On Monday we changed a setting on the servers that will now allow the number of AOs to drop to 2 per-side instead of staying at 3. There have been a lot of erroneous claims as to why this was done, so I'd like to clarify what we changed and why... 

In April of this year, at the start of Campaign #44, we changed the way Attack Objective (AO) numbers are calculated. We pay very close scrutiny to population trends, and what we were seeing was that when too many AOs were placed people became bored and stayed online for much, much shorter periods of time. We kept the previous rule that if the number was less than 3, we would call it 3 anyway.

This has created a low-peak stretching from 1.30am CDT to  4 or even 5am CDT, until a fight of some sort finally broke out and the average player finally had something to keep him online for longer.

6 weeks ago we announced this observation and that and we were planning to lower the minimum AO number from 3 to 2. The aim: providing about an hour where less AOs would encourage a regrouping of players to bring about the "kindling" engagement that would start keeping people online again.

This met with an incredibly heated debate, so we delay the change. To the credit of the HCs, they took it upon themselves to stop doing some of the things that players had been raising as reasons why 3AOs was too many.

Unfortunately the lack of durable action continued to reduce the effective population numbers and it became critical that we take action. In the last few weeks the population during this period was dropping well below what was required even for 2 AOs.

Effective Monday 12th the AO system now allows a miminum of 2 Attack Objectives per side (4 objectives total). We are already seeing some evidence that this is getting the proverbial ball rolling again earlier than in previous weeks.

We appreciate that low-peak has special significance for players on both sides and so we also reduced the requirements for a 3rd AO slightly. We're hoping that when the limit drops to 2 it will encourage an emphasis on getting a sustained action going and that the 2AO phase won't last for more than an hour or so. In the first week or two it may well last longer, for this we can only apologize for having waited to long to introduce the change. 

Notes:

• We did not adjust the requirements for 4 or AOs,
• AO numbers are based on the average population of the two sides at the time,
• Both sides get the same number of AOs,
• Side imbalances are generally much lower than people speculate and rarely go over 9% - giving each side their own AO count would almost never result in different AO numbers for more than a minute or two and, if it did, would counteract the effects of spawn delay