124690-same-faction-gameplay

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Hey all,
 
First off let me say that I am sorry if this has been covered already but I haven't been able to find any threads with this as the main topic (my search-fu may be lacking), if there is this info please let me know.
 
So anyways with that out of the way I am wondering about the upcoming drop and same faction pvp queue's. I have recently returned to the game, started Dominion and had a heck of a time finding anyone even in the area let alone the same level or running dungeons/shiphands etc. The pvp was even worse but I'm guessing this may be fixed somewhat with the new drop. Once I heard about the new drop allowing same faction pvp matches it sort of just seemed like the final nail in the coffin of the Dominion side (at least to me). With the much larger Exile population if you want to have a better chance of getting things to pop it only makes sense to play the more populated faction.
 
The question is this; Will the same faction queue's be strictly same faction or is there a plan to just use anyone who is queued? IE: If there are 9 Exile players in Q and 1 Dominion player with they be matched as two 5v5 teams for example or would the Exile players need to wait for one more Exile?
 
I know that some people are very opposed to a cross faction game like W* to allow for co-op play and I understand that it breaks immersion, but wouldn't it be better to have the people who want to play Dominion side not at a disadvantage for queue times and what not?
 
I (probably like many new returning players) feel the need, real or imagined, to just play on Exile side because if I do decide to run a dungeon, pvp match etc it will be much easier to do so. Well thanks in advance for taking the time to read this, let's see what people have to say! 
 
 
PS: In TSW there are 3 factions and amongst the servers, time zones etc there are obvious faction population imbalances, but you can group and travel anywhere and team with anyone. The factions are only limited to the PVP side of things. Now in W* it's different in that it has the possibility of open world pvp which is fun and exciting but I'm just trying to think of ways to help make new people who are levelling have an easier time of grouping for content that they like without feeling forced to play the more populated faction.	
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			I would be completely shocked if Carbine went the route of excluding the less-played Faction from being folded into the battleground queue.	
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Angel, I'm pretty sure cross-faction BGs coming in D5 are simply: No faction mixing, if one side has 20 people queued the game will launch with Dom v. Dom or Exile v. Exile.
 
I'm still worried that this may lead to Exile queues popping while 8-9 Doms sit around. But it's a big 'if' so I'll wait to see what happens.	
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Angel, I'm pretty sure cross-faction BGs coming in D5 are simply: No faction mixing, if one side has 20 people queued the game will launch with Dom v. Dom or Exile v. Exile.
 
I'm still worried that this may lead to Exile queues popping while 8-9 Doms sit around. But it's a big 'if' so I'll wait to see what happens.
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			Just drop the artificial developer created barrier that prevents us from talking to, and grouping with the other faction. Factions should be for roleplay and story only and should not affect the game play negatively	
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I'm still worried that this may lead to Exile queues popping while 8-9 Doms sit around. But it's a big 'if' so I'll wait to see what happens.
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I would be completely shocked if Carbine went the route of excluding the less-played Faction from being folded into the battleground queue.
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I know i mentioned something about this in the ptr forums. it was clarified by a gm that it is in fact Faction vs Faction no matter how u slice it.. its a step back imo but they are doing it because it is a quick band aid fix for queue times on the only populated faction right now. So from a marketing perspective... with limited resources/time you are going ot please the larger crowd first.
 
Sadly though this only further alienates the dominion. which could in turn mean LESS players on dominion then there already are.
 
Imo drop the faction crap completely aside from the story line. We should be able to guild with both sides, group with both sides, and raid with both sides... how logical is it for both factions to be fighting anyways with the entity on the rise...wouldn't the entity prefer us to be fighting? this can VERY EASILY be woven into the lore come on carbine! lets do something before u lose the rest of a dying faction.	
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			Should have had 3 factions :D	
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Should have had 3 factions :D
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A space pirate-themed Marauder faction would have been awesome. ^_^
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Yeah, this wouldn't make a lot of sense, if they're really trying to smooth out the experience for both sides though.
 
