The last set of Readme notes included a section stating that the Spawn delay cap had been raised. Not surprisingly, this has caused strong reactions from our players, some support it, some don't.  I'd like to go into why we decided to raise that cap for this special mini-campaign.

We are always looking for ways to encourage players to play for the underpopulated side. One of the things that we had done in the past was to begin displaying the population imbalance at persona select and put a delay in for selecting personas with the population advantaged side. We never really put as big an emphasis on this imbalance here with something like a big balance meter across the top.

We also put in a spawn delay timer that would try to act to keep the number of players in the game world more equal. We capped that at one minute as we calculated that the imbalances wouldn't be that great as we encouraged players to play for the underpopulated side.

These measures have worked with some success but they are certainly not the final solution. We plan to introduce several sticks and carrots to improve population balance. These can come in the form of reduce action costs (faster captures?) or more score for ranking up (and any future benefits). A player once told me that we should "make the disadvantaged side so easy to play that there is never a disadvantaged side". I like where his head's at.

We don't have all of those levers in place right now but we will. What we do have in place right now is a spawn delay timer that tries to keep the on field balance but is hindered by an artificial limit. Would this be more effective at promoting people to play the other side or would it serve to just make players mad? Well obviously it is going to make some players mad but at the same time, if more players switch then there won't be a timer and then no one is mad. The game has to have balance to be fair and a fair game is more fun to play. Being unfair as it can be now already makes players mad, just different ones, at different times. There are many avenues to address this problem but for now this is the lever we have to experiment with and with an intermission, especially a long one, planned it's a great time to test it.

I know it has caused a strong reaction from many on both sides of the fence and that's good. This is the kind of feedback we are looking for. What we probably should have made more clear is that it is unlikely this will go live, at least by itself, right now. But who knows where the magic bullet will come from. Less AOs was thought to be a game wrecking terrible idea. Sometimes ideas work and sometimes they don't. That's why we try them.