Implemented that sites are only usable for travel and rescue when they are not vulnerable or attacked.
I understand why this change was made. Attacking sites was already used on live servers as a means of area control - to prevent your enemy from reaching a specific location on the map. But there was always an investment required to do so (Supply Charge). Now when attacking sites is free, players may as well run across the map and attack all sites anyway for area control. But I don't think that this means that we can just automatically lock the maps when the Attack Phase starts.
If the majority of sites belong to the players, players will be forced to spawn in a very limited number of locations. This means that the winning team can easily set up a trap for them, and spawn-kill them repeatedly. A small attacking group cannot do anything in that scenario. Depending on the random layout of sites owned by Dinoville and owned by the players, some sites may become significantly harder to defend and attack - it takes a very long time to walk the linear path wihout good placement locations for jump links. Leaving the proximity of that site as long as there are any dead players in the area would be very risky, as the defending player would need to traverse that long path all over again for one player that used a well timed Recovery Kit.
If the majority of sites belong to Dinoville, then being unable to travel to vulnerable sites isnt as detrimental to the players. Instead it significantly limits the ability for the players to choose their attack strategies (expanded on further down below). Additionally, it is very discouraging when a site you fought over gets randomly selected to be taken over by Dinoville, when other sites remain with their owners and they can upgrade the yield of those sites for the next day.
I believe it is better to keep the site travel and rescue mechanics as they are on the live server. Players should be able to travel and spawn at vulnerable sites, but not at attacked sites.
The buildings are claimed by DV to scale to the population of the server to have comparable scenarios between each server. It should help to make the fights more interessting as the players per building should have a good balance. Nothing is more boring to attack or defend a building when not enough players are avaible vs the building count.
The less sites are available for takeover for the players, the harder it becomes to successfully finish an attack on any of them. It is significantly easier to win some sites as a small attacking group in a map with 13 sites available than as a large group in a map with 4 sites available (against a larger defending force). If everyone is forcefully swept into the same areas, the game becomes a lot less strategic. Players can't try any surprise attacks and take over a gate by remaining unnoticed during the chaos, if the chaos cannot occur due to the lack of available sites. Attackers don't have enough room to try to divert the defender's attention from the sites they want to take over for themselves. Those types of attacks prove very effective on the live servers and they are very far from boring.
What you are proposing instead is an all-out battle. Where both sides gather all their forces in the very limited space they are provided with. There isnt much room for strategy, it is purely a battle of numbers. And while the huge battle may be fun, if your group is smaller and you keep losing it, it becomes very boring in the long run.
Also a small mention - by limiting the number of sites that can be attacked, at the same time the amount of gameplay gets limited. If all sites get taken over before the Attack Phase ends, there will be simply nothing left to do. Players also enjoy big numbers - it purely feels much better to fight over 13 sites than 3.
To scale the amount of buildigns the most fitting metric is the townhall which uses the fame earned from the buildings.
Townhall activity isn't really an ideal metric to estimate player activity on the server. A significant amount of active players do not participate in the majority of elections and there are numerous reasons for this behavior.
Some of them have already won sheriff and t-rex, so they would rather not participate and leave the seats open for other players (instead of directly competing with them). Those players are generally not interested in the Townhall at all, but they will still attack or defend sites for their clan members. It is still important for them to keep sites with their clan (so that their friends and clan members can win) but they stopped taking fame.
Even some players that show interest in interacting with the Townhall do not participate in a majority of elections. Getting fame can be a lengthy process, especially for the higher tier elections. Many players could participate in the low tier elections each week but they choose not to "waste" their fame and instead collect it for later. Gathering fame may take weeks or months for some players, but they are still very interested in the Townhall. On a given week they may be only
e.g. 20 players that joined the Townhall, but at the same time there were another 40 players that were gathering fame for the next weeks. And while this week's winners try to regenerate their fame and stop participating for a while, others come to take their place. This means that the number of players that joined the Townhall on any given week is significantly lower than the total number of players that are collecting fame and will want to join elections eventually when they feel that they have enough of it.
