This baffles me.
How do you justify playing 7-3, or 9v5, or even 8v6? Having extra players on your team is no different than being able to run faster, shoot more, or have more health. it is a willfully unfair advantage, just like using aiming hacks, or god mode. Being more skilled, however, is a fair advantage. this is a game of skill, after all, and better players are, and should be, rewarded with victory. I like to think of playing on a stacked team is a 'passive cheat', as opposed to an active cheat. You may not CHOOSE to end up on a stacked team, like you would CHOOSE to install hacks, but you certainly DO choose to STAY on an unfairly stacked team. It is incumbent upon the honor of players of the unfair team to fix the situation. Frequently, the disadvantaged team's requests to fix the situation are ignored. It's not in the interest of the winning team to change, so why bother? The people who are being cheated should not have to beg the cheaters for justice.
Here's how I would solve the problem.
First of all, you should retain your score statistics if you change teams. Completely disassociate team score from personal score. That would remove the one big negative of fixing teams: you reset your score and time back to zero. This might solve the problem by itself, but maybe not. In an environment with no accountability, people are, in their heart of hearts, complete assholes. So, I would have a second measure. The server should track team balance. If 'team a' is greater than 'team b+1', then the server should display a message saying something like "Teams are imbalanced! Fix it yourself, or one random player will be moved from the bigger team to the smaller team in 30 seconds." This would give volunteers the opportunity to do the right thing, and in the frequent absence of any decency, would force them to do the right thing. It's responsible governance. The balancing act might require a bit more finesse, maybe a way to factor in team scores. That way you can avoid giving a team with fewer people but higher scores an even greater advantage. Ultimately, I think that by removing the punishment for changing teams (reset score/time), you would stop good players with high scores from refusing to balance games.
What are your thoughts?
my thoughts are to have a pickup channel on irc for team games as those seem to work out for half decent 2v2 4v4 etc. also people often justify playing like 8 v 4 or so forth by accusing a player in the other team of having 'lg hax'... poor excuse lol (hi falkland from me too)
