[Shogun]

another idea that would work without restricting people who really like to swap empires and play legit:

instead of a cooldown that restricts to play as another empire, use this cooldown on friendly fire.
how would it work?
someone plays as vs. he gets pissed and wants to asshat another faction to influence the actual stalemate, so he logs to tr.
but the client registered, that the faction has been changed and turns off friendly fire registration on the client for any player/account for the next 2 hours.

maybe even take it a step further to prevent people from abusing this to intentionally get rid of friendly fire: a portion of the friendly fire damage is reflected and applies to the griefer instead of the friendlies.

also, the warnings and weaponlock counters would stay active at all times.

i think this would be a fair solution for everyone and it would neutralise the problem quite well. (as much as it is possible in a free to play game)
key to success is that the client saves the cooldowns and doesn´t link them to accounts. in addition, it could be saved in the account, to even prevent using same account on different rig.

i think the main problem comes from players who want to influence the actual big battle they seem to be losing.
even a short cooldown of half an hour would prevent this type of behaviour, because when you have to wait 30 minutes, the stalemate might already be broken.

by the way, a br1-3 that does any damage to a deployed friendly sunderer should always get the full damage he tries to inflict dealt on himself!