Or perhaps I should subtitle that "or have a way of scaling them to match the number of players online".
I'd like to humbly suggest that the time of the big dumb (by this I mean non programmable to scaling) massive maps is OVER. I've been on several times on weekends where its been impossible to find fights or even opposing players for hours at a time. And this isn't at 4 am, its at 2-3 pm PDT when theoretically there should be sufficient numbers to find a fight. The problem is that the maps are so HUGE that even 200 or less players are like grains of sand on a basketball court. There may be a lot there but they are so spread out they can't find each other. Nothing kills a game faster than having no one to play with. Given the comments on country, I'd say this was a problem.
I'm not talking about bringing back the rotating big map/little map system. That worked but kinda well sucked, although I think it would be better than the present situation.
The ideal system would collapse and expand playable area depending on number of players. The computation would be that each field supports X players (my uneducated guess is 1 field per 5 players per country). I believe this was floated before and the answer was that the way maps are created makes this difficult.
Obviously if the maps were numbered from the center, this would be easier. You could make fields active from #0 to #X as long as 1/3 was Rooks, 1/3 Bish, 1/3 Knights. I would recommend that all new maps be constructed this way. However since the number of fields is higgly piggly on most maps, another method is needed.
We CAN assume that contiguous numbers tend to be close together in proximity. That is number 1-10 or 220-230 tend to be somewhat close together. Obviously this won't always be true but it should get us close enough to make it work. The code needs to find a continguous set of numbers where the distribution is 1/3 Rooks, 1/3 Bish, 1/3 Knight.
So the hypothetical computation is:
1. Between 100 and 150 players have been on for X minutes. To make the math easy, lets assume that the distribution is 1/3 Rooks, 1/3 Bish, 1/3 Knight. Based on the high end of 50 players per country, we need to have 10 fields for each country.
2. The code looks through field number until it can find a contiguous run of field numbers where there are 10 Rook bases, 10 Bish bases, 10 Knight bases. All other bases are marked inactive. If more players come in for X minutes, additional bases are added per the preset value.
3. When players take a base, one base is added to the side that lost one from a number closest to the contiguous set.
It won't work perfectly but it will address the current horrible situation. In some cases one or more bases may be off by themselves but since they won't be close to anything that can be attacked so nothing will be lost. It WILL concentrate the available players into a space where they can find each other. The code will have to accomodate for times when it can't reach a perfect 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 distribution by adding a country field with the number closest to the contiguous run. You could also make the number of fields 20% higher than calculated to cover these issues.
There is of course the option to do nothing, but I'll argue that making it so that people can actually PLAY ALL THE TIME is more valuable than a new plane that keeps them entertained for a weekend. If they are playing they are happy, if they can't play they get frustrated and ultimately leave. This set up will make the play experience more consistent over time and ultimately retain customers.
The kangaroo court is now in session . . .
