256 player servers.. or not

[Valleyforge3946]

i think not on the 256 players part. Not until the hardware can handle the software. if you catch my drift 103%?? yikes. Frying that poor CPU. They cant do that forever. They fizz out.. Trust me i know. i have blown plenty myself.. although much older chips. Is tehresome kind of special event going on that the 128 player has a password?

[gazzthompson]

Is tehresome kind of special event going on that the 128 player has a password?

https://www.realitymod.com/forum/f29-pr ... ost1581988

[Bringerof_D]

I've played a few 128 player games where I've had to wait one hour to actually see an enemy....
But I've been sniped at, mortared, bombed, and everything else during that one hour, so it was fine.

Like a game of Command and Conquer I played on Kashan yesterday on the 128 server; I was perched on the hill overlooking North Village for a lot of the game, and I didn't see any enemies, but it was still plenty of fun, since the Americans were hitting our Firebase with mortars and our tanks were shelling the Village.

PR is pretty much the only game I know of where you can not fire your weapon once during the whole game (happened to me one or two times in my PR history) and still have a great time.

yeah PR is awesome that way, i once played a round where my squad capped 2 objectives which were held by enemies without firing a single shot between the 6 of us.

[TommyGunn]

64 players -> 4km maps
If 128 players -> 8km maps
If 250 players -> 16km maps

[Snazz]

Those that say 128 is "too much" or "chaos" need to consider that the community has not yet gotten used to the change and no client-side patch has been released to address the game play impact. Experiences will also drastically differ per team and round, as has always been the case with PR.

Soppa has also already advised that the VOIP system cannot support more than 9 squads per team. So squads either have to be larger or communications have to rely entirely on mumble.

64 players -> 4km maps
If 128 players -> 8km maps
If 250 players -> 16km maps

IMO 4km maps are too large for only 64 players, even 1km maps have deserted areas with 116 players.

Besides 8km and 16km maps are very unlikely due to various technical issues, 4km maps are already literally stretching the limits of the BF2 engine.

[Nebsif]

64 players -> 4km maps
If 128 players -> 8km maps
If 250 players -> 16km maps

So even with 128 players it will feel as empty as it is with 64 on 4km.. If u just double everything (map size, amount of vehicles) 128 wont be any different from 64'emptiness with its small scale firefights, with only about 50% of the team being inf and every1 else trolling around in various vehicles or doing spec ops leet combat engi/hat stuff.

[Cossack]

Guys, this is awesome but first you must sort out the issues like squad size and count, vehicle size - Its a must - more than 8 spaces or whole thing is messed up, kits and other stuff. Bigger maps. 4 km map for 256 players are to small, dont even think about 2 or km maps. If you guy will sort these things out and you will found machines which ones can handle such things - we can start forming the armies.

[BroCop]

They cant sort it out even if they wanted.

more than 8 slots in vehicles is hardcoded

maps above 4KM are messed up

[KingKong.CCCP]

I got to get some burden off my chest, so I'll say this (don't get offended, please):

(this is no joke, I'm actually serious)
100 players even on 4km map for me is an empty map. That's how I feel now. Can't believe it took me only 2 months playing on 128 to come to this. 128 players is ok... I can except it. But I'm for at least 150 players, even on 2km maps. That means 150 now - in few months I would go for 200.
I see nothing bad or vanilla with that number. It feels right for me.
In fact, I think it would produce more better organized fights (and players) in the future.

Vehicle number/assets are totally fine the way they are now for 150-200 player server. No need for more transport at all, but increasing number of passenger seats would be nice (thou we can live without it). We could go with logy trucks being spawning every 10mins regardless if the previous trucks are destroyed or not.

Squad limitation problem?
I like idea of 13 guys per squad (rename squad to platoon). One officer leading a small platoon. 3 fireteam leaders leading 3 guys each. That would work on good servers, with good players.
On bad servers with bad players, I see no difference in having 2 disorganized groups of lone-wolves of 6, or one disorganized group of 13. And, with the lack of good squad/platoon leaders on bad servers, this means one guy can lead more low quality players, which can be good.

There are so many organization challenges with the increased number of players (like leading a squad without gamey 3D markers, nametags, or being promoted to an officer by a game itself), but after few thousands of hours spent playing FPS games, facing those challenges is the only thing that can be fun for an old vet.
I believe PR community has by far the most experienced players in the world, and if anybody can bring online battles to a new level, we can.

