Zloth
I smell a... wumpus!?
I've never been able to get the "dedicated characters" thing to work very well except with just one person at a time. When it involves four or five people, it's never even close. Within a month somebody has to take a vacation, somebody has financial issues and has to drop their subscription, or Zloth… umm, somebody buys ES:Oblivion and vanishes for 10 weeks.
With CoH, somebody could be gone for YEARS and we could still pull them into whatever group had formed inside of ten minutes. Less if we cut out all the "OMG, he's back!!" chatter.
I agree it does make it "gamey". If your team size doubles, having the spawn sizes double very soon after makes it real clear that you're playing a game. I think it's well worth it, though. It might annoy me in a single player game but not in a multi-player where my main goal is having fun with friends.
With CoH, somebody could be gone for YEARS and we could still pull them into whatever group had formed inside of ten minutes. Less if we cut out all the "OMG, he's back!!" chatter.
I agree it does make it "gamey". If your team size doubles, having the spawn sizes double very soon after makes it real clear that you're playing a game. I think it's well worth it, though. It might annoy me in a single player game but not in a multi-player where my main goal is having fun with friends.