Idea Revised /team Ideas

Big teams are a huge problem currently in WarZ. /team was implemented to help against that but there's more that can be done to prevent the creation of such teams.

This is definitely sensitive to the community since some players prefer big teams, others don't. Some players also differ in opinion on whether or not a preventative system is even worth it.

Idea 1: Team Cap
Currently, the team cap is 20. While teams of 20 usually don't happen, teams of 8-12 are plausible and frequent. A very simple (but controversial) solution would be to reduce the cap. A popular number for this would be around 5-6.

Pros
- Team sizes are forced to be smaller with no other repercussions to the team as a whole
- Cross-teaming would be easily identifiable and manageable at this capped size
- More fights would occur
- Fight standards would change as it is not just large teams steam-rolling smaller ones
- Higher chance of fights being fairer
- More friendly to new players (although this is a tiny fraction of what would make their lives easier)
- Stupidly easy to implement

Cons
- Those with large friend groups will suffer the consequences of not being able to all be on one team
- Cross-teaming does become more of a possibility - but with staff promotions incoming it's manageable


Idea 2: Further Repercussions
Basically, keep the current system but add more inconveniences for teams of 5+.

5+: Friendly-fire (current)
6+: Compasses only work for friends/towns/airdrops
7+: Status effects.
- If x = # team members and 7+/x of them are on one server and in one radius (say, ~35 blocks), a poison/nausea/wither (or other) status takes effect on all of those 7+.
- If 7+ team members are online on one server, their movement speed in water/lava decreases, and they may randomly get a slowness effect for 10s after every chest refill iteration (1/5 chance?)
8+: Reduced projectile damage. Guns will deal 1/2 - 1 heart of damage less than normal
9+: If 9+ people are on the same server, the critical hit chance for each member becomes 0.
10+: Gapples/Mountain Dew do not work, quenched thirst level goes down significantly faster

Personal/Team elo may also be affected at each level.
Achievement gain may also be hindered. This would be very tedious to code.
If there are currently methods to gain tokens by playing the game, also tweak this.
Server hop delay might also be an option since the current /team system tracks who's on what server.

Pros
- Will discourage the creation of absurdly large teams due to these inconveniences
- Becomes less restrictive than the Team Cap idea since large friend groups may still team if they want
- The inconveniences stack, but players will have know the consequences at each level making it easy to decide a "maximum" that's right for them and their team

Cons
- Might encourage cross-teaming if players want to continue having their large teams without the consequences
- Cross-teaming won't be as obvious to catch as it would with the Team Cap, but still easy enough to /team info two of the cross-teamers.
- Becomes extremely annoying for those hardstuck on having a big team
- Perhaps the most tedious to implement (but not difficult if I'm not mistakenm unless some of these features are globalized)


Idea 3: Elo Repercussions
Much of the time, players are with these big teams to maintain or raise their elo. Adding a solid elo repercussion might deter some of these players from making or joining big teams. This probably won't solve the problem but it might help regardless (and also doubles as a fairness measure for the elo system in general)

Being in a big team will decrease your elo gain but won't affect your elo loss.
Team elo gains are largely decreased depending on the size of your team.
These effects will only take place depending on the amount of players in the team on the same server.

Pros
- Might deter some players from joining big teams
- Makes the elo system way fairer

Cons
- Probably the weakest deterrent
- Might treat the elo system weirdly since elo gained is not necessarily equal to elo lost


Idea 4: Do Nothing
It is totally a valid argument to suggest that doing nothing about the issue is the best option. If you vote for this idea in the poll, I'd really appreciate it if you comment as to why that is.


Idea 5: Elo-Restrictive Team Joining
The main idea is very simple. If Team X has too many players with a mid-high level Elo Y which player A has, then A cannot join X.

I won't bother going into any specifics with this idea since it's too specific and tweakable.

However, if two players A and B are in team X, where B initially didn't fill the implication but now does while in the team. Ignore this edge case.

This idea is mainly to make it more tedious to concentrate the server's skill on one team, but not impossible or punishable. It doubles as a way to deter players from creating large teams and may be tacked on with other ideas.

Pros
- Decreases chance of big teams
- Decreases possibility of elo farming within teams
- Disperses skilled WarZ players across different teams
- Greatly increases fairness within the elo system. Idea 3/5 would couple well together.

