Hello, This is going to include some math as well as personal opinions.
I'll start with: I'm not particularly in favor of the new legion system or it's size caps. People who I am actual friends with have scattered into different legions and many of these legions have hit their max-cap already that means being allies with certain friends is impossible.
So I decided to look at the 'why' for the new system and can understand the reasons. I have plenty of 'friends' I can now de-friend since they are only there for the legion bonus... but it is most likely that through them I will find a new legion to participate with. That leaves me with joining a 'team' of random people just because they have 49 players already and want to fill up... reminds me of being the last kid in gym class to get picked for a team.
So I can't join with actual friends because there is an artificial cap of 50 people. Each person gives a 2% bonus to planet offense and defense and at 50 people this is 100%. Easy math but it helps define the cap. I would propose a different formula.
1-1/(1+k*N)
N is the number of people in the legion. k is a scale factor that Dan picks, probably about .05. the 1+ fixes the divide by zero error for having 0 friends. the "1-1/" portion means as the denominator increases the formula trends towards a max of 1 (100%)
(assuming k=.05) This means a legion of me plus 1 person would have a 4.8% bonus instead of a 2% bonus. Add another person and it jumps to 9.1% instead of 4%... but the rate of increase drops off. At 11 people there is a 33.5% to 22% difference. At 30 people either formula gives a 60% increase. At 50 people the bonus is 71.4% not 100%. At 100 people 83.3%, at 1,000 people 98%. And extreme legion of 10,000 people would only have a 99.8% bonus. A larger legion always has an advantage over a smaller one but the advantage is less and less important as they both increase in size and it makes it more competitive for well coordinated small to mid-size legions to compete. A new max size of say 2000 (~99% bonus) would work just as well as 50.
I'm hoping that we see a shift like this in the future. I was joking with 1 friend that creating 48 dummy accounts plus us two would be easier then the BS of standing around shouting "Oooh, Ohh, pick me!" from the bench.
I don't want to be doing that. We want a system that discourages bot accounts, not encourages them. The current system encourages a well formed legion of 30ish to have 20 bots and then kill off or add bots players join and leave. I strongly suspect that there will be a rash of low level players in the next week or two as the new legion system sorts itself out.
Sean
