more serious squadrons

[DARGAN]

greeting,

as it is possible to create a squadron for anyone, even alone, there are many squadrons with one or two players. I propose to integrate a system of signature, a squadron can not be created only if there are minimum 5-10 commanders who have signed for example, with a reduction of the cost of creation distributed on each commander.

something else, it is possible to leave a squadron when you want, very well, but I think it should not be too easy to be unsubscribed from a squadron by the leader, only by the fact that we only want hard working people, for example, at the top of the rankings.

The idea is to make the squadrons more serious, a squadron for a single commander should not exist and unsubscriptions for no reason despite the time spent or our involvement should not be possible either, or more complicated than just, thank you goodbye.

 

[Factabulous]

Not sure if to comment on thread title, or post content, as they seem unrelated ... Fixed

 

[DARGAN]

yes thank you, I just changed it.

 

[Jmanis]

How would this make Squadrons more competitve? There's a couple problems with this...

• Single commander/small squadrons aren't going to magically migrate to larger squadrons under such a system, they're simply not going to bother with squadrons... as they're a small squadron, they clearly don't care about being competitive, so there's no desire to join with a larger one in order to be competitive.
• Quantity of commanders does not equate to quality of the squadron. If a single commander can punch above the weight of, say, a 10-commander squadron, why should they be excluded?

This wouldn't increase competition, it would just pointlessly inconvenience a host of players who, for whatever reason, have chosen single/small group squadrons.

If you want to increase competition, instead of getting rid of small squadrons, establish a league system based on the squadrons size, or even better, their overall scores between each season. Since FD seem to tie rewards to it, break it down as follows:

Rank 1-50: Top tier rewards, extra for winning
Rank 50-100: 2nd tier rewards, extra for winning
Rank 100-150: 3rd tier rewards, extra for winning
Rank 150-200: 4th tier rewards, extra for winning
Rank 250+: Break down into leagues of 50 going down the score chart, with no rewards.

You promote through leagues based on your score in the previous league... breaking it down to two leagues of 3 squadrons, assume the final scores are:
League 1-3
Squad A: 20pts
Squad B: 15pts
Squad C: 10pts

League 4-6:
Squad D: 12pts
Squad E: 11pts
Squad F: 6pts

Then in the next season:
League 1-3 participants: A, B, D
League 4-6 participants: C, E, F

That would be far more effective at increasing competition by setting realistic goals based on the ongoing performance of a squadron. As it stands, even if I were part of a sufficiently-large squadron by your definition (say, 10 commanders), and we did anti-xeno activities, I'd still look at AXI's performance and go "Yup, never going near that, so not going to bother"

 

[Florenus]

To create a "serious" squadron of, say, 50 members, you still need to create a squadron and gather people interested in joining.
Untill at least one apply, you'll have a squadron consisting of only one person.
So what? You first would need to gather 50 willing players that will sign a petition, or something?
And once the number of squadron members drops below - what then? Squadron gets disbanded?

Actually, the main bonus of a squadron is the squadron chat, what they do as a squadron is not important - it can be usefull to squadron of any number of members. Well, apart from one man squadrons - but I have nothing against those.
And you have to start somewhere.

 

[Factabulous]

I sometimes start a 1-person squad so I can watch a factions' systems. So even 1-person squads have a use. Just not a very Squaddy use

 

[Florenus]

I sometimes start a 1-person squad so I can watch a factions' systems. So even 1-person squads have a use. Just not a very Squaddy use

That's an option I wish would be accessible to single commanders without need to be in a squadron.

 

[Factabulous]

That's an option I wish would be accessible to single commanders without need to be in a squadron.

Plus the ability to see where you are allied. Though of course you can only see that if you don't have a squadron

 

[Nadreck]

I have 3 accounts, one main and a couple of "assistants" (bought in a sale when my main CMDR was heading to Beagle Point with DW2). I created a squadron for them back when we thought Carriers were going to be squadron-based, but it's entirely logical for them to be in a squadron anyhow.

Recently I removed my main CMDR from the squadron (handing leadership over to one of the alts) so that I could create a new squadron to get info on a faction I was considering assisting (as I knew that if I aligned my original squadron to a faction, there was no way of undoing that). After running several high-INF missions, I managed to get the faction's status from 22% to... erm, 22%. So I gave up, left and disbanded that squadron, and rejoined my original squadron.

