A lot of people are asking how many people will be able to play together in a Public Event. Bungie has been diplomatic but essentially silent, saying things like[quote]enough to make it fun but not so many that you become irrelevant[/quote]and[quote]we're still playing with the numbers to see what feels right[/quote]Fair, Bungie. But what I really want to know is: [b]why are you trying to come up with one, hard and fast number??[/b] You come up with one number, and you have suddenly restricted yourself way more than you should! You now have to design these events (and I'm assuming that there will be a very large collection of independent events) around, let's say, 8-12 people. You can't really send a 600-strong Hive swarm against 12 people. But you could against 35 people, and with so many enemies, no one would be irrelevant, everyone would feel the intensity of the fight.
What I think makes sense, what should be done, is you (Bungie) should be able to create [i]ANY[/i] Public Event that you want to, and then come up with a maximum number of people for [i]that[/i] Event. Why not have some smaller, maybe close quarters, Public Events for 6 to 9 people, like stealthy Vex splinter cell-type agents infiltrating the sewers below the Wall. Then, simultaneously, you could have a Cabal horde of 70 troops and 5 tanks flanking a human outpost on Mars and allow up to 20 people to join that Event. And anything in between.
I should also mention that I keep saying "people" instead of "fireteams" because I think that four fireteams of two and a lone wolf should be able to join a fight that you might be temped to restrict to three fireteams under the assumption that they would be full (in this example, a fight designed for 9 people may end up only having 5 if the fireteams aren't full).
The end result of all of this is complete flexibility. You (Bungie) would be able to create a much larger variety of Public Events, limited only by your imaginations and what would be fun, rather than having to tailor Events to the same specific number of people every time. Huge Public Events, tiny Public Events, and a whole lot of everything in between. Moreover, you can then fill Public Event with as many people as they were designed for, instead of guessing how many people may or may not be in the average fireteam for this area or Event.
While I don't know how the game is being built, obviously, I believe that this method would work because, as of right now, I'm under the influence that in the Tower at least (maybe the rest of the City or Wall, too?) you'll be able to see and interact with many more people all at once than what you might find at random out in the world or in a Public Event. So, theoretically, the code/technology is already there in some form.
So that is why I implore you to [i]not[/i] decide on a single maximum number of fireteams for every Public Event, but rather to have a maximum number of [i]players[/i] that can vary wildly from Event to Event.
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The reason that they have to put a cap in place is so that they can actually balance the damned thing.