Originally posted by ET
Maybe the system should be based on bases owned instead of numbers on line. People on line does not reflect the action going on such as two teams piling on one with total numbers. But bases owned will help the country with the least amount of bases. Not much good having numbers when all your bases are being vulched or your hangers are dead.
Adjusting perk cost/award values as a balance tool is a good idea, but remember that it was just implemented; it's going to take HTC some time to accumulate enough statistics to find the best computation to get the balance they're looking for.
On the other hand, there are some fundamental problems with the way that it's implemented. Aircraft and GVs are fundamentally different; you can take off in a plane and fly several sectors to attack or defend if you need to (12-sector round trips being possible for the B-17 and Lancaster); GVs rarely will get more than a few miles from their spawn point, which functionally limits them to attacking an adjacent field, and the arrangement of vehicle spawn points can easily create situations where a country that is severely reduced in bases may have little or no ability to attack other fields with GVs.
What I propose is that the perk arrangement be split up. Perk
awards for kills are always based on the ratio of player numbers in each country, as are perk costs for
aircraft. Perk costs for
vehicles are based on the ratio of
bases held by each country. So a country that was getting gang-banged into a corner would be able to mount heavy GV assaults or defenses, but not handed the ability to overpower their opponents in the air.
Another suggestion, and one that I'm sure will generate a lot of arguing on both sides of the proposition, is to adjust perk cost not on the
numbers of players in a country, but their
success. When the arena resets, each country's perk multiplier is set to 1. When a country
captures a field, its perk multiplier is raised; when a country
loses a field, its perk multiplier is lowered.
This has the advantage that it inherently compensates for what is actually happening in the arena; if a country is getting gang-banged by both enemy countries and losing bases left and right, its perk costs will go down, even if it has more players (and if they're dweebish enough to be losing with a numerical advantage, they need all the help they can get), but if they get organized and start taking bases back, their perk costs will rise. This will have the consequence of making a country stiffer as it gets backed into a corner -- the more fields it loses, the lower its perk costs will be, and the more perked rides people are going to be taking up, but that advantage starts draining away as they push the attackers back.
The cost factors would probably need to be adjusted for each arena, so that the range of perk factors would be the same (say, 400% of normal if you had both enemy countries down to 4 fields, and 10% of normal if you were down to 4 fields), regardless of how many fields there were on a particular map (i.e., the increase/decrease per field on AKDesert would be smaller than for NDIsles, but the overall range would be the same).
