywide. Now it is far easier to switch factions. Problem mostly solved.

[MCaliban]

I'd wait until the f2p crowd joins and matchmaking kicks in before we start applying fixes.