Clan stacking and otherwise imbalanced games are a problem
Servers really need to start trying out some kind of balancing mechanics. Even very rudimentary shuffling of teams based on players' win rates would lead to fewer brutally one-sided games.
And servers really need to start banning clan stacking. It's an absolutely terrible thing for this game. No one who cares even slightly about winning enjoys having zero chance to win when a bunch of clans get together to stack one side to roflstomp their opponents in every game.
I lose all motivation to even try to play when half the team dies in the opening minutes, loses their vehicles and when I look at the score screen, a third of the enemy team is made of a few clans playing it together.
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I completely understand this position. It can be frustrating and discouraging.
However, consider it from the perspective of the players that have been playing together for years and just want to play with their friends. Someone is going to come along and tell them they can't play together because they're having too much fun, i.e., really good at the game?
That's a tough sell, too.
Having been on both sides, I don't think it's any more fun to clear a server than it is to be wiped out. I think the problem fixes itself if half the server leaves and the server autobalances the teams. Hopefully, it repopulates.
I don't think anyone needs to be banned for playing with their friends, nor should they be discouraged from doing so.
To be fair, this was written in a lot of frustration. But in that particular instance, it wasn't really a group of friends, it was two different clans with both having around 9 players taking the same side and stomping the other side. For 3 games straight. After the 3rd game I left and unfavorited the server.
It's one thing if you've a small group of friends come together to have a blast commanding a tank or leading a spearhead Squad, and whole another thing when +10 clan guys stack one side and play closely together using multiple squads and vehicles. There's no way to win in that situation. When it happens over several games, I just lose all motivation to even try anymore. Extra frustration is added from how long it takes to get a full game in Squad. Okay, yes I can leave the server, but then I might be queueing 10 minutes to get to another server, and that server might be 30 minutes into a 60 minute game, so it might be 40 minutes until I get to have a complete game.
The behavior of experienced players stacking one side really needs to be heavily discouraged. If you wanna play with friends, and your friend group is more than 4-5 players, at least consider splitting your group into two and going to both sides, or somehow limit your impact on the game by choosing tactics, vehicles or squads where your impact isn't maximized.
The best idea I've heard is for an admin tool to scramble the teams, but instead of randomly assigning all players to different teams, it only swaps the squads around for the next round. That way, most buddies are kept together on the same team next round.
Again, I totally get where you're coming from. Been there a hundred times. But...
Those guys probably did not set out that night to go roll a server and coordinate on different Discord servers and make an event out of it. People go to where their friends are playing and sometimes these things happen. Sometimes they happen quite often because these same people play quite often.
I always take it as a challenge. Sure, the odds may be stacked against me, but I can pick up an SL kit, try and communicate with the other SLs and try to put a plan in place. As long as my squad is having fun and working together, we have a fighter's chance of having an impact and at least closing the gap on the loss. These games are more rewarding in some cases than simply winning.
I guess it's a matter of perspective.
So like some Battlefield 4 servers have right now. Also Geebus you contradictes yourself about scrambling bc you said it doesn't work(look at second to last paragraph)
This is what you said taken from
steamcommunity (Dot) com/app/393380/discussions/6/3108018050531920824/#c3108018050532731734
"I think a lot of people seem to miss that this kind of thing is usually natural, rather than coordinated in nature. Clans usually don't go out of their way to stack the teams. Rather, it just kinda happens that way. At the root of it is just folks who want to play with people that they know.
When folks say that clans don't care about their effect on the balance of the game, I have always taken this with a grain of salt. To put it into perspective, would you not play with your friend for the sake of balance? I'd question somebody that says yes. Just scale this up a bit and you can kinda get what I mean. Clan stacking is a really hard issue. Of course these folks should do their best to not just pub stomp. But at a certain point, actions against it really start to be more like restrictions against the freedom to play with whoever they want. Nobody can deny how much they can ruin a server if they win game after game with no attempts to try to balance out the teams a bit, but there really isn't that good of a solution against it.
Team scrambling is something that always seems to come up in these discussions but they don't really work for clan stacking. By getting rid of the ability to clan stack you would also have to ruin playing with friends. Even at best, it would be just frustrating for the clans and friends alike, leading to them disabling it on the servers. We can't expect clans to not play with each other now can we?
Really the only solution is for people to encourage clans to be mindful of their effect on the game. It isn't really that much of a solution but it is a generally pain free one."
I don't mean to double post but my other post was too long since I can't post links. I wanted to say that I disagree with OP.
