[Suggestion] Pub platoon not following waypoints. Half the time they follow the vs zerg. Pubs platoons non effect

So I spent 2 hours yesterday adding people to my pub platoon on the map. Nearly remembered the entire VS's name of every trooper, as I asked spam invited for pub platoons all day. For brief map recruitment times, not to bother or invite someone more than twice per 30 min.

Only for the entire 8 hours, all that got me was nowhere. Had a full platoon yesterday Friday. From early afternoon till 10pm. Less than half showed to pub platoon waypoints all day. Other days are a little better, yet this is still a map leading dilemma. For pub platoon leaders. At first they were amazing for the 1st 30 min like a Seal Team, then the rest of the 8 hours was the worst pub platoon ever, almost like nothing would organize them to a simple platoon waypoint. They were scattered all over the map, no matter what I would say or beacon toward.

Ye I joined a friends platoon at night 10pm till 1am & we all had a good time as a armor party. Tho even then my pub squad was meh I had to leave the platoon, before joining the friends platoon. Especially for daytime hours earlier, or all 8 hours prior, only 20% of the platoon followed me around all day. Yet the platoon was full, all day. Sometimes a bigger platoon than the zerg outfit had, yet they still followed the cheese regions. Also I like to leave mid a lot, & explore elsewhere with a platoon & most of these guys keep returning to mid all day. Until the main zerg outfits arrive & then they follow them, or else people leave the pub for their zerg outfit at night & then you have half a platoon by then.

Amatuers follow the vs zerg. The vs zerg follows the vs zerg. Half or more of my pub platoon follows the vs zerg. & all the VS zerg did was hit Watersons 3 times in a row after losing it & then returning. I wanted to go elsewhere after the 3rd time them wall farming. Tho they won't budge. Theirs no incentive. To help pub platoons go to the waypoints.

Only outfits have this, for the sake of outfit resources or the title of base guard. Something that makes players go to the waypoints, or they'll be kicked from the outfit. Yet pub platoons won't have this. Pubs have people from many little outfits, non outfits, or solo outfits. So theirs always going to be those people. Until outfit limit of 100 members max only = 4 main outfits template ui per server. Without marketing 1 outfit at the #1 recruitment page.

So this means everyone has to follow the zerg outfit, they rule & they don't even have a ruler, just mid tier platoon leads or random people I wouldn't know. I do know they rule where the main army is & that making a full term pub platoon only gives me 10 guys out of my 48 troops. The rest are at some repetitive medic TW2 area. Some days will be slightly better than this; I'm still asking for a feature that gives rewards or events for people who follow pub platoon waypoints. Or anything that helps amateur's not follow zergs or not repetitively hug mid.


#2 Topic. As to not make a new thread for this. " Voting Polls ". All the available possible regions to cap, a poll prompts for all pub platoom members or all leader chat players, to vote on where they want to siege next. A poll list of regions. So that way all the players may vote to leave mid & we get to. By people maybe impressed with the voting results, that that sways their mind to redeploy. When they wouldn't have redeployed.

Or take it a step forward & make this a global server faction poll & the regions that don't get picked get entirely locked. So that way these leaders on leader chat get less say so on where to go, the whole army gets to vote.

You are describing basically 3 problems that the game has:

1: a lack of incentives to fight hard battles. The way to win alerts or resources the fastest is by avoiding fights and using zergs or ghost capping.

2: no proper teamplay mechanics and incentives. Teamspeak for up to 48 people? Why was that ever thought to be sufficient?

3: leaders assuming their actions have to be followed for teamwork. As a consequence of #2 people seem to think that the only way teamplay can exist is if a "leader" tells someone what to do and they do it. The most basic of basic teamplay is two players meeting and having both the tools and incentives to work together.

Solve these issues and you solve your problem. A squad or platoon that has the tools, mechanics and incentives to stick together and work together will do so. Without it players will not do so outside of heavily coordinated outfits.

The problem in this case lies with the platoon leader. If the platoon leader cannot inspire the platoon to do things, that is not the game's fault. If the platoon leader leads with the stick and thinks that threats to be kicked from an outfit are all a PL has to work with then that PL will never be an effective leader.

