My $0.02...
There doesn't appear to be any short-term plans of making large scale changes such as new FF formulas that would require testing via full battles.
This is a test server. I agree completely with papa's point that if players want better battles, they need to promote battles on an alliance level and start drumming up attendance as is done on every other server and as was done here previously when there were decent battles. At this stage any comments about the need to make admin level changes to have battles here that are balanced and fun are moot because if large scale tests are going to be done, they won't be done on a server that has so few active FFers. I imagine they'll be done on .pl servers again in full larges and mediums. Any tests that may need to be done on the beta servers relating to battles involve things like ranking, functionality of new set bonuses, and set balancing issues. These are things that can be tested with a smaller community and should be the focus of the discussion.
I do agree, there needs to be more people testing these new features as they come out and having more towns that own forts as well as having more battles would help this. Setting a fort limit alone does not solve these issues and will not revitalize FF'ing here since there will still be the same issues as mentioned earlier in this thread about it being an uphill battle for one side as they go against a team that uses what some consider unfair tactics. There were discussions back when we did need more full battles for testing which lead to special rewards for participating which solved the issue of attendance far better than setting a fort limit would. I see no way that limiting the amount of forts a town could have would encourage more participation. There are better solutions to the problem such as providing greater incentives for people to attend battles.
For example, most the testing involves new items. When do new items come out? Tombolas. So why not incentivize with tombola related rewards (these would be beta server only incentives) such as more event currency, and more bonds for tombolas that don't involve event currencies. There may be other solutions that are simple like this and that solve the problem of
creating a better test environment better than a fort limit could.
Now let's say this did pass and the fort limit was set at three forts. The obvious goal here is to make it so that a certain town doesn't own 34 forts. What is stopping that town that is already at their fort limit from asking an alliance mate to dig for them? We could easily be in the same situation after a limit is in place where the majority of forts are instead just spread over 10 towns in one alliance.
One thing mentioned in this thread is that the towns would need to have 15+ members in order to dig battles, that way we could avoid asking a one person town to dig on behalf of your town. Looking at the rankings, there are only 12 towns with more than 15 members on zz1. That means there wouldn't be enough towns in order for all forts on the map to be owned assuming there are no town mergers happening. I do however like the idea mentioned that each town over 15 or another specified number of members gets a large fort. That provides a fort for calling maneuvers for each town that has a sufficient number of
testers to merit transferring the fort to them. How I imagine this would work is initially all large forts would be transferred to each town currently at the specified number of members while the remaining excess large forts would be transferred to a dev town for holding until another town reaches the specified number of players. These forts would be protected and if a town grows to be over the specified number of players and wants one, they can send a ticket to ask support to transfer the ownership of a fort to them. This is a fairly simple solution that solves issues relating to being able to
test new features and items via maneuvers.
Fort points... you mean bonds? Anyways, now we are really getting off topic if we are changing to a whole new system of rewards and shops.
Lastly, sleep is a non-issue... seriously go spend an extra 2 hours in a town hotel if it's required for a quest.
Sorry for the long post, but I think I covered everything I wanted to talk about
TL;DR:
- Solve the issue of there not being enough players testing new features through attendance incentives such as increased event currency and bonds.
- Solve the issue of not being able to call maneuvers for testing through wider distribution of large forts.