MrRiply: I have 3 simple questions.
Is it optional to switch to the other arena under your system?
If it is not optional do you think people are going to be more pleased with being forced to switch vs having a choice?
If it is optional, why do you believe people will switch, when they will not choose a different arena now?
HiTech
First of all, thank you for addressing this discussion even though tempers have flared.
1) Switch would not be optional but automated and as transparent as possible in order to achieve the point in 2
2) People would not perceive they switched but some *others* did if their own 'world' continued as it was on in their point of view (achieved by porting the player to the running copy along others).
As players we do not have any knowledge which server, which port, which IP we play on outside of making the orange/blue choice during login - we can only observe the game 'world'. If the state of war remained, by players point of view all that really occurred was that a lot of players left the battle. This, then, will create a counter reaction from the defending side populating the same area again if too many players were transitioned locally and there's now a local power vacuum.
I'm making a leap of faith to say here that for majority of players the only other players whose presence matters for fluid gameplay are players that are squadmates. If no organized relation exists between players, it's likely a single player won't be missed. Enemies are anonymous as it is. Even if a player would want to switch to meet someone, by the virtue of now having two servers with 50% capacity, basically anyone who desires could move without causing much damage to anything. And because the split would be random, by average both sides would have equal amount of persons wanting to switch to either side, again balancing eachothers out.
3) As you said when given options, the customers make decisions which are detrimental to their and others gameplay (by overfilling maps as one example), that's why guidance is needed, which you already do in form of arena cap.
The whole point behind my idea was to achieve conditions where a total shutdown would not be necessary and the process would create two equally sized and active arenas 'on the fly' thereby negating the necessary time required to populate the new arena and most importantly, remove the inevitable near empty second arena that players will not voluntarily choose as long as it's low in numbers.
Now, I think I've made my case the best I can and if you say my idea is a bad one, this will be the last post about the subject, end of story.
