Reasoning
There have been countless posts complaining about unfair games. Stacks is just one of the reasons, with the others being poor faction balance, player skill, and map design. Map design is currently being handled by the devs, which is a step in the right direction. Faction balance will always be a contentious thing, as no weapon lines up equally with the other.
Player skill is an odd one. While nothing really can be done to help it, other than practise and perserverance, it can be indirectly helped through the form of better tutorials. I will make a suggestion later detailing a better tutorial that would help players more. For now, let’s just focus on getting stacks and clan players out of single queues.
Implementation
Stacks would work much like how custom matches or events work today. They would have their own queue where only stacks can join, and it would function much like the standard Squads mode, complete with rewards. This would help separate coordinated parties from single queues, and hopefully prevent stomps to those who can’t help it.
I’m still deciding whether to add a 20% bonus for playing as a stack against other stacks in the specific queue, or whether the 20% bonus is only added to those who decide to enter understaffed (2 or 3 players). I don’t know whether the unfilled spots just get filled up with bots, or if other players can join an empty stack just for the match. It’s still something to be figured out.
Conclusion
Separate clans and stacks from the normal game mode. It’s unfair, especially since many players don’t know what teamwork means or even what to do in certain game modes. This would help retain player retention, especially in the lower BRs, and would improve match experiences.
7 Likes
How much longer are you prepared to queue for?
I don’t queue as a stack, so it doesn’t affect me. The other possible solution is that they make it visible to both sides which players are a stack and just give games with stacks a 20% bonus.
2 Likes
Yes it does affect you - because you will no longer have squads (“stacks”) in your queues.
Yes and no. I doubt stacks make up a very high proportion of the game, and if they do, then the game is basically cooked. I would much rather wait 1.5 minutes and have a 20-minute game with high score than 30 seconds to have a game finish in less than 10 and no score.
2 Likes
High enough so you want to do something about them but low enough so they don’t affect many games at all??
Point I’m getting at is they’re enough to be annoying, but they are still far outweighed by single players. I don’t know the exact numbers, so I can’t really speculate on wait time increases.
That’s why I suggested instead giving solo players a 20% boost for playing a match with a stack in it, that way we are at least rewarded for our struggle. That’s if you don’t think the Enlisted player base is large enough to support 2 separate queues.
2 Likes
agree its almost like youre playing death math and there playing team death match
im a solo player and if you’re facing another team with 4 dudes all in a discord voice call sweating then its game over unless your team also happens to have 3 or 4 dudes in a discord voice call sweating
players in a party of 1-2 should be discouraged from matchmaking with players in groups of 3-4
6 Likes
In reality, groups should only play other groups, and solo players should only play solo players. I doubt DF will say there are enough players for that. However, I think there should be an option for solo players to choose to play ONLY solo players, and those solo players who don’t mind playing against groups or just don’t want to wait for a longer queue can skip the option box and just click start. For me, It wouldn’t kill me to have to wait for a solo player queue, so I would choose to play solo.
3 Likes
Console players as far as I’m aware have an option to disable crossplay, aka PC players. They should be able to implement the same thing, but for solo queues instead.
2 Likes
Yeah, and it would not affect any player other then those who take the second to choose the box that says solo play only. Those who don’t care will just bypass it and click start, so, it shouldn’t be a big deal to implement.
1 Like
I mean, if you get queued against a giga sweat stack you are not playing anyway so still it does not affect solo players.
I don’t think a full segregation of stack and solo would necessarily be the best implementation. I think it should try to pair stacks against each other as a soft rule like so
- Stack - Stack of same size
- Stack - Stack of +- 1 size after 30s wait
- Stack - Stack of +- 2 size after 1 minute wait
- After 60s, free form
The remaining team slots would follow the same. Solos would fill any slots not occupied by stacks, but would still have a stack of near-equal size on their team as compared to the enemy so each team should theoretically have a balance without having a heavy impact on queue times.
1 Like