this isnt about PVP voomz. and regaurdless you could have two teams of the same size beat the ever living fuck out of eachother and one will loose. depending on how bad it gets they might war for a very long time. but that is beside the point.

Ether figure out where the FUCKING HELL you are going with this. or dont even touch it. do you want more solo? (aka smaller teams) then fix the classes to reflect that. if you want more cooperation and team work you need larger teams. that is just how its working...if it only took one man to win a war countrys wouldnt have armys. Do you want more solo? or more team?

Got to agree there. To do uber runs you need a lot of people.

The easiest way to get get the number of people u need quickly is to have a big team. This not only is much easier to organise , it keeps the rewards "in house" so even if you dont get stuff personally you benefit collectively.

The downside for the game is only the big teams really benefit.

The answer is three fold, put a limit on team size, (sinking lid works), and make ubers spawn more readily, put a limit on the number of times a character can go to a certain location per week.

I've had it.

what admins seem to be doing recently sends mixed messages..if they want to favor small teams...make stuff easyer! if it takes an entire team to do or even just large numbers of players you are promoting big teams. if you want smaller teams..best way to do that is make stuff easyer. and reduce spawn times drasticly. or set instances (hint hint!)

most people join large teams because the large teams can do the ubers and can help them get skills..if instances were in we wouldnt have so much contention for skills and being in a smaller team would work. what chance do any smaller teams have when a lot of them MUST be comprised of at least a few realy good players with weps 20 to do ubers? people with weps 20 dont want to spend their entire time helping people...they want to play! kill ubers,fight wars, do contests,DG! and now even DGs can require a few players to do...


seems like the only thing you want to do is drive players away with this..what exactly do you hope to accomplish by hurting large teams since they are so vital these days? or are you thinking of nerfing ai with the nerfstick of doom? and setting instances? if you doubt what i say..when was the last time LC or some of the other smaller teams managed to fight ubers? stuff has become considerably harder recently..ai nowadays would make most people back when i joined shit themselves opaque. and then you look at the bosses.....they could hand several of their old selves their asses!

I think the idea is that there will be smaller teams, but it will take group work to get stuff done, but smaller teams will mean more war, which means content put ingame will be unlocked slowly like it always used to be.

SHIT! youve done it now! you mentioned the "W" word! war! OMG! here comes voom! run before he bans and otherwise pesters you to death for playing the game !!

I like the Idea on "Base Boss" and you could expand it a little more ...

Director or councillor, whoever logs in first is designated Base Boss and everyone needs to follow him he drops a base in a galaxy sets up colony etc... and owns the galaxy. Team can only build in connecting galaxies, once owned they can only build in galaxies that are conected to those. this will create pockets of ownership and make galaxy claiming more strategic trying to out manuver another team. Limit the number of bases people can drop to 2 during the first 8 hours of the new uni. This will prevent teams from flying around dropping kits in every galaxy before anyone gets the chance to even see the new uni.

There will need to be one exception to the connecting galaxies and that is each team can own 1 unconnected galaxy. This will allow ownership of Emp Bio, Hyper etc... and only allow teams to control 1 of these. If one of their team mates drops a kit in warp 0 that is not connected then ... oh well too bad guess they wont own emp bio.

Ok... I have to say this, subtle encourgement instead of a hard cap.... Bad, bad, bad idea. These sorts of subtle encourgements is one of the reasons why a certain programing language failed to become mainstream. The designers relied on the subtle encourgement of saying in a comment that these functions are private, ergo don't use them in your programs as they can change at any time, thus breaking your program horribly anytime those were changed. Guess what? The programmers saw too many useful "private" functions and used them, so every updated of the programing language, or there abouts loads of programs would up and die or get very weird bugs. That is one of the reasons later object oriented languages had private and public distinctions be hard limits and not comments.

Edit:
Unless you hard limit it there will always be too many advantages to a large team.