I myself am in a clan and have to say
Why should we have to be forced to split our side when people just need to learn to work together. It's like we are punished for being good. Other people need to learn to play better. We have two servers. Noob friendly and our other server that is for more for better players. We don't always win the matches when we have our guys. people think we clan stack when we have one full squad and the rest randoms, but that is not the case. We just want to play with our friends.
Some of our guys go on the opposite team too but that is usually at night.
You've gotta take into account that I'm talking about two different methods of team scrambling in these two instances. One where the server will randomly scramble all players and the other where the server will randomly scramble the squads. The first is frustrating and annoying for anyone who is playing with friends, the second only really becomes annoying when you are trying to play with friends that are spread among more than a single squad.
At the time of that Steam discussion, I don't believe that I had ever thought of a scramble that wasn't just a general randomizing of the teams. I believe that somebody brought up the idea of squad swapping in a later discussion but I don't believe that I ever found any glaring issues with the idea.
This is usually a non issue as the population will vanish and kill the server after the round 90% of the case, Usually the admin of the server will come out and reshuffle the server. As a player, I would highly recommend you to to leave those stacked server and go find another. There are plenty of servers for you to join in the game.
Or join a clan and get in on some really good organized Squad so you can see what it's all about!
That would solve your problem.Becouse many of the players in a squad if not in a clan do God knows what even whole squads doing God knows what in the middle of the map or at the point where they are not needed.Thats why we have clans in squad.
And also do not forget about team switching where people are switching to the winning side after they see whats going on.
It doesn't solve the problem of imbalanced games.
Not every game is going to be balanced. I play in as many balanced games as not. I just try to focus on having fun and working with the squad. I've played many many games that come down to 01 tickets. I think that's pretty balanced.
Not every game can be balanced, that's true enough.
But atm the significant majority of games are one side pretty easily securing the victory.
Squad on public servers is really a game of around 5 versus 5 players, with the other 90 players being there just for a show. By that, what I'm saying is that on the *average*, out of the 100 players in the game, 10 or so are actually pretty good and are capable of deciding the game through their own gameplay. Now the problem is that sometimes one side has 8 such good players, the other side just 2.
When clans stack, if it's a good clan, it pretty much removes any chances from the other team to win, since there just aren't that many good players in the game to counteract a good clan stacking one side.
I'm not sure that's fair to say that any given game is really only a 5v5 match with everyone else playing in the dirt or whatever. What are these other 90 players supposed to be doing?
Now I don't know if I'm one of the elite 5 on one side or one of the 45 playing ticklebutt. But I tend to have fun when I play.
Interestingly there is something called the Pareto principle. I cannot remember the exact ratios but the basic rule follows that in almost everything a very few will always do the vast majority of the work. It seems that this idea could also be applied to Squad.
Yeah!
Monologue warning:
Also somewhat related is that the Pareto principle can be applied to considering human skill curve in various tasks. In gaming, skill ranking systems usually follow a normal distribution/Bell curve. An example of which I would link but the forum doesn't let me.
But anyway - human skill does not really follow such a curve. It's really more of a long tail distribution, where most players are on the left side and the right side is elongated.
The Bell curve only forms because players are pushed towards the middle by compensating with additional skill gain/loss depending on how far the player's skill rating was from their opponent's.
That is to say, the differences between an average player and a below-average player are generally smaller than the differences between average players and above-average players. If you have a team of 10 good players and 40 below-average players, they are still going to win if they go against 50 average players.
This is why it doesn't really matter what side the average and below-average players are. There's a nice summary of his phenomena on Reddit with the title "The Bell Curve Distribution Makes Competitive Play Meaningless "
Okay this got a bit off-topic and not so directly related to Squad, except for that it's some additional musing on why the games are so lopsided. The simple fact of the matter is that a few good players can decide a whole game's outcome. Right now which side those good players are is completely random. The end result being that most games are very one-sided. I would claim that probably 4/5 of games I play start with one team gaining the middle point, never coming even close to losing it, and keeping the initiative and pressure up on the opponent team with no point where it was unclear that they were winning.
Then there's that one-in-five game where the action is actually a bit more back-and-forth, with there being moments in the game when it's not fully clear which side has the upper hand. These games are way too few.
git gud lol
Weaken the medic's ability, making it impossible to fill up the health of teammates. The use of real death mode makes it impossible to quickly replenish soldiers.
It is equivalent to weakening the upper limit of individual soldier's ability, thus narrowing the strength of two teams of different levels.
I see this alot. I leave and find another server but it's getting hard to find a community server without clans on one side. Sometimes multiple clans on one side. Its also no fun steam rolling imho
People kept forgetting that clan tags can be used by anyone, it doesn't mean anything.