Wasteland Mission; Sectors

Face it, Altis is HUGE; 10x Stratis.  The current Wasteland play mode won't really work if you just scale it up to 10x on everything (spawn points, vehicles, weapons) and keep the same amount of players. 

So, do you go with 10x players on a server?  My understanding is that Arma III would be unplayable with even 2x players. An alternative is to "go small" on the big map.

Carve the map into "Sectors" and populate only one of the sectors for each mission.  Meaning, for an area comparalbe to Stratis, drop in player spawn points, vehicles, crates, etc. and leave the rest of Stratis blank. This would, effectively, restrict player activites to a more playable area, yet leave it open enough to still be a sandbox. 

Altis Wasteland: Myrina Sector
Altis Wasteland: Moudros Sector
etc.

While Atlis is huge, I don't think restricting people to certain areas is really a good solution to the problem. This is by far not a trivial problem as everyone has their style of game play. Its a problem we are conscious of and while this might be one solution, I don't know if it will suit the vast majority of players.

I think to really overcome some of the challenges of the size, we really need to encourage team play, and give those teams the opportunities to cross path. whether that be making the missions much more enticing, or things like radar vehicles that you can use to scan the surrounding area for bases.

If this is a solution that people really want, we have no issues implementing it... but it requires quite of work to get right and we would rather put that time in to something else if only a handful of servers are going to want use it.

MF

If it was all OPFOR and BLUFOR, that might work.  However, there is a large contingent of players that go Independent; usually for one of two reasons; natural lone wolf or can't stand all the yakking in OPFOR/BLUFOR and form 3-4 person indie squads.  What are they to do?

Even with that, on-the-fly teams work only if all are on the same page.  All it takes is one yahoo to fly off with a team's last remaining helicopter to break the back of that team, given the size of the map. You -Have- to assume and take into account that there will be lone wolves/non-team players, even on OPFOR/BLUFOR. 

You can still move around the entire map if you want.  Just thought the proposed solution would be easier to implement (in chunks, vs the whole map) and alleviate some concerns I have and have heard from others.   

Added a poll so its a bit easier for the community to add feedback.

MF

If your playing wasteland for PvP then join a Stratis Wasteland. I can see where your coming from. For me I'm picking a Altis  Wasteland because I want to play on a big map for the freedom of building bases and having them find me.

My suggestion to this problem is simple. Don't sector the map, leave the map open but sector the spawns allowing the user pick if they want PvP or not.

IE - Keep the normal one but also add 2 new options

Any/Random - Same as it is now. spawns you in a random town/place
Town - Same as it is now, spawning you on group players if the town is clear
Beacon - Same as it is now, spawning on team beacon

New Options
PvP - This spawns you in areas which are high in PvP
Safe - This spawns you in a safe areas which don't see much PvP

...
My suggestion to this problem is simple. Don't sector the map, leave the map open but sector the spawns allowing the user pick if they want PvP or not.
...

THIS^
Don't invisible wall any part of the island, simply keep Spawn points and missions in a tighter area.

What I was thinking was having  Altis split into Three sectors.

Sector 1: Respawn points(towns/ or interesting terrain features)
              AND simple infantry missions
 
Sector 2: More difficult mission (occur less frequently (NPC tanks/armour .And require
              heavy firepower/explosives or long distance transport/heli 
              NO Respawn points

Sector 3: No Missions
              No Respawn points(Respawn Beacons for team bases would be ok)
              Populated by players building bases with respawn beacons. 

This would still keep the whole island open for people to explore and build bases, but would keep the action in a tighter area while at the same time not leaving large areas of  the island completely unused.

Future development: Not a priority and would be at least 3x the work  Rotating the sectors(either by separate mission files with things shifted around, and having players vote on the mission to be used when server starts) or by creating a system to decide on the sectors randomly at mission start)

Rough ideas for sectors.

Sector 1: (Spawn / infantry missions) Everything West and of and Including Lakka / Neochori towns and North of Melanera / Zaros Bays

Sector 2: (Armored missions) Everything South Of Melanera / Zaros and everything East of Lakka/ Neochori (including main airport with a jet as a mission reward?)

Sector 3: (Emptyish / Team Base building Overlaps other 2 sectors).Everything North of Intl.Airport with more sparse/rare mission and spawn locations

Rough ideas for sectors.

I think the NW and west would be better for spawn locations and infantry missions due to the hilly  and more varied terrain. south and south east softer rolling terrain better to engage enemy (npc tanks and armor)
NE and North central are pretty boring. but there are  a few places that would make good player bases.

My idea was not to eliminate access to ANY part of Altis or the surounding water.  Just to have the spawn points clustered into a portion of the map.

If A3 could handle 300 players and 1000 vehicles, that'd be great and would not have proposed this.  But it cannot (even putting aside the communications nightmare).

Let me ask you all; have you spawned on the island with no vehicles within reach?  Early on, I did.  And after running for 45 minutes it got pretty frustrating.  This map is HUGE.  I could have kept hitting the respawn until I found one, but no player should ever have to do that.

If all you are talking about is restricting Spawning into a particular area, that is already easy for servers to do. All they have to do is remove all the spawn points that are not in that area. We could have multiple repositories, one for each sector but we wont because its just too much work maintaining it while we are changing stuff so often.

For reference all the spawn points are defined in the "mission.sqm" in the root folder of the mission so any server admins that want to set this up can simply remove the ones they don't want and rebuild the pbo. We can look at defining the spawn points outside of the mission.sqm if we get enough requests for it. Its still a balance of which issues we concentrate on at the moment though.

I'd like to revisit this soonest.  For the kind of players that liked playing on Stratis because of the much increased and higher frequency of contact, Altis is too big.  A lot of them got burnt out on playing the same map for 6+ months.  Some didn't (me), but understand why some
could.  Altis is the ultimate solution, IMHO.

Cutting down the number of spawn points might do it.  But after playing a bit more on Altis, get the feeling that will need more spawn points in that "sectored" area. Plus missions need to be limited to a much smaller portion of the map.

I know the Dev team is concentrating on getting to 1.0, but would be willing to help get this in the planning stage.

I think the Stratis version will solve that problem for good. Those who enjoy frequent encounters will play Stratis, and those who want a bigger map at the cost of slower pace will play Altis.

Carving Altis into "sectors" would take a huge amount of effort and time. In fact, think of it as each sector requiring nearly the same effort needed to port the mission to a complete different map.

I hear you Rev.  The problem is that there are a number of players that have burned out on Stratis because it was the only map available.  Having said that, it is a map that is just the right size for a number of mission types.  That's why I proposed what  I did; Stratis-sized Sectors. My thoughts were not to do it all at once.  Jeepers no.  Do one Sector and see how that rolls out.  If the impetus is there, then do the next, but months later. 

Understand the effort though. Just want to say thanks so very much for all the effort that Team Wasteland has put into getting Altis and now Stratus up and running