[LordReaver]

Originally Posted by Xyntech

It's not that 3 factions instantly balances everything, or that one faction can't still have half or more of the population, so much as the fact that 3 empires just tends to be a lot more balanced than 2.

If you have 2 factions on a large scale game like Planetside, once one faction starts gaining a noteworthy population and/or territory advantage, it usually becomes very easy for them to pick up momentum and start crushing the other side. It's possible to balance two factions to a degree, but it's cumbersome and difficult, and usually fails pretty hard.

3 factions on the other hand is relatively easy to maintain a balance most of the time. You can't just slap a third faction on and call it a day, but it makes it much easier and much more possible to keep all three sides in check when a dominant side has to worry about spreading their population and defending their greater amount of territory against two sides which usually at least equal their own population, if not outnumbering them. While one side did sometimes have 50% of the population during PS1's glory days, it was far more frequent that the advantage would be much smaller, in the 40% range tops. Again, it's still possible for a dominant faction to cause some devastation even with only 40%, especially if there isn't a good enough incentive system for the other two factions to focus on the dominant side instead of focusing on fighting each other, but it will always be a lot easier to balance a 43% vs 31% vs 26% divide om a three faction game than it it is to balance even a relatively minor difference like a 55% vs 45% divide in a two faction game.

Tl;dr, 3 factions = balanced MMO PvP is an over simplification, but 3 factions is still a very big and valuable contributing factor to maintaining balance.

I'm not saying three doesn't dilute advantage more than two. I'm saying two can be functional.

Originally Posted by JesNC

I tried a ton of games, some with X, some with Y. I'm my experience Y works inherently better, and there are only very minimal measures required to keep a balance compared to X. I just put up some examples to my claim.

But I'm interested about that game you're implying that got X right. Care to enlighten me?

I didn't imply anything, I simply pointed out a flaw in your logic.