PS2 PMC

[mockingjay]

i dont know if this has been tried before or even why it should be but has anyone tried making a PMC (eg mercenaries) in PS2? i dont know if it would work but it would be kinda cool if there was someone you could ask and suddenly there are loads of extra soldiers fighting with you. obviously it would be free though because trying to charge people would never work. what do you guys think?

[BlaxicanX]

It's a cool proposition, but that's basically what an outfit or organized platoon is already supposed to be doing/already does.

The lead in most organized platoons will spend a lot of time listening on Command chat and coordinating with other platoon leads on where they should best allocate their forces. So, functionally a good platoon/outfit isn't much different from a mercenary group.

To take that a step further, I suppose a mercenary+1 would be an outfit that exists across all three factions on the same server, and they'll play on whichever faction has the lowest pop. But that would require an extraordinary amount of cooperation and organization.

[Baneblade]

So you would basically have other people telling you where to go and what to do, yet you won't get anything for it? You might as well just join an outfit.

[Gatekeeper]

This could work if the PMC functioned as a fourth faction, members of which would be assigned to to the faction that currently most needed support on a given continent. If population later changed, the PMC members would be reassigned on their next respawn (with a message explaining they'd been hired by the new faction). You'd need to make sure the squad/platoon persisted through the change though, which would probably require that PMC squads are not allowed to have non-PMC members, and vice versa.

Getting this to work right without constantly flipping the PMC members between factions might be a little tricky, but ought to be doable and would just take some fine-tuning. In theory, this could really help to balance out populations and make fights more fun.

The real difficulty is working out what equipment the PMC should have access to. Should they be limited to NS gear? If so they'd need some kind of buff to compensate them, or need to have some unique gear of their own to fill the gaps. The alternative, giving them the gear of the faction they're currently assigned to, would be problematic - since anything they bought or certed into would be unavailable two thirds of the time.

One possibility is that you could give them access to everything from all factions (which would then encourage people to play as PMC), or to some things from one faction and others from the other two. Might be fun to be playing VS alongside PMC guys driving purple Vanguards, for example

Unfortunately this will never happen, because the work involved in developing armour art-assets for a whole new faction is simply too much work. Still, it's a fun idea.