Setting up large team games (15 players min.)

I want to use this thread to gauge interest in the setting up of large team games (which I will arbitrarily define as 15+ players, but ideally at least 20). These are really the only games that interest me and I am only doing 4v4 Clan Wars and 3v3 LoC and so on because no one is currently running large team games between organized opponents on a regular or even a semi-regular basis (if ever).

The problem is that really only the clans, and particularly the bigger ones, can set up these kinds of games. You need PA Stats to see the custom servers, and randoms don't tend to have PA Stats, so those large lobbies fill excruciatingly slowly. Besides, even if you could get 10 randoms into a shared team, they are laughable as an opponent. At least 2 or 3 of them will immediately drop out when they realize what they've gotten themselves into, while the rest will start squabbling between themselves on which units are whose, who is crashing the economy, and who is trolling the others by deleting people's units. At most you'll get a couple of solid opponents per 5 or 10 players, but they will be completely helpless against 10 clan members, even if the latter are merely beginners or intermediates. So these games are unplayable with randoms.

Now I know that I have criticized the large clans quite harshly on occasion, but this is one case in which their size helps, and it's the primary reason I want to get my own clan as large as possible. It is too bad I have created a bad image of myself precisely with the people whose help I need the most in order to play the kinds of games I want to play, so I am hoping that they will be able to see past whatever issues they have with me, and help me out into setting up these games with them, simply because they are so enjoyable.

I haven't figured out the details of what I want to pursue yet, but I will bump this thread when I have concrete proposals. In the meantime, I am just putting this out there in the hopes that someone will want to take over and organize this. How about an Exodus 8v8 or 10v10 mini-tournament like LoC? How about setting aside one day a month for large team games? I suck at organizing events, and don't enjoy doing it (just as I don't enjoy throwing parties, but rather crashing them lol), but I absolutely love entering them and participating in them, so maybe someone more enterprising and social can take this work off my hands and set up everything for us?

If so, great. If not, I will talk things over with my clan members to see what is the biggest size team that we can comfortably field in the near future (i.e. whether 8-player, or 9 or 10 or whatever), and then I'll bump this thread with a concrete proposal to see which clan(s) will take us up on it.

Any ideas or offers, let me know in this thread.

I do like the idea of seeing much larger games and in saying that I think it's safe to say you may want to come back in 2/3 weeks after the fire storm you have caused has calmed down. I could help you with organization if you wanted and possibly be the middle man (talking to the other clans) so we don't have any past thread repeats but currently I think now is definitely not the right time to be asking for forgiveness especially when I can still see your past threads still on the 1st page.

I don't mean this in any harsh or rude way but since I have the pleasure to be in both camps on this one I would highly recommend that you just be patient and wait for people to go back to arguing about shields and stealth capabilities before suggesting more 8v8's / 10v10's

I thought games where maxed at 10.... =P

I am not asking for forgiveness. I fully stand behind all the ideas I've put forward. I am sorry I've created a bad image with many players, but the ideas are more important to me than what people think of me, so I regret nothing other than human nature, which dislikes people that don't mind stirring things up a bit and speaking their mind. The fact that you are calling a little thread on an online message board a "fire storm" is a clear indication of the vast chasm that separates my attitude from that of other internet users on these things. A thread on a message board could never be a fire storm for me, just as the results of a videogame tournament could never be anything meaningful in my life, or have any appreciable effect on my self-esteem and my ego. We are still talking about videogames, after all. No matter how invested I may become on these things, I never forget that.

And yes, it did occur to me that this is not the best time for this thread, but I felt like talking about this subject, and I am not good at diplomacy and find these sorts of calculations on "the best time" to make a thread tiresome. I just want to say what I want to say when I want to say it, and others are welcome to react to that how they see fit. And what is so bad after all in starting a thread about a subject that everyone else is talking about all the time anyway? If anyone else had started the exact same thread we wouldn't be talking about a "fire storm" now, and I think it is silly and ridiculous that we are.

