256 player servers.. or not

[Snipd]

As been said. I believe a ~100-128 player for public servers is reasonable (I for one can't play Kashan with 64 after playing with that many). If a pub server wants to try 250, let em....They'll soon find out too many problems are a result of such.


As far as maps, I feel 4 km maps can fit 250 people nicely if they are optimized to hold that many vehicle wise.

Would encourage maps with more areas of interest though, map designs such as Silent Eagle, Quingling, and Hell even Fool's Road are PERFECT for 200 players, while maps such as Kashan tend to result in cluster-fucks in the Bunker Area.


What 250 players will work in, regardless of anything, would be the PR:T world. Here we will see extremely interesting situations in a military shooter being played finally as it was meant to be played.

[Snazz]

The 3 main areas of consideration seem to be:

- Technical limitations (pertaining both server hardware and the BF2 engine)
- Gameplay (which still needs tweaking and testing)
- Server owners (concern for running costs, shift in playerbase)

I think at this stage the technical limitations are most important, as they ultimately determine what is achievable. Once the realistic player limit is figured out the appropriate gameplay changes can follow, then the server owners can make the hard choices.

Regarding the potential loss of server variety, ask yourself this: When there is a full server and a quiet server in the same region, do you wait for a slot to open up on the full one or join the quiet one hoping that it eventually fills up?

The point I try to make is that currently the choices are already limited, with popular primary servers and secondary overflow servers. Having bigger primary servers that everyone in the region can join seems like a better solution to me than the current uneven spread. Besides, who thinks we really need over 210 servers when the vast majority of them are completely deserted?

I don't mean to be unsympathetic to the situation of poor-old-Joe-the-average-struggling-server-owner, but their troubles shouldn't hinder overall progress either.

[Tiger1]

If you succeed you will be put on the PR HALL OF FAME. 256 or 200 players in general would be perfect. I am looking forward to the day we have a game like PR with 500 people on a server at once. A whole battalion size game. Even 200 players or 116 players is great to see. But the day of 500 players will come.. at some point...

[Khidr]

The magic number right now is 146 players.

Many people have stated that they are comfortable with the 8 man squads. I personally have seen some great squad leaders this past week running these larger squads.

Here is the simple math:
x9 squads(with 8 men each) +1 Commander = 73 troops
Double your money for the other team = 146 players on a server.

Please run this configuration over the 116 players and see what happens.

[Lt.Dan_991]

The magic number right now is 146 players.

Many people have stated that they are comfortable with the 8 man squads. I personally have seen some great squad leaders this past week running these larger squads.

Here is the simple math:
x9 squads(with 8 men each) +1 Commander = 73 troops
Double your money for the other team = 146 players on a server.

Please run this configuration over the 116 players and see what happens.

If the hardware can handle it, I like this number as well.

[Wicca]

Eight is the number of love..

But yeah Sounds good 146

[Sidewinder Zulu]

Would really be nice if we could somehow have other divisions aside from just squads...

Once you get into bigger numbers you really need to have platoons and so forth. I suppose a well-organized team could just decide that certain squads make up one platoon, but if there was a way to actually divide the team up into larger chunks (a commander could give orders to a whole platoon, rather than just selecting individual squads) the it would certainly help a lot on the battlefield.

That sounds very hardcoded, though. But hey, we broke the player limit, we might be able to break that too, right?

[illidur]

256 would not squash other servers because they are empty to begin with. but there are only 2 that i play on in USA anyways and thats =]H[= and TG. both of those i would rather wait for a slot than play somewhere else.

somebody mentioned an idea for a script that would kick players not in mumble, I AGREE 100% pr needs that.

admins aren't a problem, because the servers that would actually fill 128 - 256 would be servers that have lots of admins already. i also doubt that server hardware will be a problem for the same reason as previous.

so all thats left to address is gameplay effects imo. i think good sl's could lead big squads. but... 256 = 16 man squads... could be kinda crazy. -edit forgot its 256 /2 /9

[lucky.BOY]

for that 146p idea, it has one big flaw - all squads cant be full. There would have to be a CAS squad with 8 members. What would all of them do? There would be transport squad - it would have to be full with 8 people. What will all of them do? then we have armor squads, tacticool recon squads and so on and so forth.

The only thing that is struggling me right now is the lacking management structure. Bigger squads are great, but we would really need is more squads (but seriously, being commander of more than 10 squads can possibly make my head explode, then some sort of platoons could help ), or fireteams to help squadleader manage his enormous squad.

Ther problems i know about
Server hardware? I guess the more people are playing, the more people will be willing to pay.
Playerbase? I guess most of us have some popular server which tend to be full, so if it gets moar slots, there will be moar fun . At the end of the day some might be dissapointed tho, as their server that used to be at 40 ppl at best is now empty all the time.
Teamwork? I hope that if we give it sime time, it will get only better.
Performance on PCs? Some might have to (including me) lower their graphics. I can pay that cost.

-lucky

[FullMetalMonkey]

I've got some good footage from the Kashan Desert C&C match with Wicca trying to organise 13 people.

It should be up by tomorrow but all i can say is Poor Sod.

Oh and sorry i disappeared, my game crashed and then server was full. Then i realised i had no cigarettes and had to walk to the garage to buy some.

