All that's actually needed would be to ensure that a battle is only launched when there are sufficient players for both sides ready to pilot their 'mechs, whilst simultaneously ensuring that people would actually queue for a match...
Any planet marked as "contested" on the map gets an attacker and defender queue. As soon as a certain number of players from the attacking faction have queued for assault, and if the amount of defenders already queued has not yet reached a certain threshold, an alert is put out to queue for defence - first to all players of the defending faction, then to allied/friendly nations, then to unaligned mercenaries.
A system of rewards will be in place to incentivize certain actions, such as a "Rapid Response" bonus for people reacting to an alert, or a "First In" bonus for the first X players who managed to get into a fight, as well as small stipends for simply spending time waiting in one of the queues.
From those two queues per planet (which are dynamic, meaning that players will keep entering and leaving depending on the time they have available), the matchmaker will then attempt to set up proper battles. Certain handicaps such as a dis-favorable matchmaking ratio or the battle featuring PUGs vs Premades (which may occur if the amount of players on one or both queues is lower than recommended) will be factored into the battle results and may mean that a weaker team's defeat only costs their faction's control over the world, say, 0.5 points, or if a weaker team wins then this victory counts as 1.5 points instead of just 1.
There would also be no time-limited phases - a planet will remain contested as long as it takes the attacking faction to capture it, or the defending faction to reassert control. To represent this, contested worlds start out with a 50/50 control ratio. The faction that manages to push its control rating above a certain threshold wins. This means that planets may stay contested for days or perhaps even weeks, as the factions throw ever more players at them, launching ever more battles to decide its fate. The important thing is that the amount of players engaged in this fight does not actually affect the chance of victory - only their quality does. So one side-effect would be the House leadership working to make sure that, ideally, important battles are fought by veteran units, whilst PUGs and smaller units may either supplement this effort or hold/expand less important fronts, all depending on how many players a faction has to spare and how many players an enemy is sending against them.
To prevent the defender from simply stopping to defend and thus lock down an attempted conquest, a certain minimum number of battles would have to be fought each hour to prevent the enemy from scoring "free" points, and once again an alert will be used to draw the attention of available players if such a situation is close.
Should the unthinkable happen and several hours (6?) would pass without at least one battle being launched in spite of a sufficient number of attackers being present in the queue, then the planet flips immediately.
Once a contested planet has either been conquered or fortified, it goes into lockdown and cannot attacked again for X days.
Yes, this would almost certainly result in longer queue waiting times for overpopulated factions (as now they'd actually have to face an enemy), but with this also an incentive to move to smaller ones. Besides, at least this way you actually get to play the game and blow up 'mechs.
Most notably, this does away with silly ghost drops, and I feel it would lessen the issue of a "last hour rush", simply because there
is no last hour.
I'm writing this up shortly before going to sleep, so I'm almost certain I may have missed some minor detail, but all in all I feel this is an example of an alternative that would actually work without discriminating against smaller factions. Or people in Non-US timezones.
Edited by Kyone Akashi, 04 January 2015 - 10:48 PM.
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Odins Fist, on 01 January 2015 - 12:08 PM, said:
