Originally posted by AKcurly
Because his choice of fun ruins the evening for the other two countries. He can change countries and do all of the above.
One person - all alone - is responsible for the odds being skewed? I think not.
What I think you meant is that squadrons lead to the imbalance. Which is partly true - for the squadrons which fly heavily every night and more or less dictate the odds. But the "weekend flyer" should not be penalized for this.
And making statements like the one you made only heighten the feeling of injustice because the people who only fly once a week know that their impact on the odds is minimal.
And so they take your advice and decide to change sides. What if that same night another squadron has decided to do the same thing and arrives at the same country they did? So they now went to all the hassle of telling everyone to move, getting everyone re-joined in the squad - and they still can't fly the plane they want. Through no fault of their own - and they followed your advice. Now you can explain to this squadron CO how fair the system is.
No matter how "big" the problem you're trying to fix here, it still all boils down to how it affects individual players.
Implementation details, please. It's always easy to suggest solutions based on qualitative ideas. Turning those ideas into 0/1s can be very difficult. Why do think TOD didn't happen instantly?
This kind of high-handed response may work with others, but not with me. This could be implemented in a way which wouldn't require any terrain data structure changes at all. Such as:
- Create a global array called "homeFields."
- During terrain load on the host, walk the fields array or data structures and for each field set the associated value in homeFields[fieldNum] to 1, 2, or 3 depending on Rook, Bish, or Knit.
- Then when the balancer is determining plane availability at a field, add an and-if condition such as (player->countryNum != homeFields[currentPlayerField]) to test if the current field belonged originally to the player's country. If it did, the balancer behaves as it does now at that field.
That's what? Three lines. Even if the data structures or database is more complex, I can't see how adding this little piece of logic would take more than 10 lines and add 1 extra clause to an "if" statement somewhere - meaning no performance hit.
If the terrainfile or runtime structures already track which country a field belongs to at load-up, this gets even easier.
And I'll give you yet one more reason this system should be changed: and that is that it can be exploited. I'll even tell you how. Suppose you're a Rook CO who "always" has such superior odds (odds which I never seem to enjoy the nights I fly ... how odd?). Well, to get even with some of the morons who belittled me in the BBS for wanting to keep my squad night, I'd move my squad to their country and just log in and go AFK on my non-squad nights. Keep their odds jacked up so they can't get the good planes all damn night. Boo. Hoo.
-DoK