Spawn System Proposal - 2022

Alarm system

To allow players to move to other fights Reinforcements Needed would be replaced by a territory alarm system, which depends on the population balance. These territory alarms would grant spawns from across the continent when outnumbered.

Any fight in friendly or enemy contestable or contested territory in which your faction is outnumbered would have a yellow, orange or red alarm status. The colour would be dependant on the degree of imbalance, see table to the right and would indicate the degree of imbalance. There would be no limit to the number of these spawn options available.

Spawns in the territory would then appear to all players on the deployment screen, with an amount of spawns displayed equal to the number of players needed to balance the fight. Only that amount of players would be able to deploy into the territory from outside it until the next population check. See below for a mock up for how this would look at Gourney Dam for the Vanu Sovereignty.

The population balance would be checked only once every 30 seconds to reduce server load compared to the previous system. Each territory could be checked at a different time per faction to also reduce server load. This would also obfuscate the system to reduce players gaming it and starting hacks just after the checks.

For those territories where your faction is overpopulated the spawn option would appear grey on the map, including those soft spawns in enemy territory such as Sunderers. This would telegraph what is happening in those territories and that you are not needed there. See the mock up to the right for details.

I have excluded squad spawns from this system as keeping squads cohesive is, I think, more important than balancing populations. While squad spawns will unbalance fights as they can be used by both sides it should balance out and allow fights to grow as squad members spawn in.

Note 1: The game currently checks population every 15 seconds in each territory to display the pie charts we see for each base, increasing this to 30 seconds would presumably help performance.

Note 2: Population would not be checked in non front line territories, to hopefully help performance further, and would also implement a fog of war mechanic.

Note 3: There are some territories where soft spawns are often set up in non lattice linked adjacent territories. These are a problem in this new system and these territories should be adjusted to fix this previously long standing issue.