more serious squadrons

[Bloodsign]

To clarify, I would personally definitely "squadron activity" to mean "members log into ED every so often."

That way, being out in the black still counts as activity (which it is).

 

[Bigmaec]

At this stage that's probably not a problem. Squadron tags are letters and numbers, four characters long, so there are 1,679,616 squadron tags available per platform.

There's maybe a little over 10,000 squadrons on PC (based on leaderboards and random searches, very few are entirely inactive [1]) and the consoles are almost certainly smaller, so <1% of tags have been used. Doesn't look like there's any danger of them running out any time soon.

[1] Back in season 3 I did a random search, picking various two character starts of squadron tags, and seeing how many squadrons showed up with that. Multiplying that sample up to all possible two-character starts gave slightly fewer squadrons than the season 3 exploration leaderboard had on it, so the inactivity percentage over an 8-week season must have been very low indeed. Season 5 had a couple of hundred more active squadrons than Season 3.


How would you determine that a PMF was inactive in a way that would get rid of any at all, but would let a small PMF's supporters go on DW3 and still have something to return to?

Frontier will have to do something in this area, since under current rules about 50% of the space is used up - and rising steadily, but it probably won't be removing the existing ones.

I didn't think it through to be fair.
But I feel there are lots of abandoned pmfs.

 

[Ian Skippy]

I think it is crucial that people should not play in a way I dont like. Especially when it has absolutely no influence on me at all, such as one-person squadrons.

 

[M00ka]

I have no need for joining a Squadron but I would like to create a Fleet! And I think that is what so many of the small squadrons are attempting to be, a fleet of ships not a squadron per sec.

 

[Kissamies]

PMFs are another matter. Even abandoned ones are better local colour than the procgen ones with their formulaic names.

 

[IndigoWyrd]

I'm just going to reject your vision of what squadrons "should" be. If that's how you want yours, run it that way. Small squadrons shouldn't even be a concern to you, as they have no bearing on how you choose to play. That's actually one of the nice things Frontier did with their design. Let's not try to "fix" what isn't "broken".