Please increase the maximum size of player groups.

Recent hive hunting events have brought to light that the max cap of 8 members is just too low. We have had parties of as many as 15 participating and have had to jump through hoops to manage it.

+1

I've heard that at one point, group sizes had been increased, but that was reverted - did this happen? I'm curious what the technical challenges are to this kind of change.

+1
Probably increase it to 20, not counting capships. Everyone has a capship these days so the group slots tend to get filled up too fast.

I'm not against this, but what exactly are you trying to manage that requires all 15 people be in the same group?
If it's communication, then why not use a numbered chat channel?

How do you propose reconciling the display?
Already it shrinks down substantially if there are too many people in the group, to the point where it's almost unreadable for some.

Previous threads;

Increase group player limit (2011) (2011)
Increase group size limit (2015)
maximum group size (2020)

In 2015 Inc stated :

"Also, you would need to mitigate expectations on how polished the result would be. The UI basically starts to break over 8 people, with lots of overlapping data on some of our supported HUD resolution/font/aspect configurations. We just don't have time to screw around with all of that right now. But, we could just.. let it be ugly and broken."

So keep that in mind, though that was a while ago, and things may have changed.

Regardless: +1

Sid123 stated:
Everyone has a capship these days so the group slots tend to get filled up too fast.

This is incorrect. Capships don't take a group slot.

"If it's communication, then why not use a numbered chat channel?"

being in the same group means that participants get private information about where to meet up.. or in the case of the ITO event, the location is not broadcast on a public channel where nefarious types can disrupt it.

"I'm not against this, but what exactly are you trying to manage that requires all 15 people be in the same group?"

The training mission can be used to add an extra bonus for bot kills, as well as the hive skirmish missions when our group is large enough to hunt the Leviathon.

"How do you propose reconciling the display?"

The display does not need to show all members of the group if it exceeds a given amount of people. This is evident in groups containing lots of NPCs. If it is such a problem for some, a setting could be added to create a "max group display" so that a player can determine how many to display. The full list is still available in the PDA.

Silverace wrote:
If it is such a problem for some, a setting could be added to create a "max group display" so that a player can determine how many to display. The full list is still available in the PDA.[/i[

If this was to happen, then having the ability to pin specified members to the hud group list would be handy.

We All Float

Just reading through those previous suggestions you linked, I see that Incarnate had intended to address this as long ago as 2011. Even with some "squadron" ideas. I think the fact that it's coming up again means it is something we have all always wanted.

+1 It is annoying coordinating multiple groups for the same thing

+1

I support this request with any display workarounds required.

If we can't increase group size. Maybe make another type of group specifically for events that doesn't have all of the ui from the group, but being able to coordinate 15 people can get very hard if useing multiple chats and groups.

The group list currently uses two lines per member. I'd suggest that the health bar go behind the name instead of using a line of it's own. Then in the same vertical space for 8 now we can have 16. Or get rid of the health bar and follow the name with a percentage health color coded, again saving 8 lines keeping the same font size. The location could also be abbreviated after the name.

I'm no designer, I'm sure there will be better suggestions. There could be a design contest :)

Well, the health bar actually shares space with the player location when they aren't in the sector. Frankly, I don't think that information is terribly relevant to have on the HUD. If you really need to know where someone is, then opening the PDA should be sufficient. Though it would be nice if there was a command to open directly to that page (assuming there isn't one already).

I would disagree to a degree, in combat situations it's important to know where your team members are. I think it can be displayed in a more compressed way.

We're going to try for a simplified implementation of an increased Group limit in the next release. We'll see how it goes.

Don't expect immediate HUD changes. There's a lot that goes into tweaking the HUD, it's pretty easy to overwhelm things on mobile and VR and other particular cases.

[EDIT]
VO 1.8.643:
- Increased group size limit to 16. Group mining benefits are still limited to 8 members.
- Group list on the HUD is limited to 8 members, with an option in Interface -> HUD Settings to show all members.
- Sort order of group members has been changed to put all players first, followed by player-owned capships, with NPCs last.

Thank you for the update!

We had our event today and were able to get I think 14 of us in the group at once without any problems at all.

While that may work now, what about next week if you have 17 people?

I still feel that the squadron/super-group approach -- where all attached groups share a common squadron channel -- is the better approach in the grand scheme. It provides scalability without necessarily impacting other aspects of the game.

Each group continues to be treated as an individual group. Each group retains it's individual chat channel.

The only basic addition would be to allow all of these groups to chat among themselves.
This would also allow for groups with specifics tasks to chat without interfering with other groups/tasks, while still remaining apart of the whole.
Of course, there would also be room to expand the feature set.

Seems like it needs a new thread

A linked-group "squadron" type system was always the intention, as some of the earlier linked threads describe. But, it's more development-intensive, so I just tried to help improve something "for now".

Anyway, yeah, let's discuss that in a separate thread.

In the meantime, I actually came on here to check in and see if anyone had given feedback about how the expanded system was working.. and I'm really glad to hear it has improved some cases, at least.