So, all I am asking for is a little perspective and a little maturity. Yes, there is the PAG thread, and it is a fascinating subject, and then there is this thread, and that is another fascinating subject, and I made both of them because I am fascinated by fascinating things, so let's all try to grow up a little bit and plunge into these fascinating things headfirst with no hard feelings because that's what fascinating people do, and that's what we all are or should at least aspire to be. Thank you for your understanding on this, and particularly for offering to help out.

After offline was released a few of the modders managed to make private servers work and visible via the pa stats mod.

These servers have no restriction on player count so any number is technically possible. The only issue however is simulation performance struggles with more players and is probably why uber haven't lifted the 10 player restriction (yet).

We are planning to set up a Clan Wars-style 6v6 or 7v7 with Boggles' new AC clan soon (i.e. they make one system and we make one system and we fight in turn on both of them), and this has got me thinking of a problem we are going to run into, and which will become more and more prominent as team games become bigger and bigger. The problem of voice chat confusion.

You see, all the big games that have been played so far, to my knowledge, have either been FFAs, in which no one has to communicate with anyone else, because all players play alone, or 4v4v4v4v4v4v4s etc., in which there are indeed many players, but still very small teams.

Has anyone played a 7v7 or 9v9 or 12v12 yet? I haven't found any such videos.

So imagine being in a voice chat channel with such a huge team, with half the players on one planet and the other half on another, for example. It will be utter chaos. You need to break your team into smaller groups, per planet or per megabase if you are playing on a huge single planet, and you need to place each group into a different voice chat channel. And then you need the overall leader to be able to switch channels by pressing a key, or "whisper" into the ears of the regional commanders (per planet or per megabase) by pressing another key, and so on. I did this with a two-squad platoon on PlanetSide 2 once, and it was pretty cool, but since the level of coordination required in PA is an order of magnitude greater, it will be much harder here.

For one thing, in PlanetSide the squads can be kept separate, for the most part. But with PA you will need to move players between planets quite often, so it's not just the supreme commander who will be channel-hopping, but also many of the players. So you'll have to help every single player set up the appropriate hotkey, and so on.

We'll make some initial efforts to set this up, and I'll report back here when we've made some progress.

The trick is get 2 voip systems up at once (e.g. teamspeak and game vox).

Head commander in game vox, sub commanders in with him and also in team speak with their group....

be prepared for a sim crawl within 5 minutes. And server crashing within 30 mins. The game is not optimized for 10+ games. The servers maybe there, but the game just can't handle them right now. I won't be joining the games for that reason. I can't stand playing on a sim speed of 0.1 for an hour and a half.

We haven't tried a game like this for a while, and sim performance is much better now than it was. I think 8 v 8 may now be possible so it's worth trying at least one game....

aw those were the freakin' days, man!

Do any of the systems have an http api for the local client? Going the server should be possible as well, but it would likely add authentication hassles.

You just need a TS server.
TS supports a whisper function. Press a hotkey, and you can whisper something to another person even if they're in a different channel.

So, tried to join one of your "big" team games. But since the host seems to be totally lacking any sense of humor I get the feeling that getting these games launched from lobbysimulator will be hard.
So basically you have to agree with everything the host has posted on these forums or you will be kicked from lobbysim.
BTW Yeah, im Swedish

We played a 4v4 with AC on our server today and it went well, as a test for the 7v7+ games we've got planned on Sunday. More details and links to the stream channels to follow. And RLM has a lot of trolls, and it's not fun for us to play most of those guys. Sorry.

Trolls = Publically disagree with you on the forums.

@stuart98 , @Masahiro9891 , nipping this in the bud before it goes any further. Back on topic please.

I hear Promethean might join too on Sunday for three-way matches? 7v7v7 on Elysium would be sick.

We are now streaming today's large team games against Angel's Court. First is an 8v8 on the Cult homeworld of Elysium.

The Cult stream:
http://www.twitch.tv/insomniacult

Angel's Court stream:
http://www.twitch.tv/drboggles

We are doing a 5v5v5 - The Cult vs Angel's Court vs Team Burning!

That was an epic match! Thanks for hosting ^^