May be it would be better to make restricted set of planes constant for some period of time, say 6 hours?
What do I mean.
Now: player logs in to MA and finds out that numbers are not even and he can't fly planes with ENY less than 7. He can switch to another country but who can guarantee the availability of his favorite plane to the new country after half an hour? And it is possible that in his home country his plane will be available after 15 minutes if somebody else will switch or log off. So player is just waiting. It doesn't help in imbalance problem, and it leads to frustration of players especially new ones. Why I have to switch, why not that guy? And what happen if we both will switch? The most frustrating thing for me, for example, is inability to fly the same plane again after I have been shot down.
Suggestion: player logs in to MA and finds out that numbers at this moment are not even, and he can't fly planes with ENY less than 7. He has 2 options:
1. to stay with this country. If he decides to do that he is guaranteed that during the next 6 hours all planes with ENY more than 7 will be available for him regardless of further number fluctuations. More important that he is guaranteed that he will not be able to fly planes with ENY less than 7 for the next 6 hours even if his country will be terribly outnumbered after 15 minutes.
2. Switch to another country with less numbers. All planes are available and will be available for him for the next 6 hours regardless of future numbers.
Obviously, if player's country at the moment of login is outnumbered or numbers are even all planes are available for this player and will be available for the next few hours ( or till the end of the day, or ... etc.) regardless of the further situation.
Algorithm works per player basis. The next player who will log in will get another distribution of numbers, and therefore will get another available plane set. But anyway this plane set will be fixed for him for the some period of time.
I don't know how difficult to implement this. May be it is easy to fix
plane set for everybody in this country for one day, for example, based on the numbers of previous day. Or take into account the same day of the last week. Implementation can be various. But the main idea is: I log in, I make my decision for the next several hours - switch or stay - and as result of this decision I have specific plane set which can't be changed by further occurrences.