This is like blaming another outfit for one's own inability to recruit and thinking that getting the dev team to ban other outfits would be good for one's own recruiting.

I often avoid public platoons precisely because I do not want to contribute to that problem.

I'm looking for a high intensity fight. If you put a waypoint on one I'll go. Usually though the waypoint is on some really bad overpop. The PL does this so he'll win. It bores me to death so I wander off and fight somewhere more intense. If I'm actually needed I return to the waypoint but rarely does this happen. I'm sure it's frustrating to the PL. So again I just often times leave.

Had to google this photo. The real 1 was a similar map position.

2 hour map. That's where I wanted to take the pub platoon, a pub that was full all day. We never made it. Nobody went west, till its too late (alert timer). Suppose to go before the alert starts or before the 1 hr mark. Vs had plenty of time.

Instead we did 2+ hours of TW2's " Waffle formation " as I title it. The Waffle formation is when the allied zerg, just tries to win the alert, meanwhile the alert timer hasn't started yet & they are already trying to ninja. For outfit resources mainly, not for the win. So they do a waffle formation, take 1 region from 1 side & take 1 region from the other, till you have a hexagon of a waffle. Then they redeploy to defend this flat hex of regions. I personally find that boring, as the waffle formation happens 10x more often than just digging straight into enemy territory. VS already fought mid & these zerg guys keep trying to get back to mid, a 2nd, 3rd, or 4th time. Then lose mid, they retake mid, over & over. Till it's over. Yawn.

Or they tried to Waffle Onatha, as I already told the leaders, Onatha leads to ARX & ARX doesn't have a good road to Jagged. Then we already did a Jagged warp siege 1 hour battle last weekend. Making the best place or rarest place to go is Soltech NW, TR Mountain Farm. Yet I had beacons for 1 hr, told all 100 men that West Wokuk was better. So they didn't go, they ghosted Tumas Tech. I told them we could have had a 100 verse 100 mountain tr fight at the NW TR Warp " 40 minutes ago ". Instead they were all sitting at Tumas Tech with no enemies 80% overpop, 40 minutes after I told them how to start a big battle at a unique location. & Yes that whole day my full pub platoon followed the Wildcards zerg to mid over & over.

I suggested or told allies, " that nobody should regain mid, if the mid fight didn't happen from the start of the warpgate " entry to the planet. If the mid fight doesn't happen at the start of a warp entry, than don't path there to retake it multiple times over, or even one time again. Let it go. Mid fights happen plenty enough during low pop region limited hours, so why go out of your way ever? To path there.

If they are returning to mid for outfit resources, well guess what, I don't need zerg outfit resources. Half the allied server doesn't, yet that's the main goal of the army, everyday? Why?

No matter what I said, or having 4 shield & attack beacons all day. Sometimes its amateur hour & medics just want to farm mid. Either way right now, not salty over any of this. & Least favorite topic, I'd rather talk about item features, not salty leadership stuff. Still tho, yes I wanna go to Soltech still, NW. So next time I have a pub platoon & its Amerish. This isn't going to go down any differently, just gonna yell at 100+ allies to go to Soltech to Farm the TR mountain & forget their waffle formation for outfit resources. Tho really people who keep redeploying their zerg outfit, to ninja for the alert win, really lack the imagination. It's fine to go along with them for many months, before saying anything, tho how many months till you say something? I'm kinda done ranting about outfits or leadership, nobody wants to hear it. I sound like the krazy person. Yet I find the people who repeat the same map strategies day after day, to be the real krazy ones.

P.s. Yes I'm not gonna recruit for a outfit till zerg outfit pop limit gets nerfed extremely. Fine solo till then. Total server outfit refresh. However done asking for this regular request, that any mmo for a guild would request.

The server has enough room for 2 or 3 platoons & some small squads during weekend hours. That means the server has pop for 4 major medium sized outfits per server. So makes no sense to have 1 big outfit & 8 tiny outfits. Recruiting won't fix this, nothing to recruit. Yet the pop is there for 4 major medium.

1) Nobody is impressed if a zerg takes base anyways, so flag respect is out the window.
2) Outfit Wars is a joke otherwise, who are they gonna fight other Wildcards members?

