Hello,
Firstly, I’ve been playing sPvP for quite some time (I have achieved dragon-rank and have the champion titles on 6/8 classes).
One of the biggest issues currently with sPvP is getting into a match where a team mate disconnects before or during a match creating an imbalance between the two teams. This can often result in immense frustration.
I propose the following system:
When a team loses a member and displays only 4v5 there should be logic similar to the hotjoin’s auto-balance. The team with more players can ‘volunteer’ to take an observer position in the match. They will still be rewarded according to the outcome of their team as if they had played the entire match.
If the other player should manage to reconnect, the person in the observer position can respawn (automatically and/or manually) to their appropriate team.
I believe this would grant much fairer matches. Albeit, there will be unfairness in the 15-20 seconds where the ‘I Volunteer/I’ll Take My Chances’ votes are being cast, but it will be a small window compared to going through the entire game with unfair teams.
One possible way to abuse this system would be to purposefully log off in order to force someone into an observer slot. This could obviously be an issue because say you were downed at home and there was a fair fight somewhere in the map. You decide to log off and within 20 seconds, someone from the other team is yanked from the map. To prevent this, you could place a counter on the number of disconnects during a fight (say limit it to 2, and this counter would only begin counting after the match has started so that pre-game group composition can still be evaluated). Should someone disconnect twice during a match, they will be forced into an observer role upon entering the match. While this could potentially have issues for those seeking to abuse the system, (as it would then trigger the auto-balance and bring the game down from a 5v5 to a 4v4) I believe the benefits would out-weigh the costs.
The only remaining issue would be the (hopefully) rare event where people from both teams attempt to troll one another (i.e., purposefully logging out to decrement the other team until everyone was forced into an observer slot, causing the game to stall until time is called). This could lead to issues where teams with a generous lead (say 100-points) all log out. If the opposing team can’t make up the point difference in the time it takes for everyone to be forced into an observer slot, the other team has effectively stolen a win (even if they could have made a comeback.)
In the above case I would suggest awarding nothing for games with 0 players. There may be better solutions, but I fail to think of any at the time of writing this.
At the very least, I hope this will give some of you a few good ideals to toy with.
Please let me know your thoughts.