Unfair balancing of teams in MissileWars
HISTORY:
There was a relatively recent change to the team joining mechanics that meant that people can no longer leave and rejoin a game to essentially flip the coin until they got on their desired team. The change was that if a person left and rejoined, they now always rejoin the team that they were on before leaving. This works in that it stops the specific problem it was meant to address. However, it causes a problem which in my opinion is far worse and more game-breaking.
PROBLEM:
The flaw in the new mechanic was obvious to me and probably at least a couple others, but most of us kept quiet and refrained from abusing it. It goes like this:
- Join a team.
- Leave.
- Wait for your team to have a slight natural advantage in numbers, eg. 4 vs 3 and rejoin.
- The team numbers are now 5 vs 3, which is a strong advantage for the larger team. Note that even if their team never gets an advantage in numbers, the exploiter can ensure they have a slight advantage by joining when their team have the same number of people as the other team.
Furthermore, there is a multiperson version of this glitch: all the exploiters join and leave a team one by one when it's down in numbers. For example, when Red has two people to Green's three, Exploiter 1, who we shall call 'Muthafuqua', joins and has a certainty of being placed on Red, then leaves. Exploiter 2, who we shall call 'Eleg', joins and leaves, with the same certainty of being on Red, as Red has fewer people. Exploiter 3, 'The Amazing Ohad', repeats this same process. They then wait for there to be equal or greater numbers on their coloured team and join, causing massive imbalances. When one team has 6 people and the other has maybe 2 or 3, the first team is almost guaranteed to win.
SOLUTIONS:
- Revert the team-joining mechanic to the previous one. It is true that this will allow the previous exploit to be used again, but this new exploit is in my opinion far more disruptive than the previous.
- Change the mechanic such that people who have left and are trying to rejoin simply cannot rejoin if it would cause a significant imbalance in the team numbers. This solves both problems, but has the drawback that it would occasionally stop people who legitimately accidentally left the game from returning to their original team.
- Ban all the exploiters. I include this one solely to say that it will not work. Not only is it hard and time-consuming to identify exploiters, many exploiters and hackers have been known to use many many alt-accounts in their efforts to disrupt play. We could see Cubekrowd being brigaded, staff overworked trying to deal with the exploiters and some still slipping through the cracks.