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Having 10 players at a group is really a small amount wich should be increased to at least 20-30 I think. Those few times we want to make hunt events with other guilds, we spend loads of time to split our members into 2 or 3 teams and it also makes the members unpatient and even irretated and I dont blaim them.
Why is there a limit of 10 players only at a group in the first place??
Not to devalue your suggestion but most games only allow 6ish players per team. I do like the idea that you can have as many as you want though. I?d like to see another type of group introduced into MMORPGs. Something like a tactical group where the tactical group leader can control things. Make a simple interface where the leader can get info on each player quickly and easily, then manipulate who is in what team by simply dragging them into teams. They could be the tactical leader seeing all members of all groups at any time and issuing orders to each group via the chat.
You could add a lot of options to this type of system such as who gets loot, XP etc. Add a few automated options like rotating loot and XP between teams so everyone gets a turn to gain XP and loot, not just the ?tank team? or ?damage team.?
You want 20 - 30 players in a single group? That's not a group, that's an army!
I'm not surprise people get impatient and irritated with all the down time involved coordinating a that many players. I don't think larger groups will make that much difference in your efficiency. Your still going to be standing around waiting for the last player to arrive or catch up with you.
At least the chat system is flexible enough for you to create a custom chat channel, TorchWieldingMob, so that you can all communicate with each other.
perhaps the can increase the limit if you are in the same guild becuase normally i will never go over 10 in a group except on guild hunts. It would be nice if we could get into one large group for guild hunts. as it is now we have to split in 2 or 3 groups.
IMO they should do something like WoW has and after 10 people (though it's only 5 or 6 to a group in WoW) the group would become a Raid group. At that point the Raid leader could break the group into squads (up to 10 per squad & each with a leader(s)) and those would be the people that would have their lifebars display in your group window and perhaps be the limitation of who shows up in your map window as green..
That way the client isn't having to do any more work with displaying tons of lifebars & tracking of groupmates, it reuses the same interfaces we already have, and makes management of such a large group of people more feasible. Edit: and of course lets a you share the rewards as an entire group rather than split amongst multiple groups.
Now a few of reasons one might argue against doing something like this are:
1) Client + lots of players + mobs = potentially hella low FPS & ctd's
2) Lots of players + lots of mobs = potentially lots of lag
3) Areas where a truly massive group can go and not decimate the spawn are nonexistant
Really no matter what we propose to improve the game, the performance/stablity of the client & servers needs to be improved. With todays technology the game's client should be able to handle 30-40-50 players & mobs on screen and do so without having sub 10fps. I'd LOVE to have areas that literally take 20-30 people to even stand a chance, but I don't think currently the game could handle it.
Well normally we dont get over 10 at a group but it happens we did at Ice and now when we are merging, it will be easy to create big armies if we want to really. At UO, the limit was 10 as well and as we had a bigger RP alliance there, we easy got 2-4 full groups of hunters so this is not a new problem as I see it as a problem.
Just look at this last hunt we had before Ice was shut down:
I agree that group size limitations should be raised, it is especially important for a healer when going out in a group to be able to keep track of everyone.
I know that when i was doing my RoP we merged together with another group and thus players had to be dropped from the main one to compromise etc. This left some players disappointed somewhat which would have been avoided had the group size been bigger.
At some events it happends we got 3 full groups and makes talking nasty U do can say why dont make a channel coz other get in it we dont want. And makes having guild hunts etc much easyer.
But you can your channel protect with a password, dont you?
Last I heard channel protection wasn't working...
All though have you tried creating a channel and naming it guildA&Bhunt or something?
When I've done community crafting, where a group had 10 to 30 people making a push, we just named a channel (dim bulb for example) and went to work. Didn't really have invaders in any of 'em.
In DAOC there was alliance chat, guild chat, group chat and then private chat. You couldn't see them on a master list like here, was by invite only, so there were no intruders. I like the idea of alliance chat and wish they would do that here. I know several other guilds that I would love to be able to chat with as a whole on a regular basis.
For our guild hunts, 10 slots is not enough, but I can see where having more would be a problem, such as the lag issues mentioned above. We normally rotate, give others a chance to join the hunt and the fun. Problem with that is the higher folks are normally the ones dropping out to give the low guys a chance to share in the xp and then the tactical side of the hunt falls apart. Lose your lvl 80+ healer and you got problems!
During beta the group limit was 8. That blew me away and made me very happy as I played the E-word game before and the limit was 6. 2 doesn't seem a big deal but it broke the mold so to speak. After release the limit went up to 10 and again I was blown away and stoked that we could have a group so large!
I really see no reason for group size to be changed. I do see a need for there to be a guild or raid party grouping, like what was introduced in the E-word game with the SoL expansion. They could even code it to where XP is spread out throughout the party and not just per kill groups.
An interesting thought is the way planetside does things.
THey have squads, and squad leaders. The leaders gain "leadership" XP for being a leader.
Then squads can be part of platoons, and platoon leaders gain "leadership" Xp for being platoon leaders. They gain less per incident, but they get it per squad, so not to bad.
Then company and so on and so on.
Works pretty well, and as certain skills require leadership, it adds a layer of complexity to the game. Leaders can put waypoints and such on the map that people in their groups can see, and add to the groups (their leadership adds value to the fight).
Not saying this is what Horizons should do, but it would be interesting if they were doing a war thing to have "leadership" as a new class, and gain abilities based on that. Such as highlighting a mob that everyone can see. Perhaps high enough they can highlight named mobs. Or allow healers to see the squad/platoons damage. Or healers in the leader's squad can heal (with group heal) members in other platoons.
Then again, that is probably a different game then horizons.
But I have seen lots of times when building or fighting when more slots would be good!
10 is the highest group size I've ever seen in any game by far. In every other game I've played 6 was the maximum.
Perhaps they can eventually put in code for raids of several groups. I think there are other things which are more important though. Until then, just break up into several groups and set up a chat channel. Have a healer in each group. We played like that in EQ for years until they introduced raids and we did fine (we didn't even have chat channels for a lot of that time either).