At least when rando pub platoons meet on the map they have fun battles that last longer than 2 minutes, and don't redeployside all the time, at least until a zergfit redeploys into the area or flies their lame bastion over the fight ruining it.

I've found one strategy so far but it is not worth it and leads to burnout rather quickly.

Start practicing with squad leading, give the squad a descriptive name like "WP/kick" or something etc. Set waypoints down a lane and don't kick new people before they have ignored 2 waypoint changes. Switch to a different lane and kick a few, but not all, of those who are stuck in the previous lane. After a while people will get the point, as they see people are kicked every time the waypoint changes.

Don't be too hard on the kicking and banning, there is no reason to kick non-followers unless the squad is full. Kicking 1 or 2 people regularly communicates better than one massive kick wave of 4-5 people. Kicking too many will also make your squad less attractive and hinder recruitment of new players as larger squads are first in the squad list. After a while you will have an obedient squad.

For platoon leading just keep doing the same process. If randoms are squadleading they might do mutiny and steal a complete squad of WP following members. That's why only friends or WP followers should be promoted to squadleads. Even though there will many more people to kick, wave-kicking many at once diminishes morale rather than encourage discipline. For this reason it can sometimes be necessary to put non-followers in a separate squad and "eject" the squad using a special command (/squadkick nicknameofleader or something like that). Crushing defeats will make half your platoon look down on you and disobey so keep your strategic skills honed. A large force that captures too much territory will draw a lot of attention from enemies.

When you have a platoon where all people follow the WP, you may kick 1 or 2 of those who are the slowest to redeploy after a WP change.

The goal of all this (at least for me) is to win alerts. If playing at non-prime hours this may be achieved simply by grabbing as much territory as possible. Closer to prime time the competition will be stiffer, and a public platoon cannot do much alone even if most follows the WP. One strategy that might work for some time is to use the platoon as a quick response force for the purpose of taking deciding territory during the last couple of minutes of an alert. That's right, those hours of herding will only pay off for 5-10 minutes.

On #2 and 3: While true, it does help if easy (and fast) methods of communication as well as clear goals are provided. At least for a large majority of the playerbase. Otherwise zergfits would not exist, it's a simple "me follow thingy" mentality.
Also, playing with 3 friends will give very good teamplay, but for larger groups there need to be directions. Depending on the individual experience and mental capabilities of the players that doesn't have to be much ("hey, let's all go to [place], you know what you do best"), but if you have a group of 15 people and tell them noone is allowed to make any calls, you end up with at least 4 different places those 15 people will disperse to. You *can* have people make suggestions and then decide together, but unless this is a practiced routine, this will bog down an entire platoon for entirely too long and makes them extremely sluggish, up to the poijt where a facility some of them may want to help out at could already have fallen.
In short: communciation helps with teamplay, although it is not a requirement to it. The need for a leader depends on the quality and quantity of players in the group observed: a few good players who have played together a long time will get themselves sorted out no problem, a platoon of mostly random people who don't know each other and of wildly different levels of experience in the game need someone to maintain cohesion. And if you don't have that, you may still have teams, but instead of one large one it's many tiny ones. Whether that's a bad thing or not then depends on preferences, but there would then be absolutely no need to classify themselvs as a larger group.

Yep.

A group of friends or outfit mates can also "seed" a good squad. A SL and 2-3 guys actually executing orders, getting spawn logistics etc can drag along another 8 guys. And once the squad gets to 10+ people it tends to constantly top off. So right clicking and kicking your furthest out of place guy gets them replaced quickly. Cohesion can get pretty good. <--This doesn't happen enough.

Once you show as a platoon in the squad browser you'll get headcount fast. This is usually where I see things go downhill. The extra squads should not be formed until they have a good leader and 2-3 competent people to form a new "seed". <--- This doesn't happen enough.

Crappy PLs get tempted at this point to get the easy wins by pop dumping. They should split and recombine the squads as it makes sense and avoid a strategically wasteful zerg. <--- This doesn't happen enough.

It takes a lot for a good public platoon to organically grow. Thus it's rarity.