It's a concern that a lot of people share (see hex grid thread already).
An additional problem is that this may lead to apathy. Apathy for what happens to the map and people being more concerned with getting kills than making sure the empire "wins" (whatever that means).
In the past, on /c we used to argue that we recalled a "good fight" so we and others could still have a good fight in two hours from there on. However, it meant that we could actually END a fight.
In PlanetSide 2, with only three continents at launch (meaning a max of around 6.000 people per server), I'm even wondering if we will even be able to move to another continent if we're bored of the current one? Because we can't END the current one. Worse, the other might be pop-locked...
As you cannot lock the cont, nor control even the fast majority of it realistically, there's no time at which you conclude a fight. I feel like it's going to be like trying to keep the TR out of Zal/Jamshid (Oshur): even if you brutalise and pulverise them time and again, they will just keep coming back, not allowing you to move on
till you eventually just give up. That has always been extremely unsatisfying to me and I fear this will lead to the apathic state of people much, MUCH sooner than the two to four years it took most people in /c to give up on zerg-herding and resecuring and just farm.
From my perspective, that's especially going to be causing stress, desillusionment and even small depressions for the strategic map moving crowd who like to think of the game as largely RTS: there's going to be very little point in going behind enemy lines if you can't hold on to it and won't get you anywhere. Going behind enemy lines in PS2 (in my mind) will eventually be more like "let's just go farm that for a change, see if we can pull it off", rather than "if we go there, we cut of their supply lines to here and our forces over there will be able to push and kick them out of the cont".
Simply because the last bit misses: there's no goal to achieve, so why bother trying to achieve it? Besides, as others have said, you will eventually get the approximate same territory back anyway, right? In PS1 the goal was locking continents one or two at a time and getting as many of them locked like the cont-collector obsessionists we were. The sense of possession: "The commies are raiding
OUR piestacks on Solsar! Kick them from
our land!", I'm afraid we're going to miss that sentiment since we'll just have little bits of each land.
Almost feels like more of a redneck fued over some local land than really invading another nation, taking
their stuff and making it
yours, for the empire you want to see rule supreme over all of Auraxis.
Really do hope a new intercontinental lattice will be introduced or that you eventually can capture a sanctuary by capturing all surrounding hexes. In that sense, it would be great if there was a way to have (naval/HART) invasions on locked continents in attempts to capture one of these on cont sanctuaries. But for that, we'd need true sanctuaries again, or at least orbital staging grounds.