[Wicca]

We won the round 0 - 60 And the fireteam idea with three fireteams worked really well. Just needed to get some minor training.

You missed the best part!

Our squad was moving down along the ditch with the bridge. Suddenly a tank appear to our North North West. And i call it in to CAS. But i dont have a laze on it.

About 10 min go by while we move south towards E10 when the tank appears, i laze it and it starts shooting at me. I shout WE NEED CAS NOW! And from the sky, the angel of death the A10 dives in and blows the tank to a wreck. And that was the end of the round. Epic

[FullMetalMonkey]

That does sound pretty cool. The video i'm uploading is a good indication for staying where we are now and getting everything working then setting the sights higher as it was really hard to work out who is who etc.

[kuratomi1950]

HELL NO i just finished playing in the 128 player test SISU and had an awesome time, people make squads with no limits instead of 8 or 6, they make squads up to 12 and sometimes more, its great, i had wicca as my squad lead on KASHAN, he made 3 fireteams, i was one of the fireteam leaders, and it was an amazing time with mumble and all, then i had operation barracuda with brainlaag, (i preffer wicca ) but it still was an awesome time, the environment was full of bullet sounds, apcs rolling, soldiers shouting for medics, it WAS AWESOME, i quit because i was too tired..


If you can break the 128 limit it would pwn, i mean right now even with 128 players, the battlefield is still a small firefight, with 256 players, i imagine it being a real army sized battle. Fireteams in every squad, alot of squads team working, ITS THE PR FUTURE.

Of course its still a long way down, ALOT of work, ALOT of issues to fix, such as the name tags, some say that a squad bigger than 8 is hard to organize, NOT IF YOU HAVE MUMBLE AND A NICE SQUAD, wicca did it, he organized a bunch of guys in fireteams, and he led us all with no problems, we had problems at the start with the nametags, but that got quickly solved with mumble, just fix the name tags, add the 256, and pr will be MY FAV game ever, of course get working on all the fixes and issues that may arose but from what ive seen, we are getting closer every day.

[kuratomi1950]

We won the round 0 - 60 And the fireteam idea with three fireteams worked really well. Just needed to get some minor training.

You missed the best part!

Our squad was moving down along the ditch with the bridge. Suddenly a tank appear to our North North West. And i call it in to CAS. But i dont have a laze on it.

About 10 min go by while we move south towards E10 when the tank appears, i laze it and it starts shooting at me. I shout WE NEED CAS NOW! And from the sky, the angel of death the A10 dives in and blows the tank to a wreck. And that was the end of the round. Epic

HEH epic round we had....I CURSE YOU FOR QUITTING AFTER THAT ROUND...i missed you hell alot

[kuratomi1950]

I've got some good footage from the Kashan Desert C&C match with Wicca trying to organise 13 people.

It should be up by tomorrow but all i can say is Poor Sod.

Oh and sorry i disappeared, my game crashed and then server was full. Then i realised i had no cigarettes and had to walk to the garage to buy some.

now i know why you randomly left.....YOU PUNK!

[kuratomi1950]

the problem about 256 players is not the amount of players at all. Its the amount of players per squad. 256 players would be 128 on eace side. divided through 9 and we see 14,222 players in each sq. That's far too much. It would work when there are more squads as 9 to open. Maybe double the amount. But that's (as far as i know) not possible.

come on, it is hard, but after a while, you can make your own fireteams inside your squad, assign people to a leader and that will be fireteam 1...then so on so forth...wicca made me do it...he cursed at me...made me feel BAAAD....but i had to do it and it worked

[TommyGunn]

Our Abrams'es and Bradley's were dominating in C&C xD

[Wicca]

Kuratomi, thanks for all the kind words. Now look at your posts, on the bottom right there is an edit button.

That way, you dont have to make alot of posts

[Robskie]

WHAT IF.


You code mumble and our ingame names TOGETHER and give servers the function to only give players who are linked in with BOTH to enter?!

I don't know if this has been suggested before, but I feel like this is a good solution to ensure EVERYONE is on mumble.

About 128 and 256 players. . .

128: Release AFTER the upcoming one.

256: End of this year.

100: THIS upcoming release.

This would give the community and non-affiliated community players(like myself until this fateful night) to be eased into this process.

ALSO,

How ethnocentric this may seem, there must be STRICT rule enforced on language. Despite how everyone says this is a teamgame and how arbitary rules of the land shouldn't be enforced in cyberspace, it REALLY does detract from gameplay.

Maybe create national servers? or ones based on language?
The Dutchies can play with the English though, since most of us speak it very well

Just my thoughts Have a good one.

[Snazz]

256 = 29 man squads... thats crazy.

Maths isn't my thing but you seem to have forgotten to divide by teams (2). Unless you're talking about 512 player servers...

for that 146p idea, it has one big flaw - all squads cant be full. There would have to be a CAS squad with 8 members. What would all of them do? There would be transport squad - it would have to be full with 8 people. What will all of them do? then we have armor squads, tacticool recon squads and so on and so forth.

Traditionally small squads could be merged together into combined squads if necessary. Personally I like the idea of CAS + Air Transport + Recon operating closely together as a squad, same with Logistics + Tanks + APCs. Further increasing the squad sizes is the alternative.