Cons
- Encourages alting to bypass this. Two comments that can be made about this is that the player may not have ranked alts, or they may be encouraged to buy a ranked alt because of this which will help the server.
- With a low chance, players may request that elo is scrapped altogether.
- Difficult to determine and agree upon appropriate elo level limits for a team



Complementary Idea: Jail Punishment System for Cross-Teaming
Full credit goes to @tallscot for this idea. I figured I'd formalize it in this thread for organization sake. I've added my own take on what it would look like specifically.

A Jail Punishment would be a rule violation punishment that is of lower tier than a mute/kick/ban. It is designed to handle cross-teaming which is the main issue that might arise from any of the 5 ideas (including Idea 4 due to the current 5+ friendly-fire)

Any cross-teamers (online) will ALL be /kill'd, their loot given to an opposing team if and only if there is a singular, obvious opposing team. Otherwise, loot will disappear to provide a loot sink, which may also indirectly encourage booster purchasing from two sources: smaller teams that would normally be afraid to buy them due to big cross-teams patrolling the Zone 7's, or because there is less loot to gain through means other than looting. It will also encourage players to achieve loot in more difficult ways, which might increase player-longevity on servers -> concurrency -> more total time spent on each server. These two things would be a positive for the server as a whole.

Additionally, cross-teamers will also be "sentenced" to a time-served Jail. All players involved in the cross-teaming will have their inventory loot stripped and be teleported to a non-PvP island normally inaccessible on the map. Their sentences can be discussed, but I would recommend a 10 * O = # of minutes served on the server they cross-teamed on, where O = # players in the teams participating in the cross-teaming. To prevent potential over-punishment and give benefit of the doubt, O is rounded down when it is unclear how many players were participating in the fight.

The Jail System's punishments will not stack, meaning (if this idea is implemented with the sentence calculated as above) 10 * O will always be the punishment given despite past or recent cross-teaming. This is because it would simply be difficult and unorganized to keep track of these punishments. If anyone has a suggestion to work around this, please comment below (my personal suggestion would be to add a permanent counter on each player, and if it exceeds something like 15, they receive a ban or something). Further, the Jail System's punishments will not appear on the player's punishment record, meaning it won't count toward any mutes/kicks/bans etc. This is because it is mainly a gamemode-specific punishment, coupled with the fact that this would alter the way in which the game was always played.

Jail sentences will be served even if the jailed players are offline. If a player is jailed, they are automatically kicked from their team upon entry. However, they still have access to create/join teams immediately after, so they may hop servers and play normally again. An additional feature would be such that if caught cross-teaming on another server while jailed on one already, the sentence on the previous server will either reset, or the sentence on the new server will be multiplied by the amount of servers jailed on. This is in place to prevent immediate re-offenders.

While in Jail, the player will not be able to PvP or use /tpa. There is no loot on the island - basically nothing to do.

Once out of Jail (online or offline), the player will respawn normally at any of the spawn points around the map.

Pros
- Largely mitigates the cross-teaming side effect of above idea(s) if implemented
- Creates a recyclable multipurpose gamemode-specific punishment system
- Avoids having to kick/ban for teaming which was always a WarZ feature
- Heavily encourages players to not cross-team due to loss of loot
- Can be used in conjunction with any of the 5 ideas above
- Indirectly encourages players to have smaller teams to avoid any possibility of cross-teaming which also provides aforementioned benefits
- Has the possibility of being really flexible in implementation
- Formalizes a punishment for cross-teaming where one is currently either disorganized or non-existent

Cons
- Another job for staff to handle (shouldn't really be a complaint)
- Current lack of mods makes this difficult to enforce. Promotions will change that


Supplementary Idea: No Elo Gain from Team Kills
Right now, if team X has 5+ online members, friendly-fire is active for X. That means if player A kills player B (both in team X), A will gain elo from it. This is not entirely related to the above ideas but certainly does not help with the team size department.

The idea: Team kills will still be listed in chat, but elo gain will be 0. However, elo loss for the killed player is subject to change as an additional punishment for the team kill itself.



Please feel free to suggest any tweaks to these ideas, or a whole new idea. Thanks!

 

Interesting idea actually, like a health draining system that gets worse the more people in the team you have. It’s good because you can still play with as many people as you want. I’ll add that in later