Free Allegiance Forums

Just an idea.

Rather than dictating which players are in which squad via a draft system, what effect would capping the maximum number of players allowed in a squad have on the closeness of SG's?

How about if we capped at say (arbitrary figure plucked from thin air) twenty five players per squad. Would this force the squad leadership to pick their strongest 25, leaving a lot of talent on the open market fighting for a place in the other squads?

It would probably mean squads would have to remove inactives and perhaps people who play less frequently. Some of the larger squads would probably form a B team, and maybe we would need to add some kind of a minimum activity requirement for a squad to remain "official", as well as pre-determined windows when people could be recruited into squads.

Maybe a lousy idea, what are the plusses and minuses?

Sounds good but I don't think it would work well in practice. SysX has 40 active members but there have been sometimes where we have closer to 10 players out for SG's. I would say SysX has maybe 20-25 members who attend at least 1 SG a month.

Also if we used 25 players then assuming all current actives would need to be in a squad we would need 11.2 squads so thats 2 more squads then we currently have which would also most likely be the two weakest squads or the cap would have to be 31 players instead.

The system itself would probably lead to some squads containing 25 great players and lower squads containing the leftover slag players thus not leading to any competition continued.

The system would only be feasible once an accurate ranking system is in place (no offence MrC + SgtB because the current ranking is better then any of the alternatives but is still inaccurate) and then there could be some kind of fluctuating rank cap instead.

I had a similar idea, but I doubt it would go anywhere. Also 25 is a little low, 40 would be a better cap.

minuses, i can't fly with my buds. that's what a squad is all about, right? flying with people you want to fly with.

are we having issues with squads? there are personality conflicts and that causes people to change squads . .why? because they want to fly with people they like. that's the real issue and I'm not certain any policy will affect that.

if you are addressing a different issue, please say so.

also, i don't think there is a situation in which 2-3 squads get all of the "talent." some squads haven't been able to hold onto their talent because of the squad leadership (either the leadership themselves or the leadership not handling issues within the squad) and they have gone to fly with other squads that have similar attitudes.

basically, there are two primary categories of alleg squad player: competitive and non-competitive. There are, of course, many grades within these cats, but there are two. squads, when viewed as a group of players, move around within those grades, pushing toward one end or the other. we end up with . .well ... divisions. div 1 are the more competitive squads, div 2 the less. the talent moves freely within both divisions, but the fact is that talent is not all it takes . . it takes a competitive drive.

within each division you get shuffling based more on personality than most other things as well. if a div2 player becomes more competitive, interest from div1 squads increase and the players interested in div1 squads increase.

bah . .enough . i stop rambling now, without finishing, but i think you see what i mean.

Personally I'm not keen on anything that dictates to squads how they must handle recruitment. Squads are about more than just SGs (although that's a huge part of the appeal for many people) and I'll defend that to the hilt.

You're all looking at it from the same angle, but consider this:

By enacting this plan, you are automatically deciding for people, which squads they can or cannot join.

Imo the freedom of an Allegiance player to choose what squad he wants to join is far more important than trying to make squad games "fair" for everyone.

Otherwise what you'll end up with is drama left right and centre, as people are forced to join squads with people they don't like, or people they never wanted to play with in the first place. Either that or you'll have about 3 new squads being created by the unhappy people, taking players away from the weaker squads anyway which is working against what you are trying to achieve by implementing these measures.

Any player cap will mean that squads have to remove some people. So i support this idea as a source of great Drama.

I strongly dislike this idea mostly because it's been done to RT once before.

Pook specifically told us that we were no longer allowed to recruit new pilots because we were "too big".

This led to both in-squad drama and a large sense of disillusionment in some of our pilots towards the game in general.

It didn't really benefit any of the OTHER squads because most of the people who join RT do so because it's the only squad they're really interested in. They only times we get someone applying to RT *and* another squad is when t hey have friends in both *OR* when they're applying to ~EVERY~ squad.

All that resulted from us not being able to recruit was a larger number of cadet graduates going merc.

The problem here isn't that some squads attract more pilots by virtue of being bigger, it's that the most active and recognizable squads make bigger impressions on pilots who are LOOKING for a squad and therefor end up with more members.

This problem can only be fixed if the smaller squads step up their recruitment and have more pilots active in PUG's during primetime.

Squads are also independent entities which are not under the charge of the FAO.. any squad limits would have to be agreed upon by all the squads that wanted to participate in a squad tournament/league.

i dont really think this is a good idea, but wouldnt it be better to have something like an AS cap, you cant recruit if you have over 300 combined AS

note this is also still a bad idea, but would help teams spread the better players, or maybe ppl would stop stacking -- lol - right