It’ll probably be acceptable for sneak peaks for the “press” … that’s why you did this … didn’t you. 
Whoops. I had too many threads up, put it in the wrong thread. No wonder I thought I had to backtrack.
Edit 2: No, stats were discussed here also. No matter, I put it in the “Pilot Rankings” thread. Long story short, stats that don’t turn the community toxic is good. If it gets toxic, they need to be cut out.
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How many games companies have you actually seen successfully apply that though? Especially games companies that, for the most part, have only had one developer through most of its lifespan.
Given that the vision 10 years ago was an engine capable of generating a galaxy to be inhabited by thousands (or millions) of players, how do you determine what a succesful prototype is of the overall concept? There has certainly been at least one prototype of the combat model and networking, which is more or less what Battlescape will be, as far as I can tell (but with a much larger scope).
How do you do game development faster? Do you have the answer?
@INovaeFlavien Congrats on the playtest. I would have loved to have been part of it, but the recent OS update and not-quite-overpowered-enough graphics card would probably have made life difficult 
Looking forward to more comprehensive reviews from participants when the KS launches.
EDIT:
Sorry, couldn’t resist 
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Iv been following for years way back when u didn’t have this nice new Web page and forums, thanks to this post it’s finally paid off !!!
Those videos made my week. If there is any chance of recordings from the open trail being released its gonna make my month.
I will be definitely pledging for Alpha access if there is an option once you get K’S going.
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No, those are the devs.
I should actually know … 
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There’s also Peke
I’m sure they can be sneaky at times…
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It could even be a sneaky Peke peeking on the peak
Sneaky Peke Pete peeks sneaky peaks?
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Piqued Peke Pete’s sneaky peek peaks
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Describe the user above in 6 words?
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You know what I’m curious about… is if I-novae is considering abstracting the teams away and letting the number of teams be arbitrary, to a certain degree.
Say there are 5 alliances on the server, there might be 5 different teams fighting eachother. Now lets say that the smallest of the teams shrank in numbers, they then call a vote to join a different one so fun can continue to be had. Or something.
An alliance, or group of clans/corperations I suppose would be a good start to define how many teams would be on the field. Some sort of hard upper limit would probably be a good idea, as having 75 different teams fighting eachother might be confusing, depending on implementation. And of course a minimum of 2 teams.
While I’m not saying this is a feature I really desire, if implemented decently, would make the game that much more engaging
It’s certainly a possibility, we’ll see how things pan out through playtesting.
I had imagined that, as with other arena games, which side a player joined for any given match would be kinda irrelevant, and the sides would be symmetrical.
On a public server, you’d just join the team with fewest players or get auto balanced. (With provision for groups of friends to stay on the same team). If you left the match for a bit and came back, you wouldn’t be too bothered about joining the same team that you were in before.
In the event of uneven teams, Hawken sends a general message to the overpopulated team, asking them if they want to be sent over to the other team. Press f5 or something. If they do that, they are rewarded with some money/xp for the choice.
Perhaps each team gets the same amount of starting funds to share between them? Then the team with less players can buy better equipment.
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Or the game simply says that balanced teams have balanced stats on their gear. Numerical imbalance dynamically produces gear imbalance. Facing a 2:1 numerical disadvantage? You team now has a 2:1 gear advantage. Your shots do twice as much damage. And/or your sensors are twice as sensitive. And/or you have twice as much ammo. And so on. The actual numbers would be based on a perceptual 2:1 gear advantage. Even having a 10% greater damage per hit might be considered twice as good as the defined standard damage.
Because everything is rebalancing continuously as folks arrive and depart, when that guild of 20 guys decides to leave your team, you start to accumulate effectiveness over the next couple minutes. The time delay would be intended to reduce the effectiveness of exploits.
Folks will switch sides in a heartbeat, until some balance point is reached, perhaps only a few percent. However, I can easily imagine teams seeing a 10 or 20 percent advantage for the other team and refusing to switch sides, considering it a greater challenge for their team.
That numerical advantage can be based on player ratings as well. If the sum of player ratings on one team are 10% lower than the other, then they get a 10% gear advantage.
The gear advantage system could also be used for handicapping individuals based on player ratings. If a server is defined to be level 8, then folks rated below 8 would acquire a gear advantage while those above 8 would see a gear disadvantage. The numerical imbalance stuff would be applied on top of that. So a full team of 10s against a single 1 on an 8 server would be… interesting.
you cant really trade off funds for player count without throwing off the funding balance curve vital to any match based games with funds. They’re set up by necessity that more funds increases your power at decreasing rate, to allow comebacks and to prevent one team from getting too far ahead in a power curve, once that happens the match is already lost and it gets boring for everyone involved. Also i could see problems where people get bonus funds, then an extra person joins leaving the team with both the full team and the extra funds. A better solution might just be a bot, if they exist in battlescape.
NS2 made it so that if you have more than 1 extra player on your team, the extra player was presented with the option to switch teams but would not be allowed to spawn until one of his team mates died. Frustrating when up against a team that is hemorrhaging players but honestly at that point you’ve probably won.
I don’t like the idea of changing gear attributes dynamically to maintain balance. It feels to me that a model 1 gun should behave like a model 1 gun no matter what.
Another idea is that the imbalance between team numbers is redressed by adding one “virtual miner” for each player the smaller team is short. The virtual miners will then increase the resource extraction rate for that team.
if there’s enough players in one game, the imbalance caused by even a few players might not make enough difference to be worth addressing past the standard auto balance methods.
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