Too good, I don’t believe, I think the information you provide is exaggerated…
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I look foward to seeing how many players it will be able to support. I think even 100 players will make for great battles, and If it gets anywhere near to 400 concurrent players it can be a massive success. Not advertising this would be a lost opportunity. The scale of the battles will be one thing that sets Battlescape apart from other games. It has already lost its planetary-scale unique selling point and therefore needs another to become successful. I think the most important part will be the gameplay itself though, it needs to be fun and rewarding enough to keep people interested. Since battlescape will not feature a wide variety of activities the core gameplay needs to be addicting, because it its not people will have nothing to do. Gameplay needs to be the top priority.
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No arguments there.
Has it? I can’t think of any other games that do planets quite like Infinity with the same level of freedom (not without cheating anyway).
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It makes absolutely no difference if you make that your main pitch, there should be more to the game in the first place, something that will make this game stand out without needing to sell a million copies that you need to keep the servers populated with ‘hundreds’ of players. We can all hope that will happen, but you shouldn’t rely on that happening in order for this game to be unique and good, you need to make a game that is good with a handful of players and put systems in place that will make the game scale to be good with hundreds, you can not depend on having monumental success just so your game is good.
And if you are serious about leveraging this ‘hundreds of players’, you need to make the gameplay work with hundreds of players, that means implementing features to control what is most likely to be a blob of two hundred ships that are no more fun than your 200 static bots. You need squad management in-game, you need communication management, you need target management, you need tactical and strategic awareness and a million other things.
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Battlescapes planetary tech is still amazing, but the novelty and uniqueness is gone. Star Citizen, No Mans Sky and Dual Universe all have more or less full planets and are very well know, the former two also have left a big ugly smudge on the perception of space games (and crowdfunded space games especially). I think trying to lure in people with ingame planets won’t work at all like it used to. I think it doesn’t even matter that Battlescapes planet tech is far superior to No Mans Sky for example.
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Huge battles with hundreds of players is exactly what will make this game standout. And how does advertising this feature mean that the rest will suck (which you are imo implying)?
Obviously the gameplay needs to work with this many players, but I don’t know what is bad about advertising the games USP.
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How can you sell that as an experience if it has never happened and might never happen? And if it does happen it might be complete rubbish.
I wasn’t talking about ARMA 3. I was talking about a modded ARMA 3 server which has specific gameplay. I described its gameplay and why it has a particular hook. ARMA is a different bag of peanuts.
As for the rest of the exchange here, we all started with @Crayfish’s link to an article that talks about a game’s “hook”. What is it that Battlescape has that is going to attract players? I think we agree that it’s gameplay. Procedural terrain is not gameplay. Networking code is not gameplay. Numbers of players is not gameplay. I claim that the one thing that will get people excited about Battlescape is a shot at joining in on a huge operation in the Battlescape environment. That’s a combination of everything that Battlescape does, which is exactly what a game’s “hook” should be.
Certainly don’t obsess over a certain number of players because the gameplay has to scale. At low numbers, players will stick to fighters and duke it out over one objective at a time. At higher numbers, more and more of the game should become practical. At the highest numbers, the full complexity and depth of the game should unfold, per @Skyentist’s fantasy of capital fleets pulling off deceptions, splitting up and so on.
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If the experience is ‘complete rubbish’ then what’s the point either way? Surely it’s better to set a high bar and do everything the team can to reach it than to set a low bar and not bother?
*It’s not like there’s much that can be done about it now, the bar’s been set, the team is working, results are pending. 
I think nobody here suggests that this is advertised If it is not possible or likely. The alpha and beta phase should make it clear If huge battles are realistic. I’m optimistic that this can happen. I think even If huge battles (100+ players) only occur once a week it is fair game to advertise with it.
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Putting 400 players in a box doesn’t make the game fun by default, advertising that the game is fun because you can put 400 players in a box when you have never had a dozen players in that box able to do combat is ridiculous.
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Yes, but nobody is suggesting this.
I don’t understand your pessimism and saltiness.
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Are you serious?
I don’t understand why it is so hard for you to imagine that the game might feature huge exciting battles and what is so wrong about advertising this when it becomes true. “Huge exciting space battles with up to 400 players” sounds very good to me. If I read that on a steam page and the game has good ratings I will at least give it a closer look. What is the alternative? “Space combat game with fun gamplay” is not a good tagline.
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It sounds good yes, but you need to make it good, it’s not good by default and TBH INS just doesn’t have the budget or time or following to pull that off. There is a million features that need to be implemented to manage a damn mob of 400 and make them behave in a civilized manner.
So they can probably give us a box with the network code that can handle a hundred or two hundred people, but that’s just a box with 200 people.
This is what you are claiming. Like I said, I don’t share your pessimism and negativity.
And yet here we are a decade on from what was supposed to be an MMO with a re-implementation of a prototype that was available a decade ago, but it now has $350k budget and is 2 years behind schedule. You need to expect absolutely nothing from INS and then wait a lot longer to get a crumb, it’s just the way they operate.
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Nobody is claiming that 400 players is a sandbox will automatically make a hit out of a game.
The argument that started this whole discussion was that one shouldn’t advertise with the possibility of having 200 players battling it out and You claiming that it would be false advertising and not noteworthy enough to use it as a selling point.
Which I still believe is a strange opinion.
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So that seems to be the gist of it then. I get that you are disappointed that a handful of people weren’t able to secure millions in funding to develop a mmo and that they weren’t able to hold deadlines they set themselves partly due to a constrained budget and medicore planning and managing skills. I still think though that what they pulled of so far is something incredible awesome that definitely will bear fruits in the future.
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I think we can all agree on this.
IMO it’s going to be our player based in-game videos of actual game-play that would do the trick.
Seamless game-play (waging war), across a system with at least 9 unique and diverse, true scale moons/planets. Each with its own environment, some more challenging than others, but all uniquely beautiful.
Warp-jump at near light speed across vast distances of space, and immerse yourself with the fully Newtonian physics based flight model.
*edit…Enjoy all this with up to 200 other space nerds! 
blah-blah…Yeah that’s all freaking awesome, but how is it actually going work as a game?
9 planets, 3 factions…
3 Space-Stations per planet?
3 Factories/processing plants per planet?
What would motivate me to attack some faction’s Hauler? Cause I’m poor and resources are scarce?
As @Arkenbrien said, Looking forward to what we and you guys come up with, after some play-testing.
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