Originally Posted by SKYeXile
while its always going to be hard to combat empire hoping, 1 empire per faction helps that. you can always give incentives to joining underdog factions. Hell I choose VS because it was under-popped 8 years ago, and never looked back.
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By not allowing hopping you hurt gameplay, since you lose it as an immediate population balance tool. You can't stop people from logging, but you can stop them from jumping to an overpopulated empire. Undoubtedly the first few will get through, but that will stop before long. Then you get to offer nice incentives to people going to the underdog empire. Example: swapping to the underdog doubles cert training on all characters for the day.
Just because PS1 had a poor implementation doesn't mean it can't be implemented correctly. Swapping sides is a common tool in FPS games to keep the populations even. Waiting for new players to join to fix populations won't fix temporary imbalances, and takes a while to take effect.