That said, I know a lot of you prefer "military campaigns" like NATO has in Afghanistan now (recon platoons patrol the area and make short contact with up to 20 enemies). Even thou I'm for full scale battles with hundreds of troops on both sides (modern world war), I respect that.
I don't think you should play what I want, or that I should play what you want.
PR should covers both kind of battles (on a platoon level and on a company level) so that we can enjoy the fight we like. Right now, those of you who prefer 8 vs 8 fights can get together, connect to a 0/16 server (plenty of those around).
But we who prefer huge battles can not do that.. yet. DEVs, please consider having at least one server with 200p slots.

[A.Filikov]

I think the main appeal of PR is not large scale never ending firefights.
It is all about planning with patience and gathering the fruits of your relatively longer - more stressfull efforts.
At least for me.
So i don't think 4km is large for 64 players.
100 players are okay but i think it is pretty early for 256.

[Arc_Shielder]

I think the main appeal of PR is not large scale never ending firefights.
It is all about planning with patience and gathering the fruits of your relatively longer - more stressfull efforts.
At least for me.
So i don't think 4km is large for 64 players.
100 players are okay but i think it is pretty early for 256.

I definitely agree.

Let's go for 128p and make it work. Even in 2km sized maps is a little short, unfortunately I don't think we have enough 4km maps to make a full list.

[Rudd]

100 players even on 4km map for me is an empty map

while I agree that the 4k maps have plenty of room for guys, I do kinda want some areas of the map to not have enemies in it

room to manouvre is part of the fun and strategy.

[Zimmer]

snip

While I perfectly understand your reasoning I am cant see how 200 players in a public server can be executed in any good way because of one bottleneck, with for example 13 people in the squad a SL could manage to organize it if the players are experienced and possibly know each other, but the bottleneck is communication, the problem is that even with 6 players, mumble (SL channel and all channel) it can get confusing, yes in real life people can handle that many but then possibly 50% can go and speak to you without using radio and if they do use radio in a firefight you not need to use radio at all if they need to you can wait until its possible to speak, but in PR you would need to shout out commands over voip and if mumble is already spammed well you have chaos. From my experience with both the military(national service as for now) and PR you would need really well coordinated teams for such a huge amount of people and they would need to learn how to talk in different channels and there would need to be voip protocols, mumble rules, commander rules and so on.

[Valleyforge3946]

https://www.realitymod.com/forum/f29-pr ... ost1581988

^.^ <3 Thanks for that btw.

[Truism]

I think the main appeal of PR is not large scale never ending firefights.
It is all about planning with patience and gathering the fruits of your relatively longer - more stressfull efforts.
At least for me.
So i don't think 4km is large for 64 players.
100 players are okay but i think it is pretty early for 256.

I don't post on these forums much because I don't play PR much, but larger servers really pique my interest. Why?

Because in real life you would never see troop densities as low as we see in PR except for maybe when the recon elements of two forces started to overlap in a meeting engagement. Even then, you'd see way, way, way more capability in the space than we see in 64 player maps. In essence, having platoons fighting over 4x4km (16km^2 for those not gifted in maths) means that you have 4 players per square kilometer. Assuming you put them in squads of 6, and assume (incorrectly) that their capabilities are the same as a real life squad, you are now putting roughly one squad from each team in each kilometer box.

In practice this is a problem at the player level for two big reasons. Firstly in practice there is no value in dominating every box. What that means is that outside of the few areas that are (still largely under) contested, people can just walk around without much risk of being shot. This is exacerbated by weapons being too inaccurate. This makes the entire game feel like a prolonged awkward skirmish. The second reason is that the game has so little flexibility about where forces can be sent that force ratios are always too low to produce many different interesting situations - again, awkward skirmishing feeling. Very unrealistic attacks are usually the most effective, defenses are never even vaguely realistic, there's no incentive to partake of the dozens of other tactical actions 10 people can do in real life.

But it really starts to bite at the commander level since there's nothing to really command and everyone has such huge freedom of action. At the barest level, PR has had most of the tools of infantry tactics in place since 0.75 but has still had virtually no application of tactics. This is partially because of unrealistic weapons, but also partially because of troop densities being way too low to effectively employ real life tactics (too easy for small groups to just bypass or infiltrate stuff, little incentive to do much else).

Getting two platoons with half the capability they should have fight with each other for a battalion or brigade sized objective just doesn't work and is terribly unrealistic. Boosting their capability by tacking on armour and air assets doesn't work either because then suddenly you have a squad of units that can actually capture objectives and a company's worth of armour and air assets fighting a war of attrition everywhere else (hello Kashan et al).

