Hoax415, on 29 September 2014 - 10:27 AM, said:
No it is not easy. If CW was forcing everyone to form a 12-man team outside of the MM before hitting drop it would be relatively easy because in the group screen you could figure out shared tonnage. But CW does have pick up groups formed from solo players and sub-12 player groups. That means tonnage sharing becomes a lot more problematic.
Think about the order of procedures:
-MM makes the attacking 12 man team.
-Attackers ??? and end up with a legal tonnage team.
-MM sends out defense call, builds a 12 man defending team.
-Now while attackers sit there and wait the defending team needs to build a tonnage legal team.
-Once defenders have finished the match can finally get under way?
Well, technically, the mechs and shared tonnage in a group is made long before a match is ever created for joining.
Right now, when you join a group, the group has to setup how they want to drop before actually launching the match. The same goes for CW. When in a group for CW, before dropping to defend or attack, the group is setup for what mechs and shared tonnage they are doing.
And since drops are FIFO, the group that gets their mechs situated first gets into the drop first.
But lets assume the worse case scenario, where the attacker has already declared the invasion and a notification comes up to defend to all defenders of that planet.
One of two situations will happen:
- A group of players already knew before hand on how they are going to be outfitted if this planet goes under attack. So when the call goes out, they knew these players will take X amount of tonnage while others will take Y amount. The match will start pretty quickly.
- A group of players did not know how they want their loadout. They spend some X amount of time setting up how they want their drop to look.
Situation 1 will not be an issue. So there is no point talking about that, plus, I think will be the vast minority of the drops.
Situation 2 will take some amount of time to establish what players want to drop. But, since the group all know each other (or else, why are they in a group?), the group can easily establish values for their drop. This is also ignoring any already selected mechs for the drop ship for each player, which makes modifying the drop even easier.
Each group is self contained within each other, thus there is no need to worry about who else is joining along with you to worry about what tonnage they are sharing (as it doesn't share across groups). Single players are basically a group, just with a single member.
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You can't set time limits because what do you do if the limit expires? Through everyone back into queue and start this all over again? Count it as a loss for that faction (horrible idea).
The issue about timer limits are already existing by PGI. If an attacker does not have a responding defender after a certain amount of time, then the attack is considered a win. Paul's post does leave out details about how long this timer will be, and what is gained by the "win" of a undefended attack, but a timer is already in place that defenders has to met.
What about situations where an attacker does an attack but there is nobody on the other side? They just sit in the queue indefinitely? If that is true, then defenders could just ignore responding to an attack and the attacker never gains token for attempting to take over a planet.
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You should be able to see the massive problems with such a system. Players getting disconnected or being afk or refusing to not horde a lot of tons would result in matches hanging without starting. Players would want to leave some groups because they don't feel they are being given enough tonnage which means the MM needs to ...? Remake the entire match? Have the ability to pull another person in from the queue?
Sharing tonnage without forcing 12-man teams is a big ask. Anyone who has ever played LoL or Dota can tell you what its like when its a ffa in a pug to pick roles. Far from easy. And giving shared tonnage ability to 12-mans would just result in 12-mans stomping pugs even harder in CW which is probably going to make a lot more people unhappy than its benefit even though shared tonnage makes great sense and adds even more team building options to 12-mans.
What reasons would there be for a player to leave a group if they are not getting enough tonnage? They joined the group to play CW with those individuals, so they already reasonably expect how the group will work. And since each group is self contained, other groups joining in your game has no effect on what available shared tonnage is given to your group.
The only time where this would be an issue is if groups was placed together before the sharing of tonnage happens. My suggestion is have the sharing of tonnage be done on a group basis, each player giving an equal amount of tonnage to the group for sharing.
Edit: Players don't group up then hit attack then after everyone gets queued together, THEN they select mechs. Instead, groups set up their mechs before a match happens, following the rules. Then they click the drop once everything looks good.
Players don't hit the CW Faction tab and then click drop and then people gets placed into a group on a FIFO basis. Instead, they group up long before anything happens and setup their drop loadouts within the CW Faction tab (which is different than the normal PUG play group).
If they decide to do an attack, they would pick the planet and then hit attack, placing them into the searching queue. The queue will then fill them up with other players they need to fill out a 12 man, following the same above.
Defenders will work just like attackers. The group in CW Faction tab will setup their mechs long before a call goes out. If they want to modify their group loadout due to not expecting to defend this specific planet, then they will have to modify.
This makes groups independent of each other. So there is no bickering between other groups and solo players. The benefit does go to larger groups, I will say that. They have options of allowing more shared tonnage to those who like to play specific roles where as a single player will only have that base tonnage to play with.
Edited by Zyllos, 29 September 2014 - 01:46 PM.