side switching timer modofication

[caldera]

HiTech's worry above is....
  Your on Bish, they have 29 people.  You see knits have 45 people. You want to stay on Bish and kick knit butt, so you switch to knit, screen cap where all the players, Buffs, and CVs are. Now the new time limit rule allows you to move back to bish and tell everyone on Bish.

wiley's suggest helps because you can't switch back to the same team. 

That would be superfluous.  They have a certain "bro" for that.

[pembquist]

Jeez that makes my head spin Bustr. I'll take your word for it. That kind of behavior seems slightly loony.

Maybe after 2 AM eastern the rule could change so that you can switch to the smaller country as much as you want but can only switch to a bigger country once. You might get some dedicated sweetheartbags trying to do something weird but during those hours who cares? If people are going to take screen shots and that kind of BS can't they just record the game and look at it offline? Or for that matter just have another account?

On the other hand maybe like I said before you can just let the players who promise not to abuse the side switching side switch, though I'm sure that is a can of worms and sociopathy no one in charge would want to deal with!

[AAIK]

How about we alter the time allowed based on the number of players in the arena?

Less players, more swapping.

[Vinkman]

Can any of you create a visual diagram to show the oscillation phenomenon of your ideas? Start with Hitech's as the base line diagram to compare how rapid switching develops over time.

Hitech's concern can be a team switching as a unit from country1 to country2 that has the lowest numbers causing their country1 to trigger the unlimited side switch due to having now the lowest numbers. Then the team bounces back when the switch kicks in to their original country along with how many others get in before the switch turns off. In practice a team could perform unlimited switches all night long.

They could also choose to impact ENY negatively for country2 as their reason to make the hop before hopping back when their original country triggers it's low numbers side switch. The down side for that country1 team is country3 with numbers has a team that jumps to country2 that triggers the unlimited switch to their home country3 before the first team can all get home to country1, and country3 becomes the new unlimited switch country. So the first team from country1 might decide to hop to country3 to help cause their country1 to trigger again then jump home to country1.

Oscillation of populations would screw with ENY and interfere with initiatives by groups. The individual or lone wolf doesn't really care and probably wouldn't be enough to cause the oscillation problem. No one can speak to the minds of groups of players looking to impact the game in their own favor once they understood how to manipulate the switch trigger. A variation of this oscillation concern is I suspect why Hitech won't set the Melee arena to switch at will or to a very low wait period.

In our game you rarely get side balancing out of unselfish motives to make the sides even if you have watched the AvA for the last decade and the WW1 arena. More often you get uneven sides because players want to be with friends\squadmates, they want to be on the side most likely to get them easy kills and stay alive due to numbers. In the WW1 and AvA arenas, usually a CM has to tell everyone the sides are out of balance because the high side guys don't care enough to check the roster.

His concern seemed to be with rapid switch back.  Are we concerned that a different country could go low every 15 minutes allowing people to keep moving to the new low country and even it up. That's what we want isn't it?

I thought the idea was that moving to the low country should be encouraged and moving to the high country should be discouraged.

I think his concern is people on a low country using their first allowable switch to go to a high country, spy on everything, and be allowed to switch back and disseminate that information. Easily solvable with a no switch back rule.  But hey, it's not worth fussing over. 


   

[Owlblink]

Right now if Someone logs in as side A they will see all the locations of CVs and etc. and can switch to side B with said knowledge. HiTech's concern is still valid for keeping this from becoming easier to abuse but you can not completely prevent every bit of it.

Switching back to the same side you left would need a timer of some sort as previously stated.

[gflyer]

Spying does not seem a valid concern for preventing side switching as long as multiple accounts are acceptable. 

[bustr]

An anti-jump back home timer for country1 would have to be in force against the country1 team when they jump to country2 and kick in it's unlimited side switch. So then they jump to country3 to try and influence country3's unlimited side switch and are now banned from country1 and 2 for x amount of time. And still they force country3's side switch and where do they go for x amount of time? And that x amount of time based on Hitech's population oscillation swing concerns will have to have some teeth to it.
 
Back to my question of you gents being able to diagram your ideas for side jumping to see what the oscillations will be. For the lone wolf and individualist jumper most of the time they may well see no difference between the 6 hour wait to jump and waiting around for a team to force a jump at will function in less than 6 hours. And so the same for the anti-jump back x amount of time version, they will need a team to force a jump at will function or they will have to wait out the global 6 hour timer for a single jump at will.

It's possible this will see the most triggering during off prime time when there are less than 50 total players in the Melee arena. And then what? The lone wolf type and another bored player could possibly force the unlimited timer by being the tipping point population numbers with each jump to have one of the real goals of most of these conversations. Side switching at will below a maximum total arena population number threshold. And if the anti-jump back timer is in place, back in the forums complaining about the amount of anti-jump back time makes jumping with it in force no different than with a fixed 6 hour wait.

