Suggestion #2 - Solo queue vs Team queue games:
I'm not going to touch the, "it's part of the game" aspect of it, but I do strongly agree with it. Behavior is entirely player-dependent, and we erase the idea of teaming from players' heads, nor their ability to team by banning chat or third party communication programs. A Dev said recently, "i wish people played differently", but he also stated, "It's part of the game, being able to deal with that makes you a better player than someone who can't. "
Chad and I have been talking about this, and I've been thinking about this for quite a while. People obviously dislike teaming since, in their eyes, it's
a dominant strategy that is disrupting their preferred style of gameplay. We've had suggestions come up time and time again, but we keep hitting the same roadblock again and again:
how would we realistically enforce this?
Rules are nice, but worthless without enforcement. We can put a rule that says, "no teams larger than three", but is a bit of text going to stop people? It doesn't stop it in the other networks with that rule, since their staff are dealing with the same day-to-day issues we do.
Want a server where it's bannable to team? That requires 24-7 enforcement in those servers from a mod staff that people already complain aren't everywhere all the time. And when mods are already focusing on the higher-priority offenders such as hackers, abusers, and other reports, they aren't going to be able to watch games to make sure every player is attacking each other on site in a separate server somewhere. We can handle Report Abuses by banning after the fact, but I don't think players will be content knowing the teaming player got away with that unfair win.
People suggested a team-detecting plug-in before, which I found to be absolutely ridiculous. The ideas they have might be valid (detect if two users share space for a specific amount of time while not attacking each other), but the necessary code to implement such an idea is absolutely nuts to code and resource-intensive to track across all players everywhere. From a Dev perspective, that is just nuts.
There were ideas that passed across Chad's desk about enforcing teaming by scrambling everyone's names and skins in a game. I liked that idea, and it was probably the most viable plan. However, people were quick to point out that it would be easily fooled by teamers chatting through Skype. All they'd need to do is, "Hey buddy. Meet me at ___ so I know who you are," and they've already beat the system.
As you can see, we've run through plenty of possible situations and weighed their demands and outcomes, but nothing is realistic for us to implement. And that says nothing of the number of players who would leave after being temporary banned for simply using a favored strategy.
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2456 words. New Record.
But I hope the length of my post demonstrates how complicated these situations really are. You can't fix everything in 100 words.
