Too many campaigns and a limited number of players resulted in this lack of depth in the imbalanced minimap CQC robot Farm matches.
Maybe some players are happy with robot farms and uneven matches. However, the development team did not add a formal PvE mode for this purpose.
In any case, too many campaigns and too small a battlefield map are at the root of the problem. They should make a bigger battle and always allow players to join in the middle of it (e.g. battlefield) so you can have a match with an equal number of living players.
Lots of people have proposed some ideas to solve this problem:
campaign rework (ex: Eastern front)
matchmaking (ex: SBMM, which can be cancer like in CoD right now)
It may or may not help.
But you can also work on the player motivation.
Therefor I personally prefer to propose to make more daily task target the low player faction: “play 2 match of tunsia ally”. It give a lot of flexibility (player balance can change from day to day without any reason), is quite easy to implement compared to the other solutions and is a elegant way to use and mass control.
“Oh, a nice reward this is neet! I will play tunisia ally.” The best propaganda is when you think the idea come from you.
You can also make very little reward like 1 bronze order for those specific daily. And if you want to target the veteran, don’t give bronze order, give cosmetic order.
And I think it’s very meta to use Propaganda to influence the number of player that will play enlisted on one side or on the other.
(sorry for the bad poster, I’m on my phone)
By the way in 2022 the new word is “public relation officer”. It’s more user friendly.
There are two major things that they could actually implement that would help this significantly.
Add a system of additional rewards for playing as the side that is low on players. When going into a campaign, it would display which side is currently short on players. If you chose this team, you would get a bonus to your end-game score according to how many players short you are of the enemy team. I’d say a 25% boost per teammate would be fair. So for example: if you are playing as Japanese on Pacific, and you have 5 less teammates (as actual players) you receive a 125% increase for that game. This will allow the “losing” side to progress in their campaign quicker, as well as earn more logistics orders to gear up their guys.
A multitude of the issues surrounding unfair numbers is because of how open the maps are, or just how strong certain tactics are in those maps. Again, I use Pacific as an example: the terrain is so open in many of the objectives, that artillery and mortars absolutely devastate with absolutely no counter. Either artillery needs to be nerfed in some way, and/or engineers need to be given more options to be able to fortify. Being able to make a top covering for trenches would go a long way to help this. Also, TNT is nearly useless as there really isn’t much to destroy. Allowing engineers to build stronger defenses would fix a lot of balance issues within the maps.
I think I simple fix is to just make people wait until there’s an equal number of players in a game. If there are only five players available for one team, only five players get qued for the other team.
If you’re queuing for the more popular side it will take longer to find a game, and after a minute or two a prompt can pop up suggesting that if you change teams you’ll find a quicker match.
As people filter over to the less popular team, the balance becomes easier and more people are able to join all-around.
The trouble here is potentially long wait times. If the wait time exceeds a minute, most people will just leave. Thats just simple reality.
In addition, a lot of it has to do with which side they have gear for. Even if your system was implemented, most people would still probably go with whichever side they have built up already, as there still isn’t really an incentive to play the other side.
If you are trying to say “make the incentive shorter wait times”, that’s poor development. Other games have tried that in the past and tanked their playerbase. Incentive has to be a positive thing, NOT a way to avoid a penalty. Thats where I again bring up my suggestion:
I think that it’s an overgeneralization of the community to say most people would just quit the game instead of waiting a few more minutes. Anecdotally, I’ve seen multiple posts where people say they’d rather wait for an even game than get immediately dropped into a one-sided or unbalanced match.
Giving an xp bonus to the less popular side is a good idea; and I think the two could be implemented together in a way that would incentivise people to switch sides while still having the option to just wait longer to get into an even match with the team they want.