DC Universe has the same kind of faction imbalance between heroes and villains. WAY more heroes than villains, like more lopsided than the Exile/Dominion divide. When they went to cross-faction queues, everyone got thrown into the pool together, but because there were rarely full teams of villains, the "empty slots" were filled with heroes who ended up fighting for the bad guys.
 
Occasionally it worked the other direction, too. That seems a lot smarter than just locking out the underpopulated faction.
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It actually wouldn't be a bad idea, considering they could be guns for hire.  One day playing on the Dom the other Exile.
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https://forums.wildstar-online.com/forums/index.php?/topic/124164-please-explain-to-me-how-the-new-same-faction-bgs-work/
 
As others have already said, it's still restricted to one single faction on each team, just allowing teams from the same faction to fight each other. This will surely increase queue time for Doms, and reduce for Exile, but by how much will remain to be seen. If Dom's are reduced by too much, we will simply see more people defect to exile, further imbalancing an already out of balance faction divide.	
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Only problem would be no one would still play Exile or Dom, 
 
I mean who doesn't want to be a space pirate? 
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This is how it works in Rift as well.
 
It is not the system coming to WildStar.
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Thanks for the replies everyone. It seems many of us are in the same boat of the whole "drop the faction divide and let us all group together" but as was mentioned I guess it's so ingrained in the code that it would take a lot of resources to change. It does kind of suck and I do think that it will hurt the Dominion side more but it makes sense to appease as much of their player base as possible and with the limited resources I can't fault them.
 
On another note perhaps Faction based incentives would be an ideal way of attracting more people to play Dom side? Something like increased xp or drop rate until the factions are more even then the incentive could be removed at that point. *Shrugs* just my musings.	
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That is a real shame, right there. Truly, a nail in the Dominion the game's coffin that. :(
This is a two faction game, if only one faction is viable it has to be fixed, end of line.  
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This is a two faction game, if only one faction is viable it has to be fixed, end of line. If mixed faction is too difficult to code, then other ways must be employed to fix it, one working faction is not a workable situation.
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This is one of my very few sore points with Wildstar. I haven't seen or heard a single solitary peep from a CRB on this faction problem. Like, not even the ghost of a possible solution. The only direct response I've read was basically "it's too hard-coded, you won't see change soon".
 
Which, yea, for me is upsetting. I've dealt with faction imbalance in past MMOs, several of them in fact, so it's tiresome and annoying that devs aren't expecting this and doing something about it proactively.
 
I assume that they're hoping the population will fill and a balance will no longer matter (which is basically what helped a lot of WoW's servers, which frequently had dramatic pop faction imbalances as well). And it's not comforting considering the lack of marketing. :(
 
It's a good thing that the things I love about the game, I really love. :P	
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Oh, I'm all about "fixing" it ... but at what price? One more reason to not play Dominion? I dunno. Seems kind of steep to me. I mean, I'm an Exile so it won't bug me none at all, but I suspect the Red Team will have some bad experiences. I hope not.
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Cross faction isn't a bandage that will staunch the bleeding now. Ideas like bonus xp, drops, and other buffs that the less populated faction would get seems to be a far more immediate solution. 
 
It's possible that all the perceived imbalance isn't as bad as it seems and a nice shiny piechart from a CRB would let people know that playing Dominion is not signing away any chance of queues based on population. I haven't seen much hard data of that sort so I'm not going to hold my breath.   	
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I'm heavily in favor of mixed factions instead of same faction (same for PvE)... However i don't understand why people think Dominion will have worse queues than Exiles in drop 5? for example:
 
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I'm still worried that this may lead to Exile queues popping while 8-9 Doms sit around. But it's a big 'if' so I'll wait to see what happens.
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I'm heavily in favor of mixed factions instead of same faction (same for PvE)... However i don't understand why people think Dominion will have worse queues than Exiles in drop 5? for example:
 
 
Wouldn't 8-9 doms not get a queue on live right now? they still need to wait for that 10th, whether its drop 4 or 5.
 
