The singular killer app for PS2 is its massive scale combat. It is the feature that SOE correctly promotes as something no other game can do. Massive battles require massive armies. Massive armies produce massive outfits. Nobody should imagine SOE will walk away from their best 'feature' and that means the big outfits are here to stay.
Getting back to the OP's original question, with a twist -- How can a small outfit have fun in a game that is essentially designed for the massive?
Small outfits by nature are more highly coordinated, can be highly specialized, and have the ability to react much more rapidly compared to a large outfit. SOE can tweak game systems that allow small units to leverage these attributes.
- Faster, but lower seat capacity air/land transports.
- Difficult to access small bases and/or undesirable to visit from a large outfit perspective (ie. away from the front lines)
- Sub-meta-game. Give the small units something to fight for (& over).
Here's an off-the-cuff scenario: Remote single hex bases periodically randomly flip control to neutral and spawn a special resource. This resource is granted to only one squad from the faction that wins control based on total squad contribution. Slow control ticks. No spawn rooms. Get in fast, fight like it matters (bring a medic or 2!), dominate other fast small teams, win a resource that lets you do something cool.
That's only one scenario. The key is finding ways to cater to a small team's natural strengths.
A few other unrelated things that SOE could do to help small outfits
- Create an alliance system
- Enable custom voice channels (to support cross-alliance comms)
