HTC has made it clear that they are certain that beyond a certain number of players in the arena, game play goes South in a hand basket. But Lusche and other Euro-time zone players have described it as sometimes taking the entire Euro-evening for the second arena to reach a "reasonable" playing level since the caps were implemented.
But what if once the arena cap kicks in, as players enter the tower in the overfull arena, they were to be automatically transported to the half empty arena until the caps come into line? This way the two arenas would balance out pretty quickly, and tend to remain that way throughout the evening.
Or what if players who enter the tower were given the choice of leaving the overfull arena in exchange for an incrementing offer of perk points - each time that a player towers after a 5 minute or longer sortie, he is offered the chance to change to the other arena in exchange for X perk points in whichever of the 3 categories he chooses, and each successive offer increases by 1 until someone takes the offer, at which points the offer resets to the minimum and the cycle begins anew? I know some guys have bazillions of perk points, but many of us don't, and some folks would likely jump at the chance to get some "free" perk points. This would be likely to incentive some players to move, and the "value" of voluntarily moving would be up to the player being offered, so no one would feel "forced".
Or what if instead of getting perk points, the players were offered "an erasure" of a death in some category (perhaps an incrementing offer as described above)? Or perhaps just plain old "points", such that either way, moving would improve their score in whatever category they chose to apply it to?
Or what if a base ENY value were implemented that were driven by the arena cap inequality, such that in addition to the "normal" ENY value resulting from side inequalities, some base value (perhaps a static value - say 8 as an example - or perhaps a sliding value based on the cap discrepancy between the two arenas?) were automatically added in to ENY for all 3 sides, such that until caps even out the only place to fly the "best" planes is in the under populated arena?
All just thoughts.... Anyone else have an idea or 3 for some way to either voluntarily incentive (Yay!) or penalize (Boo!) players into balancing out the arenas?
There must be some way to improve upon the current system which appears to create a negative feed back loop. Until you reach critical mass in the second arena, it's not much fun - and if it's not much fun too much of the time, then players choose not to play, causing it to take longer to reach critical mass, which causes more players to not play, etc.
<S>
