So last night me and a couple of my friends got banned for teaming in SG. First of all, let me be clear on this, I don't care about the ban and I'm not going to dispute it as the answer is predictable "it's in the rules, you shouldn't have done it". But it did make me reflect on the topic and here are some suggestions:
I'm all in favour of following the rules and I can see why the one about teaming was put in place. However, while it might seem like a good solution on paper, the cons outweigh the pros in practice. First of all, if you want to grow as a network, you need to have a stable flow of incoming players not only to ensure donations but also to have a big enough player base so that it's worth paying for servers every month. If you only had an average of 50 players a day, it wouldn't be worth it and you'd be putting more work and money into something than needed. People enjoy playing games with their friends and they bring more players to your server that way. Especially with MCSG returning, there is a good chunk of that old community that is looking for the old SG experience and by punishing them for reuniting and playing as a group while catching up with each other, it's only going to make your network look worse. Secondly, let's talk about rule enforcement. You can't expect every new player to instantly know all the rules by heart. If you'd only put a link to the rules in chat once in a while, it would already help creating awareness. Or even better, upon joining the lobby in regular SG, have a message pop up that says "teams of 4+ players are not allowed". But since none of those are implemented, players don't know. A good thing would be to WARN players first instead of instantly banning the team and contributing to player loss besides the lag and half of the servers not working most of the time. Once they have been notified, they can easily just ffa the game and go into GodSG or something in the future. But no, you just get banned instantly without a warning. If you narrow it down to the core of the problem, it's that solo players don't have a chance of winning the game if there's a 4+ team, which is understandable. But chances are already very low going against a 4 team and being able to take them down, so at that point it doesn't make a difference anymore whether there are 4 or 10 players teaming up against an individual. Also, by just kicking the team, you get rid of the problem as well without risking to lose more players. Teaming has been a part of sg since forever and there are multiple ways to combat this "problem". It's one of the main reasons why SoloSG was created, so why don't you just play there if you don't want to risk getting teamed upon, whether it's by 3, 4 of 23 players.
I don't want a staff member replying with "well it's in the rules, you should follow them, thread locked" because then you're just being ignorant and if there's one thing that is the downfall of a network, then it's not listening to your community. They form your player base and if you piss them off by making bad decisions, then they'll just find another server to play on. Just take the suggestions above (like warning players, kicking instead of banning or redirecting salty solo players to SoloSG instead) into consideration, please. They are worth discussing.
I'm all in favour of following the rules and I can see why the one about teaming was put in place. However, while it might seem like a good solution on paper, the cons outweigh the pros in practice. First of all, if you want to grow as a network, you need to have a stable flow of incoming players not only to ensure donations but also to have a big enough player base so that it's worth paying for servers every month. If you only had an average of 50 players a day, it wouldn't be worth it and you'd be putting more work and money into something than needed. People enjoy playing games with their friends and they bring more players to your server that way. Especially with MCSG returning, there is a good chunk of that old community that is looking for the old SG experience and by punishing them for reuniting and playing as a group while catching up with each other, it's only going to make your network look worse. Secondly, let's talk about rule enforcement. You can't expect every new player to instantly know all the rules by heart. If you'd only put a link to the rules in chat once in a while, it would already help creating awareness. Or even better, upon joining the lobby in regular SG, have a message pop up that says "teams of 4+ players are not allowed". But since none of those are implemented, players don't know. A good thing would be to WARN players first instead of instantly banning the team and contributing to player loss besides the lag and half of the servers not working most of the time. Once they have been notified, they can easily just ffa the game and go into GodSG or something in the future. But no, you just get banned instantly without a warning. If you narrow it down to the core of the problem, it's that solo players don't have a chance of winning the game if there's a 4+ team, which is understandable. But chances are already very low going against a 4 team and being able to take them down, so at that point it doesn't make a difference anymore whether there are 4 or 10 players teaming up against an individual. Also, by just kicking the team, you get rid of the problem as well without risking to lose more players. Teaming has been a part of sg since forever and there are multiple ways to combat this "problem". It's one of the main reasons why SoloSG was created, so why don't you just play there if you don't want to risk getting teamed upon, whether it's by 3, 4 of 23 players.
I don't want a staff member replying with "well it's in the rules, you should follow them, thread locked" because then you're just being ignorant and if there's one thing that is the downfall of a network, then it's not listening to your community. They form your player base and if you piss them off by making bad decisions, then they'll just find another server to play on. Just take the suggestions above (like warning players, kicking instead of banning or redirecting salty solo players to SoloSG instead) into consideration, please. They are worth discussing.
