You want a f2p option? This is it. Space marine scouts, chaos cultists, eldar guardians, ork yoofs. Give them their boltgun equivalents, mabye an ammo or health pack, a grenade, and call it good. Make them able to capture points, to feel useful and part of the team. But unable to spawn or drive vehicles. Gunning is fine but we have enough wasted vehicles without f2p trolls driving squads into lava cliffs. If you want true f2p access to intice new blood to possibly stick around and maybe buy some customization for there characters/upgrade to the full game, this is what you can do WITHOUT the idiotic idea of absolutely crippling one faction.
So instead we cripple all of them and let luck of the draw decide matches? Your team only has so many player slots in a match. A F2P player that can only play as one class or a downgraded class is a wasted player slot. So long as the game is structured as a lobby shooter with equally sided teams, then any variant of the F2Waaagh idea won't work. Just do free weekends on Steam with no limitations.
Free weekends sound like a plan. Especially cause top concurrent players dropped to under a 1000 now...
How would you even balance that? Chaos cultists are usually even worse fighters than your random Guardsman, while Scouts are almost Space Marines, Yoofs are almost your normal Boyz and Guardians are still Eldar that still use Shuriken Catapults.
I think Guardians and Scouts should be the class you spawn as when you spawn a bike when implemented, like tank spawns in Battlefield 1, this way you would wanna stay on the bike since your way weaker than normal. Cultists I have no idea.
How do you balance it now? Orks shooting straight. Eldar armor being a match for marine armor and BETTER than orks in melee. Trukks as durable as rhinos or wave serpents. We have thrown lore out in order to have a balanced game. Make all the free classes the same stats as the scout. I have yet to see free weekends impact game populations. It's a busy weekend then maybe 3 precent stay. Free weekends are not going to save this. You could set a hard 5 person limit on your team for f2p players. Or have matches where it's just them too. Just remove the fortresses with the walls from f2p rotation. And we can't talk about that crippling a side. Not in a game that lets 30 coordinated guild members walk over pugs like its no problem. Heck that probably cost us 20 precent of our launch players by itself.
Any such ideas could only really work if we have more open maps, at least territory matches with very high pop caps. Having 10 of your 15 guys freebie players vs a full 15 of paid players sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.
Make the Tau, Imperial Guard or even the Orkz a free to play race/faction. And get every faction their equivalent of Scout Marines, Komandoz, eldar ranger and Chaos cultist. And problem solve. pd: NO NOT NECRON OR DARK ELDAR FOR F2P because they are way cooler B)