 

[Para Handy]

... I propose to integrate a system of signature, a squadron can not be created only if there are minimum 5-10 commanders who have signed for example, with a reduction of the cost of creation distributed on each commander.
........

I have a reaction gif for this suggestion but it would get me banned. So just no thanks I don't want you telling me what I can or can't do.

 

[varonica]

We get numerous suggestions of how to adjust game play because player X wants people to play the game the same way they play it, in the end it would just end up driving people away from the game altogether. You will get the maximum number of players by allowing the maximum amount of freedom, having endless rules and restrictions would tend to limit that aim.

 

[Tiili]

I thought the only point of squadrons is to get those fancy 4 letters under your name.

The system really doesn't do anything else than put your squad on a meaningless scoreboard, gives you a tag and opens a new chat channel.
The only thing that affects gameplay is pledging to minor factions, and I don't really see any reason why they didn't just let the commander himself pledge in the first place, as it's done for powerplay.

 

[Bloodsign]

My casual squadron consists of three CMDRs. I haven't seen one on in awhile, and another plays only a couple times a month. But I still like having a squadron and it's here if any casual players want to join. We've got a Discord and an Inara page, and we pretty much are always taking applications for laid-back CMDRs.

Under OPs suggestion, The Order of the Prismatic Sparrow would just cease to exist. That's not cool, I and others put time and effort into getting everything running, even though we are small and things aren't very active right now.

I can see the merit of having squadrons of single members only getting automatically disbanded (maybe after a month of only having one member, to free up squadron tags); that's not a squadron and it was never the intent behind the squadron functionality. But you can't just disband small squadrons; I'm sure some of them are active.

 

[Rascaldees]

greeting,

as it is possible to create a squadron for anyone, even alone, there are many squadrons with one or two players. I propose to integrate a system of signature, a squadron can not be created only if there are minimum 5-10 commanders who have signed for example, with a reduction of the cost of creation distributed on each commander.

something else, it is possible to leave a squadron when you want, very well, but I think it should not be too easy to be unsubscribed from a squadron by the leader, only by the fact that we only want hard working people, for example, at the top of the rankings.

The idea is to make the squadrons more serious, a squadron for a single commander should not exist and unsubscriptions for no reason despite the time spent or our involvement should not be possible either, or more complicated than just, thank you goodbye.

I disagree entirely. Many squadrons had to start small and some of us formed them recently and haven't had time to grow.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

• Single commander/small squadrons aren't going to magically migrate to larger squadrons under such a system, they're simply not going to bother with squadrons... as they're a small squadron, they clearly don't care about being competitive, so there's no desire to join with a larger one in order to be competitive.
• Quantity of commanders does not equate to quality of the squadron. If a single commander can punch above the weight of, say, a 10-commander squadron, why should they be excluded?

The smallest squadrons to win a trophy on PC have been 2 and 7 players in size, and a single commander once came 8th on the exploration leaderboard. As you say, there are some pretty serious small squadrons out there.

 

[Kissamies]

It would probably be easiest to have a some sort of two tier system. Casual squadrons would remain like they are now, but they could elevated to Serious status if they met some requirement like listed on the OP. These serious ones would have more visibility on the scoreboards and other tiny perks like that.

 

[Bloodsign]

Squadrons are problematic on several levels. There are a TON of 1-CMDR squadrons and I think a lot are inactive. This just ties up squadron tags needlessly. On the other hand, I support anyone's right to start their own squadron if they have a reason to do so, however small.

I would like to see FDev automatically disband squadrons which are completely inactive to free up possible squadron tags. The 10M fee could be refunded, not that it matters much if the CMDR has been away for months/years. (When I say inactive, I mean that no squadron member has logged in for, say, three months.)

 

[Chaparral]

Arx for squadron ranks. Suck on that.

 

[Bigmaec]

Squadrons are problematic on several levels. There are a TON of 1-CMDR squadrons and I think a lot are inactive. This just ties up squadron tags needlessly. On the other hand, I support anyone's right to start their own squadron if they have a reason to do so, however small.

I would like to see FDev automatically disband squadrons which are completely inactive to free up possible squadron tags. The 10M fee could be refunded, not that it matters much if the CMDR has been away for months/years. (When I say inactive, I mean that no squadron member has logged in for, say, three months.)

This. Same with PMFs please.
But it should be a year or so, this game's players love a long hiatus.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

This just ties up squadron tags needlessly.

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.

Same with PMFs please.

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.