It still amazes me the how strong the force is for people wanting to play in the arena listed first. Just as DMGod showed, 2 = arenas but he waited 15 min just to get into the top one. I'm not blaming anyone for this, I am just amazed by it. People will claim many different reasons why they want the orange (I.E. like the terrain better), but we have actually just swapped positions on the list and then again everyone wanted the top arena.
There are other methods to solve the issue of overpopulation that would split arenas, and not have an artificial limit I.E. 500 and you reached a false ceiling because no one wants to be the first in the 2nd arena. Here are some other possibilities all of which also have short comings but do solve the issue .
1. Do a 1 time population split via random squad distributions followed by non squad players. Each person would then only be able to fly in 1 of the 2 arenas, and not have the choice to go to the other. I.E. Every night you would fly in the same arena.
2. Do very low cap multiple arenas, I.E. caps of 100-150 across 6-10 arenas.
3. Assign people to an arena when they enter and remove the choice of where they can enter.
4. Creating one "virtual" arena where it would contain multiple sets of people. The ground targets would all be common, but you could only see,fight, and speak with people in your "Set" of people.
I'm always willing to listen to new ideas, but I'm not interested in ideas that will have the net effect of putting everyone in 1 arena. I.E. (make 2 arenas of 850 each and let the players choose).
There is only 1 issue that I do not like about the split arenas that I did not anticipate when we implemented them. That is how the 2 arenas with free choice of entry causes country imbalance. As and example, in one arena the rooks will have 20 more then the other countries, and in the 2nd arena they will have 20 less.
Not just the rooks, but happens to all countries on different nights.
We have been considering doing some method of limiting this, but please do not post ideas that are just a hidden attempts at putting more people into one arena. The current method that I am leaning to is if the cap is 99, then once a country has 33 people no more people of that country can enter. There may also be a choice to enter if you switch sides on entry (of course change country times would also be adjusted).
HiTech
Keep the current logic that you have for balancing and capping arenas but add this ...
Arena is capped and ... Bish have 40 ... Knights have 30 ... Rooks have 30
Change the arena menu to this ....
Orange 100/100
Bishops are closed ... You can click on either Knights or rooks to gain entry into the capped arena ... until they reach 40 players each ... a total of 160 people.
As each player chooses the less populated team, the cap number moves with it, so if 5 people joined Knights and 2 joined Rooks you would see this ...
Orange 107/107
Let's say the Knights reached the 40 person limit during all of this ... you would see this ...
Orange 147/147
Now, if and during this second level balancing of orange, blue populates to the point that it kicks off your current logic of un-capping orange, you add 50 slots to the current total in orange and it looks like this ...
Orange 147/197
All countries are now available to choose from ... until the cap hits again and the secondary balancing will then kick in using the population of the highest populated country at that time.