Currently in drop 4 Dominion has near instant queues or 5 mins tops in EU as opposed to 15-20 minutes for my Exile (personal experience, both above 250 gearscore). Reason is, assuming there are 3 exile teams in queue and 1 dominion team, 1 exile team gets to play with the dominion team while the other 2 wait their turn to play that same dominion team so the dominion is getting instant pops while exiles have to take turns... Whereas in drop 5, the two exile team wont be waiting for that 1 dominion team to finish their game and they will simply go against eachother... The queue will balance out to be equal for dominion and exile, which means dominion will get slower than drop 4, but exile will get faster than drop 4, this doesn't mean dominion will get slower than exile...
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My experience (as Dominion) is there's usually 2 Dom teams (or close to 2 teams worth) when I usually get to PVP (after 8pm PST). There's usually more exiles, as I see a wider variety of players, probably up to 40 or 50 in rotation. Queuing solo, I can almost always end up on nearly identical teams over and over and over if I immediately requeue, but if I wait a few minutes then queue, I'll find a whole group of different people. If I'm immediately requeuing and seeing the same people on my team, I almost always face a totally different Exile team, which will rotate between 2 or 3 different regular teams. This is norm for me. 1-2 dom teams to the 2-3 exile teams queuing at the same time. Actual teams vary slightly, but generally contain anywhere from 5-7 of the same people each time (when talking exclusively of 10 person teams).
 
What we Dom fear is that if we have less than 20 people queuing, and Exiles have more than 40, they'll get to get matches with us AND with themselves, where we'll have to sit and wait for up to 3 teams of exiles to finish matches before we get back into the queue. The chances for a Dom vs Dom is MUCH lower than an Exile vs Exile match at the current populations. And I fear that those that have made Dominion PVP alts to get faster queues will totally ditch them to go back to Exile PVP characters, and throw the balance off even more, leaving Dom with only getting matches with 1 in 3 exile teams.
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Quite frankly all I see it doing is promoting more PvP.
 
Not facing off against the same teams over and over will be really nice. More queues popping will encourage more people to queue, which will make even quicker queues across the board. Nevermind that it will also be infinitely easier to encourage PvP during off-peak hours (go to Thayd and poke at people to queue, enjoy).
 
Being able to much more easily organize lowbie PvP will be awesome, and not only that, having those queues pop will ENCOURAGE more people to queue! Do I know this will solve lowbie PvP queue problems? I don't. But I do have high hopes.
 
This can be nothing but good, though I understand the worry RE: less draw to Dominion side. I do want to see you guys active and populated, but I've also heard the imbalance is not nearly as off as people say (as mentioned by Carbine staff.)	
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Did i miss a combination? i still don't see how it'll be worse for dom than exiles. The only thing i see this doing is allowing the exiles to play with each other instead of taking turns against the two dom teams... Making it even on the chances of getting games rather than being in favor of dom.
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Not sure what you're trying to prove. That's one single "round" of queues. But anyway, like I said, I'm expecting it to get worse for Dominion, obviously it will get better for Exiles. By how much remains to be seen.
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			Like  I said a way to possibly remedy the population problem is to add another faction (Space Pirates; guns for hire) and let Dom and Exile defect over.  Put a limit on how many times you can do it a month a  year or however.  At least this way we can have 3 faction split, and if one is still more popular give them bonuses.  This worked in DAoC. 	
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Was there not a thread of this like 3-4 weeks ago? Might even have been sooner.
 
Any way, I am against the idea of mixed faction. I believe in faction pride. That and I dont want to play with aurin. They look like children, people make them run about naked, well the player should just be arrested and registered on a list.
 
But, I am not against it. I am Dominion on Jabbit, my PVP queues are instant when I get to play (roughly 20:00 UK time), and for PVE, I tend to stick to my guild. I firmly believe this game is not pug friendly. I will accept it, if I can have an option of "play with my faction only". I know they have faction vs faction coming in drop 5, but if it were mixed faction, give me that option and I will be happy (think of a similar system as rift, its a good system for mixed faction purely because there are no creepy child looking races).	
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Cross faction isn't a bandage that will staunch the bleeding now. Ideas like bonus xp, drops, and other buffs that the less populated faction would get seems to be a far more immediate solution. 
 
