Team Stacking

[chuckwagon]

I am suggesting that we should add team stacking to the rules. We should make it against the rules to undo the changes made my scrambles whether they are triggered by a vote or triggered automatically due to win streaks/frag ratio/etc.

In the past, when people team stacked in didn't really matter much because we were getting a pretty constant influx of players from quickplay.

More recently though the servers seem a lot more fragile, and I have seen groups come into servers and constantly stack teams so that their team wins over and over. Even after scrambles they would re-stack leaving players to lose over and over. But now that we aren't getting the quickplay the people that quit aren't getting replaced as quickly and sometimes the server ends up dying because when the numbers drop to low then the players that were stacking leave then the server pretty much dies.

TL;DR: We should make team stacking against the rules now because it is easier to kill servers now with the recent quickplay change.

 

[Roboute Guilliman]

Perhaps Admins should be allowed to scramble the teams if they feel it's too much of a curbstomp?

 

[111111]

Sad fact of it is this if you talk away /swap or make it so people can't go into spectate for a tiny while it will upset a party that uses skial to play with friends and not play against friends. I'm guilty of this because I will not play against friends when I don't have to I'd rather be destroying the other team with my buddys and sometimes we are on servers that aren't skial that already have this system in place (try to join spec after a scramble and it says "you're trying to restack the teams, FOR SHAME!") Those kinda servers see a decease in server population after ever scramble and not just before bed or something. So I'm going to have to give a -1

 

[Deadfront]

I hate getting my teeth kicked in just as much as the next guy. I guess the way I look at it is, in all my years not everything is going to be fair. The odds are going to be stacked against you from time to time. I guess I look at it as Adapt, Overcome and Conquer.

 

[hXcjedders]

The difficulty of this issue, is that we're needing the opinion of people who usually wouldn't frequent the forums. Randoms are always in greater numbers than regs, who would be more inclined to visit here. With that, randoms tend to be more fickle because they hold no anchor to this place, all they care about is having a fun time. So, the question is, do a greater number of them try to stick out a major ass whooping and try to tip the odds in their favor or do they run to another server to escape it?

To find the answer, it would take some difficult data collection and analysis because you won't get a lot of people to fill out a survey to answer your questions for you. However, I do think we should have a forum section for surveys in case anyone does want to fill them out to help better the community.

 

[Gwor]

You've almost convinced me I'm wrong. Not being able to play on a team with your friends for a few minutes might hurt us just as bad as team stacking. I'd like to go play in some of the servers you guys were talking about that have tried this and see how it affects them. Please post examples.

 

[Antamania]

At the end of the day team stacking is always going to be an issue, and it's not something you can ban for.

Taunt gamers tries something where it forces you to join random, this sounds like a good idea but the problem is people just wait the 2 minutes until they can teamswitch, and do it that way. No matter what policies you try to institute, you are either going to have to ban people, or not enforce team stacking. Those are the only two ways to deal with it frankly.

Also, if you start banning people over it, you're going to lose people simply because you banned their friends, going to be more negative posts about Skial everywhere etc.

 

[Someone.]

Why not just have team scramble every round.

 

[Deceptive Walnut]

Sorry for the week old bump but I decided to search team stacking on skial earlier and found this. What I say most likely won't matter but I thought I would anyway.

I used to play a lot on skial servers, mostly the ones running badwater. I check out the player list beforehand and see players with over an hour in there, go in and one team has 4+ people with over 100 points and everyone on the other team has less than 100 with 1 or 2 above that and then I get kritzed or ubered in spawn. I'm terrible at this game, so knowing my team has no chance of capping a single point makes me think "why even come here?".

Team stacking isn't as bad on other servers from my experience. I've played everyday this week and have checked badwater la at least once every time and every time one team was stacked so I didn't bother playing. You can say I'm crying but I genuinely liked skial servers because there is good and entertaining people there, but when all the good people are on one team it gets boring dying over and over. Badwater is my favorite map so I tend to go into populated servers that are running it.

EDIT: Just want to add that I played on the badwater us server last night and the teams seemed well balanced. It's always badwater la that has the stacking problems.