Allegiance has too many players

juckto · Post by **juckto** » Sat Jan 31, 2009 9:27 pm

So many choices for thread title:
Madness? This is Quake in Space!
5 year-olds playing soccer (or football if you prefer)
Change the map
"It didn't start like this"
Primetime is teh suck

I went for the one which is most simple, and most likely to bait people like Adept.

But yeah, I'm not kidding. When I log in and see over 30 people per side on HiHigher, I log out. HiHigher is a SMALL map. The game is going to suck. Oh hey, look. There's an average of 2.5 enemy pilots in every single sector. What's the point in deprobing when there's a 90% chance an enemy scout will come into the sector within the next minute? Hell, what's the point in probing when you can just get a low-sig scout to sit in every enemy sector and still have 80% of your team left over?

Tactics are going out the window. More and more, it's becoming Quake in Space. No one bothers to think about what the enemy are doing and where they need to be next, they just react to what is going on at the moment - just like 5 year-olds playing soccer. A giant mob of idiots trying to be the one who gets the ball cause then they're special. New players think that that is just fine and normal, because they have no other reference to compare against. They dogfight cause that's what everyone else is doing, and we've entered a nice downward spiral. Games often stretching out over 2 hours cause neither team has the skill to do anything worthwhile.

So please, please. Bring back the "limit team sizes". You have to select how big the teams can be before the game launches and then they can't exceed that. Also have the maps available for selection dependant on team sizes, so we stop getting this stupid 4 players per sector asshattery.

Then maybe we'd get a few half-decent PUGs going at any one time. We have a large enough player base to support it, but for some reason everyone has a herd mentality and furthermore believe that spending 3 hours dogfighting and working on their k/e ratio is more important than being a decent player.

tl;dr version:
Main game has too many players on it and too small maps being played. Bring back the limited team size option.

KofiMan · Post by **KofiMan** » Sat Jan 31, 2009 9:39 pm

Hmm.

The best way to fix this would be to have a unified lobby, so people can join more than one game while still maintaining their NOAT whoring abilities.

Second best would be for the end of the main game only on big saturdays and sundays like this. It'll probably fix itself this summer.

CronoDroid · Post by **CronoDroid** » Sat Jan 31, 2009 9:39 pm

Yeah the number of people playing is starting to get annoying. I thought more players would be a good thing but because we all like to hop on the "main game", the skill pool is being diluted and even would be vets are just not playing up to scratch.

That game last night, me vs Kap, great example of a huge game on a tiny map. What was it, Crush? We had EIGHTY players, it's impossible to do anything until people start getting bored of whoring for hours and leave.

Anything more than 15 a side gets fairly ridiculous. It's impossible to stop a 20-man galv run, there's no point of nanning if the enemy has 40 mini3s on your ship, etc etc etc.

35 people per server. That way you have your 15 players per team and the five AFK'ers/NOAT chatters. Or we should start playing EastWest more often...

Norgonq1 · Post by **Norgonq1** » Sat Jan 31, 2009 9:42 pm

Every map should have a ginormous bomb in it that blows up after an hour causing both teams to lose.

Sealer · Post by **Sealer** » Sat Jan 31, 2009 9:43 pm

Also maybe we should start playing on other maps then HiHigher and InsideOut

Dorjan · Post by **Dorjan** » Sat Jan 31, 2009 9:48 pm

I am Dorjan and I aprove of this message.

CronoDroid · Post by **CronoDroid** » Sat Jan 31, 2009 9:48 pm

Most of the other ones aren't much larger. Ideally for the massive games the map should be at least 18-24 sectors.

But I prefer more smaller games, that makes Exp actually worthwhile. If you go Exp on a 35v35 EastWest game, you're pretty clueless.

Adept · Post by **Adept** » Sat Jan 31, 2009 9:48 pm

juckto wrote:QUOTE (juckto @ Jan 31 2009, 11:27 PM) tl;dr version:
Main game has too many players on it and too small maps being played. Bring back the limited team size option.

I approve of this message.

/edit

Not all the large games suck. There have been great 25+ vs. 25+ games played on maps such as PolishedDiamon (which isn't bigger of course). The dynamics of the map are important too.

But as for wanting the option to limit a game to 15 vs. 15 (for instance) without limiting the option to loaf on NOAT, that would be great. Just limiting the server to 30 wouldn't work, as it could well end up with 6 vs 7 and the rest being NOAT jockeys... and this would prevent any actual players from joining too.

_SRM_Nuke · Post by **_SRM_Nuke** » Sat Jan 31, 2009 10:47 pm

There is also the annoying issue of sector overload. In the Crono vs Kap game we had enough people for sector overload on ONE team alone. So that means, if everyone listens to the comm (rare, I know) you will kill your own bomb run before you even leave your sector. Its just impossible to play with 30+ people per team. We either need to up sector overload or limit team sizes. It wouldn't be that bad to go back to the days when we had multiple servers going with 10 vs 10 on each one.

Spinoza · Post by **Spinoza** » Sat Jan 31, 2009 11:04 pm

Interesting.

I have to agree to some extent. I always thought Allegiance could do with flexible maps. I mean that the maps would grow as the number of players grows.
I know, I know ! It's not practical, but it could be interesting. Does anyone know of any MMOs which have such a mechanism ? Just out of curiosity !

FYI comms who like smaller games can refuse to accept players if they feel the map is crowded. No need for a special function. Just make your intentions known.

Part of the problem is that people join in droves after a game has started as an 8x8 or even less.
We have quite a few good larger maps. Hilo42 and Obsidian are fun, so is the classic Diamond.

On the other hand, In many cases the large number of people makes little difference. You just have a loot more useless noobs, the number of players actually doing stuff remains small.
I know for a fact that even in the larger games miner D is still lacking.