R F Gyro wrote:How can we get more than 32 players fighting with the current game engine and PS/3 limitations? Multi-district platoon battles:-
1. Allow players to create platoons as the next structure up from squads. Lets say 48 players max, initially. Each platoon would have a captain ("boss"). The captain can invite people; if that person is in a squad, the whole squad is pulled in.
2. In merc tab, new platoon battles are created. Each platoon battle is for a planet, rather than a specific district. Only platoon captains can join.
3. Platoons wait in the warbarge until 2 mins after the second platoon joins.
4. The game then creates multiple skirmish or domination battles on the planet. There should be 4 ongoing at any point; each can take the standard 16 players, which means that neither side can fill all 4.
5. When battles complete the players return to the warbarge, and then 5 minutes later a new battle spawns.
6. The game keeps track of the wins for each team; when one side leads the other by at least 6 wins they are declared the victors.
Other points:-
a. It would be good to have better voice comms organisation to support this. For example, the platoon captain can normally only be heard by squad leaders, but the PTT button changes this to "broadcast to platoon".
b. To avoid farming, but still give rewards, ISK given to the winner of each battle is 80% of the value lost by the losing side. SP given is capped to the amount you'd get by standing in the MCC in a skirmish MCC for the same duration.
c. There should be some mechanism for platoon members to see the status of all the battles raging on the planet; health of the MCCs, clone counts, etc. Also, the total wins for each side.
d. Platoon captains can only join battles if they have at least 24 players in their platoon, to help prevent people ruining other platoon's games.
e. Players can quit from individual battles, return to the warbarge, then join a fight in another district as long as there is space. They lose their clone & suit in the original district of course.
Hopefully this would lead to things like "squad 2, looks like district 4 is locked down; move over to district 2 and help out while squad 3 runs down the clock". Or "reds just spawned a load of tanks in district 5; AV squad to district 5 ASAP". How about "we're losing district 6; everyone out of district 6 and we'll concentrate on 3 and 7"?
TLDR; battles are still 16v16, but platoons fight multiple battles at the same time.
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