It's possible that all the perceived imbalance isn't as bad as it seems and a nice shiny piechart from a CRB would let people know that playing Dominion is not signing away any chance of queues based on population. I haven't seen much hard data of that sort so I'm not going to hold my breath.   
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Heh, it'd be nice to see an in-game demographics chart from Carbine. I remember BHS and SE doing those for their MMOs and it was fun to see the breakdown of races, classes, genders, etc.
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So as a player all I have is what I see, about a 3 to 1 ratio of Exiles to Dominion in the open-world. So if this isn't the place to ask for that chart, should I be having people ask for it on social media? 
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It doesn't even have to be numbers to show population imbalances or lack of imbalance. They could make an infographic that simply goes "out of the total population 50% play exile, 49% play dominion, and 1% play Timetraveler" without giving hard numbers.
 
Example info can be:
% of exiles and dominion
% of each race
% of male and female characters
% of accounts with both faction characters vs accounts with single faction characters
% of people level 50 and those sub 50(possibly having brackets percentage break ups of this as well)
 
The above could even be good as a infographics contest too so community can have fun with it.
 
 
Anyway in regard to factions interacting. I do firmly believe that the better solution would be to loosen faction restrictions in the long run, but am aware this will take time. One thing Warhammer did that helped a bit with faction imbalance was give experience boosts to the lower faction. It actually made a difference and encouraged alts to be made and people who were on the ropes to reroll took the leap. In Wildstar I feel like part of the perceived concurrency imbalance observed is not so much that people aren't willing to play both factions or their preferred in some cases(some people main a faction to be with their friends), but rather they see the hurdle of re-leveling a nw character as not pleasant.
 
Personally speaking once both factions hit whitevale it feels as if it's just mirrored and there isn't much in terms of diversity or play experience for some people to feel that it's worth doing. This combined with other limitations such as not being able to mail to cross faction alts, time, and certain things not being account bound(though wardrobe mitigates this to a degree) don't help with he willingness to make alts. Often what I see is people will at most willingly make an alt to just get into housing of the opposing faction and then stop.
 
I do think that same faction BGs is at least something. However I feel that Carbine should not settle at this and continue to work on breaking the faciton barrier here and outward. Starting with PVP because that would benefit the most and is in need for some love. 
 
I'd like to see in addition to the transitioning faction enforcement to the players bonuses like xp boost and rep boosts(especially helpful for reps that are harder to get in smaller or solo play). I can't really agree with a money drop boost as the AH/CX are cross faction and I don't know how that may effect the economy as a whole if one faction is capable of gaining more than the other via content, so I'd rather not touch that.
 
@Mae- I understand and agree with the concern Dominion have and it was mentioned when this mechanic wa sfirst brogut to light in the PVP forums. While Byonna is technically right on paper using static numbers, this won't necessarily be entirely true in practice, but we'd have to wait and see how it pans out. I worry that having same faction pvp if left long enough will give off the impression that one faction will be the go to for everything as a result and harming the impression of Dominion further.	
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It doesn't even have to be numbers to show population imbalances or lack of imbalance. They could make an infographic that simply goes "out of the total population 50% play exile, 49% play dominion, and 1% play Timetraveler" without giving hard numbers.
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			I have to agree with Byonaa that it will even out queues. Yes Doms will wait longer, but you won't wait any longer than exiles who are in the same scenario.	
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@Mae- I understand and agree with the concern Dominion have and it was mentioned when this mechanic wa sfirst brogut to light in the PVP forums. While Byonna is technically right on paper using static numbers, this won't necessarily be entirely true in practice, but we'd have to wait and see how it pans out. I worry that having same faction pvp if left long enough will give off the impression that one faction will be the go to for everything as a result and harming the impression of Dominion further.
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