Tonight I planned to amuse myself with some air-combatting, from about 9 to 11 PM GMT+2, i.e. Euro Prime Time. There were about 250 players on-line, 80-90 on each side, but still I found it very hard to find a fight. At appr. 10:20 PM I made this calculation:
Fields total 240
Players total 250
Flashing fields 12, which makes on the average about 20 players/attacked field, half of them attacking, half defending.
Now, I guess 10 players in a sector should make a full length darbar, correct me if I'm wrong. However, most every darbar was the shortest possible, meaning 1-2 players. Nobody was telling about hordes milkrunning, the situation was quite stable. So, if there were a handful of players at each of the dozen flashing targets on the average, where were the rest 200? AFK?
I understand it's everyone's own business how they like to use their $14,90, but: HTC has to pay for the headroom for large player quantities on servers. People who just leave their game open for sleep or work or such are actually wasting resources which could be used to develop this game.
The amount of on-line players also affects on the maps being used. If HTC believes there are hundreds of players airborne, they'll give us big maps with lots of fields. With tonight's activity a H2H arena map from AH1 with a dozen fields would have been big enough.
What I suggest, has been suggested before: To kick players out if they haven't moved from one tower in a certain time. I guess an hour would be a suitable time for that. Logging back in isn't that hard to do.
