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Thanks for that nice post, it's motivating to see people around who are well capable of discussing a matter properly.
Allowing people to switch between alts would accomplish the same thing, but in a different way. It would put the burden of proper team composition on the players and add another level of planning and strategy to the game. I for one would prefer choosing how I can best help my team, to having an algorithm take the best shot it can and sticking me with the result for four to seven rounds.
Teams don't need to be symmetrical to be fair. Does each team having exactly X infantry, Y cavalry, Z archers (and of course equal numbers of all the sub-classes you defined within) have a pleasing symmetry to it? I can see the appeal, but it seems boringly predictable.
Let people figure it out for themselves and you can have tactics that are always different, and teams that adapt to interesting maps which are fair without being depressingly symmetrical.
I see where your idea is coming from, but there is
one factor which will prevent your idea of working like intended: the average cRPG-player.
There is little good to say about him. He is egocentric, narcissistic, careless, mentally lazy, arrogant, stubborn, and, most of all, kill hungry and has always complexes about the size of his e-peen.
That's why he will not, like you, choose the class which will help his team a lot, he will choose the class which is the most effective on a certain map.
Let's assume for example, that the map changes from Swadian Riot (it's that city streets map with the gallows at the market place, I think
: ) to some random plains map. On those narrow and short streets archers and especially cavalry couldn't develop their their full potential. But now the map changes to the open random plains, and things change. A caring player could think "Ouch, open plains, I guess the enemy will bring a lot of horses, so I will go pikeman to protect my team" or "I could use my thrower build and bring an extra siege shield to protect our archers.", but the average cRPG player will think "Oh! Open plains! I will go horseman and rack up a lot of easy kills!". And suddenly half of the server will be cavalry, if not, more. We already have this behaviour with cavalry hybrids, but if you don't even need to hybridize any more with the character-switching-feature, this phenomenon will even increase.
On a hilly map with many ruins or a well defendable village for example you will have half or more of the server switching to archers.
And with the fast switch feature most battles would become incredibly symmetric by default. Because if on a good, but not perfect (still has hills and obstacles and more) cavalry map one team decides for some reason to rather go the archer way (I want to say that many players incidentally make the same decision - not like cRPG players would arrange with each other
), they will shoot the enemy, cav-heavy team to bits. You can be sure as hell next round the cav team will be an archer team as well. Not because they planned on countering them or the like, no, just because of the fact that they saw the archers doing well last round, and that's what they want, too, to rack up more kills.
cRPG players don't think within the boundaries of their team, they only think about themselves. In some way you always need to design the game like you would be designing it for a bunch of players who are playing multiplayer, but think they are in single player. Because you are.
Edit: sorry Thomek for that long post again, but I am confident PhigNewtenz will read it, and it's mostly directed to him.
