Process oriented solution for team compositions

[Sixsixsix]

While the hard coded vs. soft coded debate seems pretty one sided, there appears to be greater diversity in team composition opinions. I think the various opinions are good, and I think there is significant value discussing the pros/cons with each approach.

However, I do worry about us (the community and admins) making a poor decision before the server launches despite our best efforts to think of all possible outcomes. Consequently, I am wondering if our decisions about team composition could be made via a testing process. This might look something like the following:

Continue discussing pros and cons of various team compositions. Distill options to a few number of choices and try to gauge community interest (which might also include some from the blue server) in each via polls. Administration decides based on their best judgement, poll results, tarot cards, or whatever they want which team composition option they think is best. Then, they test this set up for some elongated amount of time. If this set up works, then we advertise the launch of the server, delete all testing characters (or merge them to red99 or blue99), and start enjoying a quality server. If the set up did not work well, we repeat the process with the knowledge we gained from the testing phase.

Pros/Cons of this approach
Clearly, there are some problems with this approach. I believe the two biggest factors limiting this approach is getting people to play during the test phase and remaining patient during the elongated testing phase. It is possible that these cons are too much to overcome, but I believe if we can solve/deal with them, we might be able to reap delicious rewards.

The benefits to this approach, seem to me, related to ensuring we have a quality, classic PVP server forever. Project 1999 has shown its amazing longevity. They even stuck with red99 when it was suffering. I would prefer to make important decisions carefully rather than rush a system out. This is especially true when considering how long the server may exist. If we learn a chosen team system has significant flaws within a few weeks/months, we may forever have crappy classic pvp experiences forever.

Ultimately, I don't care exactly what testing process we use to determine team composition (e.g., maybe 6 months of testing could be cut down significantly), but I think the process for making that decision is probably more important than the specific decision we make. Everyone is going to have an opinion about team composition, and it is possible all of them would need some specific changes or subtle tweaks to make them work in reality. I haven't heard people talking about the process we will use, but I think its an important issue and am wondering others' thoughts.