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.

Like me up, or rip me apart.

Freaking awesome idea.

No idea how to implement it, but I bet it would take a long long time.

But freaking awesome.

I've specifically tried to come up with something that didn't require too much actual "game" development.

There's the extension of squad mechanics to cover the platoon side; the corresponding comms enhancements can wait if necessary, relying on platoons maintaining good comms discipline and judicious use of "mute".

I'm sure the basis for the battle spawning is largely there already for faction warfare.

The platoon battle dashboard shouldn't take a lot more work than the current post-match dashboard did.

My (uneducated) guess is that CCP would need less time to implement this than either FW or PC took them. I'd love to hear from them about that though :-)

Once we've got 256 man platoons duking it out over individual planets, the next phase would be to allow the platoons to group together into battalions, then have those fight over multiple planets simultaneously.

A battalion of 6 platoons attacking/defending a New Eden constellation would be around 1500 players working as a coordinated unit.

Are we starting to edge into "massively multiplayer" yet?

This would require having that many players.
I do like your idea though - a platoon option, in particular, would be nice.