I know what you're thinking. Real no-no, up there with grace period, but please hear me out.
MCSG has come a long way from beta, for good and for bad, and naturally the climate has changed. The serious players used to go solo, whereas the more inexperienced players would be more likely to team as they got a feel for the survival games. Blamph would always preach that solo was the way to go if y0u wanted to improve. However, nowadays MCSG is home to a host of tryhards with their gaming PCs and mechanical keyboards their complete lack of empathy for other players. The skill level a player needs to win a decent portion of their games solo is unreasonably high- players that used to win 1/2 of their games now typically win 1/4 or less, and this is entirely due to the ubiquity of teams, and to a lesser extent hackers (but that's a separate issue).
If you think about it, teaming is grossly unfair. There used to be frequent threads on how to take out teams- the standard procedure being to use chokepoints, spam fire, split them up etc, but nowadays a team are just as likely to use the more advanced tactics on you, and many teams are frustratingly smart in that they never separate by more than 5 blocks. On the face of it, pitting 1 player against 2 equally skilled players is just nonsensical- I challenge you to think of another game where this is done (turn-based games like chess don't count). Teaming is something that is deeply rooted in MCSG, due it obviously being based on the Hunger Games movies- but in MCSG you can't kill somebody with one arrow to the chest, or blow up the cornucopia and with it your enemies food, can you? The comparison cannot be made- teaming in MCSG is far more overpowered than it is in the movies.
In the last game I played, I was up against a team of 3 in full iron with a seemingly endless supply of arrows and golden apples. We were the last 4 players and there was
nothing I could have done to turn the game my way. I played to the best of abilities (and im no skrub, k?) and managed to take one of them out, but in a cramped deathmatch arena with no more golden apples, 5 hearts remaining and a diminished supply of arrows I stood no chance.
For me, what makes the survival games so intense is that, no matter how bad things are looking for you, there's always a chance you can clutch the win with some deathmatch heroics or tactical nous, but in situations like this you honestly might as well just /kill, and that completely ruins the game- the excitement is gone. And then when sh** like this happens, it makes me want to quit the game completely.
Of course people enjoy playing with friends, and I bet there are already some people getting ready to tell me that I'm just a loner who doesn't appreciate how fun it is, but you can play with friends without ruining everybody else's chances. I play with friends all the time, but whenever I do we always FFA or stay separate out of respect for the other players, which I find a lot more fun than going around gang banging randies. That said, teaming is still fun in itself, and of course clans must be considered. I would advocate dedicated servers for both- clan servers have been on the agenda for a while, so why not teaming servers too?
In my mind, teaming servers would work like this: there would be servers for 2 teams, and servers for 3 teams, and perhaps more. Upon joining the lobby, players would have a compass that when right clicked would bring up GUI with a list items named after all of the other players in the lobby, from which your teammates could be selected. When somebody else selects you, their item would change, and you would have to click it yourself in order to confirm the team (those who have played swish 2v2s and 3v3s will be familiar with this system). Once your team is made, you and your teammate's names shows up as a different colour in tablist, and in-game the players' names have a prefix with the team's colour in parentheses. When the lobby ends, players not in a team are kicked from the server. Deathmatches would be between 2 teams, i.e. at 3 or 4 players for 2 team servers, depending on whether a member had died. Scrim and clan battle servers would work similarly, with the designated leader selecting his teammates and them all having to confirm. Anyone not in a clan at the end of the lobby would spectate, and there would be no sponsoring. I don't know about you, but I would find teaming in a game where everyone else is teamed a lot more intense, and a lot more gratifying than teaming on a bunch of solo players.
Of course there are issues about enforcing the teams, but with coloured names in the tab menu and prefixes to people's displayed names it would be as easy as recording two players not attacking each other at close proximity. I'm anticipating a lot of disagreement, but I genuinely think that in order for MCSG to become as fun as it once was, radical steps need to be taken.