That is a terrible analogy. What would you rather have us do, put a completely arbitrary hard cap on the number of people in a team?

loot sharing (whores)

keeping track of everything (the base is under attack thing is helpful, but still...)_

organizing (man let me tell ya, when it was me useugi and minch on the old andro, we were so organized)

etc ect

simply make the content doable with fewer numbers.. and yea it would need a hard cap..you cant simply stop people from making friends can you? this is like the grinch stole christmass except voom is on his high horse about hating pvp as usual... and also as usual coming to the conclusions that any of us would wipe a team out? he was stating that he would kill the guy an his stations if he tryed to take his gal that way..wich i think is fair play. i havnt seen a single team wiped out in ages...and i belive in fair play..hell goz can attest to that. we hardly ever shot at eachother when mercs/trader/toxic alliance was thriving and we were "hunting" andro.

just give up on limiting numbers...there is realy only one way to do it and doing it will likely hurt the game more then it will cause progression of the game. add instances...this will help big time...since larger teams are more likely to get an uber run just because there is a higher likelyhood of enough players being online at the time to do it. and smaller teams have to wait and im betting most of the time when they do finnaly get the people online stuff is allready dead...its an old mantra but instances need to be added..ether in client2 or before that..its a problem and it does hurt the games expansion.

It isn't a terrible analogy. The point was that on threat of programs dying if they used the "private" functions people still used them. They didn't changer their ways when their programs died, they changed programing languages because they got so annoyed at shit breaking.

Do I want you to put in a hard cap? No. Do I think it would be arbitrary if you did? No again. I think Jeff has an idea of what the ideal team size would be, or at least a ball park figure that is "too large." If that is the case make that the hard cap. Subtle suggestions won't do it, heck I doubt horrendous penalties won't do it, if you have a size of team that is too large then limit it to less then that.

Yes it is a terrible analogy... what you are saying is that people merely put a suggestion in a comment that may or may not have been read, to do something for which there was no real penalty for doing outside of potentially unstable code if they did it wrong.

This is a game... we put in a mild penalty the larger your team gets, to make it slightly more difficult to own half the galaxy in the first 5 minutes of the new universe. Its not a terrible restriction, but if nothing else it encourages big teams to own only the good galaxies, and leave low DF OK galaxies to smaller teams since the risk of building there and having some F2P noob ruin their ownership is very real.

Even if this restriction has no effect on the game whatsoever, its not like all of Star Sonata is going to crash as a result. So your analogy is in fact terrible.

There are already subtle penalties built into the game for having a huge team - if you don't know what I'm talking about, think of the reasons why everyone isn't all on the same big team already. We are just adding to that in the hopes that it prevents current large teams from growing even bigger.



The problem with any cap that we put in is that all of a sudden Pants, Toxic, and potentially other teams will just have to kick a lot of their members or alts outright. If you don't think anyone is going to be angry about it, then you can try explaining it to them. Now, that isn't to say that we haven't considered it, and won't consider it in the future, but for now there are more important things to be worrying about.

My primary point was that such subtle hints are just annoying and will just tick people off and are highly unlikely to alter behaviour in the least.



I wasn't aware of any sorts of existing penalties. As for why everyone isn't all on the same big team. There are several good reasons:
First there are certain advantages to running your own team, you make the decisions, you get an exp tithe, etc.
Second there are the basic social dynamics and interpersonal issues that will separate people out in to different groups.
Third each team has its own set of guidelines for conduct that people either agree with or don't and thus some people can't/won't play on certain teams.



If the problem, as Voom seemed to be saying, was that teams have gotten too large for balancing then you either need drastic penalties above your ideal team size, or you need to put in a hard cap.

Voomy the size of a team or teams has nothing to do with content balance. It has everything to do with self preservation.

In addition larger teams are havens and training grounds for new P2Pers.

Let the teams themselves regulate their max size. For example if you look at Traders' roster you'll see a lot of characters when in reality we have just a handful of players, with some players having multiple P2P accounts. Because we have so few actual players the wars with Toxic last uni had a fair chance to destroy us... what saved us is the fact that we also have multiple chars with uber base building skills and WHEN most of us could all be on at the same time Traders is a force to be recconned with.

At the present time all of the larger teams are bringing new P2Pers along and training them in base building and ship construction for maximum effect.