Sorry if this is what someone suggested and I am just too dense to realize it . . .
But it seems to me we already have a measure of country imbalance - ENY. Why not make it impossible to join a LW arena where your country already has that imbalance? If Eny >0 (or 5 or whatever min is deemed appropriate), you get "bounced" to the alternate arena even if there is still room under the original arena cap.
So, I see caps at 60/100 and 80/150, try to join the 60 arena -- but since my country already has an ENY limit in force there, I end up in the 80 arena where most likely my country is an underdog.
In the rare instance where the same country has ENY restrictions in both arenas, they would go to the arena with the lowest ENY.
I guess this makes more sense to me than a hard cap on a country side, or out-and-out blocking someone from joining an "era" of there choice, or forcibly bouncing someone from an arena that becomes unbalanced because a lot of an opposing country's players logged all at once.
It also seems it would help in a squad situation. A squad should end up split if and only if one of the arenas was unbalanced. In that situation, the decision of which arena to move to would be easy since I believe most would chose not to continue to fly in an arena with an ENY restriction and have your squad split. So, squads on a "high side" would be more likely to move to a different arena to keep the squad together, since those latecomer-squaddies would not be able to join the already unbalanced arena.
I realize that doesn't address EW or MW, but it seems like it should help with the LW without too much additional clipboard interface building (but what do I know - just guessing on that point).