There have been two holy grail of this oft-repeated subject.
1. - Switch at will with no limitations.
2. - Switch at will with a minimum population threshold.

From experience with the AvA and WW1 arenas, the side with the most numbers will not see mass jumping for the sake of balancing sides because those numbers make them win even with crappy rides. So the only people jumping are lone wolfs and bored individualists who don't care about the power of the numbers. So modifying the side switching function will not balance sides in the Melee arena. That ability exists with the 6 hour rule and people don't generally give a flying fig, and ignore Melee arena imbalances other than to make posts in the forums yelling at Hitech to fix the imbalances. And to really satisfy the lone wolf and individualist originators of these posts, Hitech will have to make side switching unlimited at any time in any direction 24x7.

[pembquist]

I think I understand what you are saying Bustr but I think the "holy grail" isn't any particular method of solution but instead some solution for the fact that if you want to switch to a lower population side so that there is someone to fight late at night you will often find that in a half an hour you would need to switch again and cannot so you log off. It isn't "yelling at Hitech" it is simply stating a real problem that makes the game less fun. If it is unsolvable with the resources available than so be it.

[Vinkman]

Spying does not seem a valid concern for preventing side switching as long as multiple accounts are acceptable.

...But Gflyer,  HiTech is very against using said accounts for that stated purpose and had disciplined people for such activity. So it seems logical he is against in game mechanisms that make spying easier. 

[Vinkman]

From experience ...modifying the side switching function will not balance sides in the Melee arena.

I don't propose adding it for that purpose. But it would only create more balance. It's a side benefit.

Flying with numbers can be worse than flying against the numbers. I hate being one of 6 planes chasing two bandits. When I see that the action is stuck in that pattern for 30min or more, I switch sides and make it a 5v3.  The fight is better for everyone. Maybe HiTech knows that many more people will abuse than switch so the 6v 2 becomes a 5v2. I dont have the data, it just seemed like an obvious thing to encourage.

But if switchback spying is a bigger concern, than I can live with it the way it is.

Note: I also think in the ENY discussion that HiTech has stated that side switching was not an objective, and I get the impression that he does not want to encourage switching, but would rather use ENY to create play balance. Perhaps he is a fan of chess piece Loyalty and does not want to dilute that feeling amongst the player base. 

...this also support the theory that he loves the Bish and codes it so their bullets work better, their planes fly faster, and rounds ricochet off their tanks.   

[pembquist]

...But Gflyer,  HiTech is very against using said accounts for that stated purpose and had disciplined people for such activity. So it seems logical he is against in game mechanisms that make spying easier. 

I would say that while of course you are correct that you don't want to make spying easier there has to be a balance of consequences and what might be the perfect balance for one set of circumstances might be a lousy balance for a different set. It is like when HQ was getting killed all the time and the only way to change the hardness of it was for an administrator to do it every time the map changed, that system worked fine until it didn't and became the source of much complaint. As it stands you could have unlimited side switching with the proviso that if it is abused by a player or "team" he or they will get banned but of course that would be ridiculous in the amount of labor required to administer and the amount of accusations and paranoia that would ensue. The real question I think is not about how you go about making side side switching easier but how you make the game retain as much fun as possible when the numbers are low and the sides get out of balance. I don't know if this would be considered optimizing for failure state which I could see you would not want to put much energy into or not.

[bustr]

I think I understand what you are saying Bustr but I think the "holy grail" isn't any particular method of solution but instead some solution for the fact that if you want to switch to a lower population side so that there is someone to fight late at night you will often find that in a half an hour you would need to switch again and cannot so you log off. It isn't "yelling at Hitech" it is simply stating a real problem that makes the game less fun. If it is unsolvable with the resources available than so be it.

The only thing that will satisfy the idiosyncrasies of your half hour problem is switch at will below a population threshold. That still does not account for what anyone else will do with it.

Is it my impression or on the mark, over many years but, are the players most concerned with side switching times lone individualist and lone wolf type players who are not a majority of the player demographic?

[pembquist]

The only thing that will satisfy the idiosyncrasies of your half hour problem is switch at will below a population threshold. That still does not account for what anyone else will do with it.

Is it my impression or on the mark, over many years but, are the players most concerned with side switching times lone individualist and lone wolf type players who are not a majority of the player demographic?

Well on your second part I don't really know, I don't think what I'm talking about is really a function of sociability but is a particular circumstance where there aren't enough people on. You know, like when there are four players against 1, not just in one little battle but for the whole map. Above 50 players it is not so much of an issue.