That would be a better option but almost no one will bother to set up a mic and then it would all end up in global chat.

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- Smaller maps to accomodate a lesser player count.

-Universal Ranking, as in you rank up somewhere... it carries over to a different match. Helps so that your not starting as private over and over. Otherwise we are going to end up with some dull fights as every newcomer will be a private and no squads will be formed!

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Smaller maps are needed, that's true, or at least maps that only have a couple of close-by bases in the center.

The first implementation of the online mode works very much like the single player mode, so it's the familiar sandbox where the players get to decide the initial settings for themselves. The player on the server enables the online mode on the game that's currently active in his/her game session, so the player on the server has previously started a new game (or loaded an old one) with whatever team, rank, soldier/bot count and base division settings. The clients join the game and decide which team and rank they are going to play.

In this mode the universal ranking doesn't mean much, as you get to choose your rank.

If you have player markers enabled, you can spot other human players easily in the field. For players in your own team, there are also these far markers on the side of the screen that help in navigating towards others.

I'm pretty sure more online modes will be implemented in time as we (that's me and all of you) get ideas what might be fun in the game by experimenting with the sandbox online mode. The top-down view, with the system that the player sees everything around him, tends to support more cooperative styled themes, where the AI can pretend he didn't see you yet and allows you to organize surprise attacks. Making the same thing against human players is almost impossible as they see behind their backs, which may ruin the adversary playing completely. It's not known yet though as it hasn't been tested, it might be surprisingly fun even with the all seeing eye.

Just to encourage human players actually making squads, you should add a small point multiplier for the more kills a squad gets in a row, and a squad would be defined as (3 or more players in *certain amount of space*. Of course, if you have a lot of people in a squad, the amount of space that allows new people to be in this area to join a squad, would become bigger, so that you don't have 20 people stuck in a tiny area, since they need to be in the area to be part of the squad.

Then everybody online will automatically pick the top rank... which defeats the point of having ranks in the first place.

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That's one way to play it, for sure. Each player would then just lead plenty of AI soldiers.

Like said, it's not clear whether PvP with AI bots makes much sense anyway, and that's the only adversary mode that could have any real purpose for the ranks as they are now. As the ranks affect only the AI by who they will follow, playing a human-only game the rank doesn't mean anything. It would seem that the ranks are mostly relevant for the cooperative or single player gaming.

On the other hand, if you're referring to the rank as a leaderboard thing, to show others how well you've played online games before, then it's a different story. The rank scale should be very much different to what it is in cooperative / single player, and I suppose it should be active only in human-only games.

Is that really the only point of ranks? I thought things like max grenade count/etc. were determined by rank... oh well

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Currently it is, the rank only affects how much influence you have over AI soldiers, nothing more.

There has been some discussion that it could be extended to unlock certain things, like being able to carry more grenades, drive a jeep, call in mortar fire, stuff like that. I agree that it could change things in adversary too, haven't really thought this unlocking in light of playing PvP.

Sure, we can try it at some point that the game saves your personal progress and you use that when you play PvP. I'd suppose that will be done when there's something that can be unlocked with the rank.