Terminology #2

Rather than just make this a comment on the previous post, here’s what I put in my official proposal for the squad/companies idea:

“Off-side Action”

A formalized action away from Attack Objectives.

“Company”

A player grouping below brigades, with stylized names: Alpha Company, Bravo Company etc;

“Open”

To register a company so that it is visible to players to join

“Activate”

“Active”

To achieve pre-requisites that enable spawning and application of the Company.

“Neutralize”

Non-capture goal of an Off-side Action which causes an effect such as displacement of brigades.

“Engage”

“Engaged”

One or more players of an Active company has reached the objective and begun the “Neutralization” counter.

“Fully Engaged”

A town with one or more Company from each side Engaged.

“Token”

A virtual unit of currency with finite availability.

I note that Easting has already suggested “Mobilize” instead of “Open” and “Deploy” instead of “Activate”, which I like but Deploy … could conflict with other uses of the same term. You aren’t going to position the unit…

Terminology?

Question: terminology for the actions on a company in the “Squad Actions” concept…

Open = make it so people can join?
Activate  = make it so that people can spawn and so that it can impart the “neutralizing” effect on the target city?

Better terms anyone?

Nice clean terms that don’t require you to ask “wait, which is it?” would help a lot, I think.

One AO to pwn them all…

That’s right, we toned down the number of AOs going on. Why did we increase them in the first place? Because people wanted to do their own thing. They did it, they got bored, and they slowly drifted away anyway.

The rest of us were left asking “Hey, where’s the fight?”.

But one of the game’s selling points for many people has always been the sandbox element. With small numbers of AOs, we are catering to the broader audience of people who actually want to spend their time in combat with the enemy over the people who want to win through bigger-picture machinations. At least those who want to do it on a short term scale, which covers things like “soft caps” and “sneak attacks”.

I’ve been having a lot more fun playing (on my seekrit toon) during the concentrated AO times – the people playing are largely people who want to see action, and aren’t afraid to stick it out, so the less aggressive doling out of AOs is a real boon.

That leaves a group of people who are instead saying “but I don’t want to go there”.