Games are too big and it equals lousy games.

[Lykourgos]

Yeah, for me anything between 8 and 25 or so per team is playable, and optimum seems to be about 12-15. Maybe soon we'll have enough people on during primetime to really run two big games. That would be nice.

Meanwhile right now there are 10 people on EoR, 5 people on DN, and 6 people scattered in 1v1 DMs. Oi.

[Zapper]

Are u guys slow or just slow...
I told of this many months ago, predicting the time of the small servers.
Evolve a bit faster plz....

Nevertheless when the accesscontrol of rank is implemented u can have all the little cosy server's u want.
Spam u Senator for a quick implementation.

Zap

[Shizoku]

Just play late at night, you can have all the small @#(!ty games you can handle.

[SpaceJunk]

It would help too that certain technologies could be flagged as scalable, so they nerf when numbers are high.

(Nothing unrealistic in this. When you need to mass produce a weapon, you sacrifice quality).

[minigun]

if there are 50 or more on noats you couls play bigger maps. of course these games could last 2 to 3 hours. maybe even play 3 or 4 teams per game, although it seems the community doesn't really like multi team games very much.

[mcwarren4]

Multi team games are terrible for the same reason most pickup games are terrible. The stronger two teams ally, destroy the weaker teams, then draw. 3 or 4 team free-for-alls are extremely fun. At least both of the ones in the last 5 years were... (where's the roll eyes emoticon when you need it?) Allegiance, besides needing more cowbell, needs to grow some balls.

On weekends, there are plenty of pilots around to be playing a 10 per side game and a 20 per side game.

[Rakinite]

Basically if two teams are going to join up and wipe the floor with the others, you might as well just play the two team game. A forced FFA is probably the best solution in those cases.

The only problem with that now, is that in most cases, you can't get large maps unless you increase team numbers. Of course, teams could probably autoresign if someone wanted to have a 2 teamer on a 6 player map.

[Lykourgos]

Actually, I've been in two 4-teamers recently where there were no allies and a fairly good time was had by all.

The other problem, though, is that given a lobby of 35 people, 7 aren't playing and that leaves exactly 7 persons per team- not enough to do fun things, really. Not even really enough to finish a large map.

[apathos]

I like the idea. There are too many times the only real game going gets someone who wants to do something stupid, and for the next hour you can't play. I try to start a new game on a different server, but no one seems very interested.

How do we get people to switch to another server then? We can do that by locking team sizes. Unless someone has a better idea?

[Picobozo]

While I enjoy having big games, Ducky is right, this game doesn't really upscale well for a couple of reasons. The primary reason being the weakness of Allegiances economy. The one thing that I think Spunky had a point with in Plus (which alot of people disagreed with) was his options for beefing up miners.

In larger games the miners would have been appropriately powerful. At the very least it forced players to use teamwork to kill them.

Another thing that might make larger games viable would be special versions of maps that have had their sectors sizes modified to be much larger. Maybe on a scale of 2 to 3 times the normal size. They can be differentiated in the options screen as LARGE GAME versions (ex. - HighHigher[LG]). That would reduce response times and give people more room to maneauver.

You could also try making different versions of maps that had more two aleph connection options that could be used to split the camp between two alephs that go to one sector (ex. - Tauceti to Larchis has two alephs that connect the two).

You make a game option that enables a strengthened economy and larger map, more connection options, and you might also make cap ships more viable with strong stats the way they should be. Now they have to be weaker because of the distance between alephs and tech bases.

I mean, am I crazy, or are there other people out there that would like to see real capships in all our larger games (or at least way more often then we see them now)?

Slipping back on topic, limiting max server sizes to like 40 players might be cool too. More then likely it would promote having more then one decent size game going on at once. In the end having multiple viable games would probably attract more people, because if they didn't like how one game looked because of whatever reasons (settings, players, game size, commanders, etc) they could hop onto the other game which might be more to their liking. I know there are a few times that I log on, see the major stack, then log right back off because there is nothing else going on.

You could keep maybe one or two large game servers (200 player) and call them tournament/squad game/zone game for big events or if somebody wants to try to start a big game.