Its a cut and dry solution to something at least.
No insult intended. I played around with that approach myself. Its basically breaking down historical squads into subordinate fireteams suitably sized to match weapons attached to HQs at various levels. You could expand to include all weapons that way. It is good because it creates something with a mild historical anchor based on fireteams more than squads.
The point issue is a trigger for action more than anything. Something must be done.
It is then important to remember that squads are meant to facilitate team work. If they do not do that, then squads could simply be done away with altogether (players then choosing what SL to spawn on from a random list of SLders). So back to RO with a twist.
In public play you need a lot of squad members to do the most elementary of tactics - staggered advance (where the squad fans out and advances, and the SL follows them with a safe spacing and timed to re-enforcement waves).
A low cap on max squad members is troublesome because you cannot get the number of team players you need in any squad to have people to cooperate with.
It also keeps players from changing squads as there simply is no where for them to go. Let alone go to the squad they want to be in.
Friend will seldom be allowed to join the same squad unless you can boot poeple in a squad. Which is bad because doing so is pretty intrusive and even if you could, where would the booted players go?
Team players work around this of course by using 3rd party software to make their own squads independent of what squads they belong to ingame. Which is a function of poor game design if this is what team players must do, and the intent of the game is to provide for teamplay opportunities.
The 13-15 number is not random, and is not meant to represent an average number of players in a squad (there should be about 5 squads in my mind, so we agree on that part for sure)
It simply is what you need as a max cap to allow team players to join the squad they want to join. If they can, then they will tend to use ingame coms a lot more. Which reflects good game design.
This is not fiction btw. The MERC clan for example is silent if and only if they are doing clan play and are on TS. Otherwise - Mercspam for the more informal occassions. To name one example.
You also need a sufficiently high cap to allow random pubbers to stay in a squad even as team players accumulate in it. Its inclusive and helps stimulate a more teamplay based environment simply by exposing pubbers to the experience at a squad level. It will rub off.
The third point is taking advantage of the point system to professionalize SL play. It would be very good if players could reward SLders with respawn points if the SLders are doing what the player wants them to, and reward other SLders with the same points if the former SL is not doing what the player thinks he should (alive is usually the most important thing. Followed by being somewhere relevant).
To be able to reward or deny reward is only possible if a player can freely and easily move to a different squad. For example by having a 1-click change SL option in the respawn location overlay.
A forth point is of couse clan requirements. Clans need up to 15 slots per squad and the free choice of weapons (subject to class limitations of course) within that squad. And clans are important to the community. They fund servers for one thing, and they help maintain healthy player bases is another.
Clans can of course work around squad limitations that do not work for them. But having to do so is again a reflection of poor game design in so far as the squad system is meant to promote teamplay in the first place.
Words. Many words. I hope you see where I am coming from
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