So here's the thing. Commanding 30-60 people isn't easy, and tactics aren't particuarly easy to pick up without training either. NATO/ABCA armies train junior officers for between 18 months and two years depending on where you go to be able to do it to something even approaching a battlefield standard. And they consistantly preselect so that only roughly the brightest 2-15% (again, depending on where you go) of applicants get the shot at it, with attrition rates of anywhere from 70% down.

This is exactly the reason why leaving it in is an excellent thing. If you imagine a scale from dysfunctional team to functional team, 64 player PR capped off at the functional end too low. "Teamwork" mostly consisted of not being overly selfish and "tactics" mostly consisted of having 6 people defend a flag while getting two whole squads to attack the next flag. Employing specialist assets, if not virtually automatic and with little more than token commander involvement (OS), simply had to be using their assets to best effect in some way vaguely connected to the team to be useful (tanks somewhere near infantry etc).

In other words, Commanding is mostly a token job at the 64 layer and the difference between a good and a very mediocre commander was minimal. 128, and dare I say it, 256 player games will change this. At these sorts of force densities, realistic tactics won't just start working better, they'll start to be the decisive difference between mediocre and good teams. Things that just didn't matter for tits before, like how you structure your subordinate commands, will start to become very important, as will managing subordinate commanders. Commanding will, in other words, start to be about command and tactics.

So here's the thing. That "planning with patience to gather the fruits of longer and more stressful labour" thing is unrealistic and bad. The planning should be happening for the individual in a much more limited scope, but for the team should encompass a far more complex and interesting scope. For the individual and the squad, this means getting specific tasks that actually mean something very definite for the team, not airy-fairy orders to 6 man groups like "ATTACK/DEFEND OBJ A" (followed by running to objective A, shooting people along the way and sitting in the capzone) - it's going to be "Suppress OBJ A's eastern overwatch positions IOT allow SQUAD B to achieve break in and assault. Tell me when you're ready." (Followed by orders for the other squads involved).

There aren't going to be a lot of people in the community that are going to have all the skills it takes to make it come together off the bat, but in time the community will learn it and the game will be so, so, so much richer for it at every level. This is easily the most positive thing announced since pretty much forever. This will tie in suppression and the LMG buffs to start to produce a coherrent tactical game.

The first time trained military leaders plan and execute a company sized defence ticking off all the principles and people run into it in PR, it's going to be a beautiful day for the game.

Now if only weapons worked properly (couldn't resist).

[A.Filikov]

Truism, you really love PR don't you.

[Rudd]

who doesn't?

[Truism]

Truism, you really loved PR don't you.

Fix'd.

Love/Hate. I sort of quit PR and didn't come back to it, still stick my head into the forums now and again because there's great potential in this game. If 128/256 becomes consistant and mainstream I'll probably get back into it because it will give me something to do in game that minimises my exposure to BF2 hitreg and PR deviation.

There are some things that need to happen though. The map needs to be tightened up as a command tool with some proper symbology so it can be used as a decent orders and planning tool. This is aside from a lot of changes that PR would benefit from having that I'm sure I've ranted enough about elsewhere.

After this I launched onto a rant about how the forces will need to be structured, but anyone who has the capacity to do this probably already knows the different viable options for how to do it, and will probably go with task organisation, several levels of command, commander's recon and a fire cell anyway... If out of interest anyone wants the rant, PM me.

One thing I will say is that the CP can't belong to the commander anymore. Commanders command. They don't fly UAVs, and it really shouldn't be their job to approve trash everywhere. That job needs to be in support of the commander fulfilling nebulous HQ tasks, and still needs to be there, but can't be the actual ground commander's job anymore. (Good teams are just going to put someone in the seat with the commander's position in game, and have a seperate ground commander who goes around and commands).

[lucky.BOY]

Nice one there. If there is 256 (?) players to command, it would be a nice touch to let a member of some (recon) squad man the uav and put markers on the map (this could be linked to the command post vehicle).

The real commander would just go around, COMMAND, use squad respective voip, put attack markers, utilise team RP.


And BTW, if all what limits the number of squads is ingame VOIP, i say throw it away! All we need to substitu it is some extra channels for squads (named Alpha - Mike or whatever), for each squad one.

Just my thoughts
-lucky

[MikeDude]

I've said this before and I will say again.

Gameplay will be WAY more realistic, once spawn time gets tripled. Or even higher.
Especially if we push up the player limit.