Guild Wars 2

One of the persistent complaints about hot join that I see is about uneven teams.

Similar to the bonus for volunteering for the other team when you’re evening up the teams, how about a small bonus for joining (from spectator) the under-strength team if they are behind by, say, 50 points? And either a small penalty for folks who join a team ahead by more than, say, 150 points, or a bonus to the underdogs for every person who joins while they are behind (for sticking it out)?

If you go the penalty route, it could be a delay on when they start accruing points (maybe their first 50 points don’t count).

If the bonuses were in the 25 point range, it wouldn’t be too drastic but it might nudge the teams to be more even.

Just a thought.

I like this suggestion. It’d also help if you got a bonus for sticking with a single team a whole game, so that people will be less inclined to want to swap or leave just because they are losing. Lets say a 50 point bonus if you stay with the same team the entire game.

A penalty for leaving the losing team for 100 rank points coupled with a reward for joining the losing team for 100 rank points might also help, so that you lose out on rank points if you go to spectator mode and join the winning side, but if you go to spectator mode and come back to the losing team you’d end up with the same points at the end. That way players can use spectator mode and join the losing team without losing reward points.

At the same time if one team is ahead by more than 100 points a 200 reward penalty for joining the winning side (if not randomly assigned to a team) would mean leaving the losing team and joining the winning team would net you -300 reward points at the end of the game, win or lose.

So the end result would be someone joining a game and picking the losing team would get 350 points at the end (If they lose, winning would get 650! Huge potential gain!), but someone joining a game and picking the winning team and sticking with them the entire game would get 350 points at the end (if they win, if the losing team makes a come back it’d be only 50 points, huge risk).

Meanwhile someone who, mid game, leaves the losing side and joins the winning team by exploiting autobalance would be leaving the losing team (-100) and joining the winning side (-200) and lose out on the loyalty bonus (no +50), resulting in getting only 200 points if the winning team still wins, equal to the losing reward, and NOTHING if the losing team makes a come back while you’re on the winning side. Meanwhile the guy who got autobalance is going to get the full 500 points either way, making it a no risk situation.

The main goal is to make taking a risk (joining the losing team) more rewarding than trying to piggy back off the success of others (joining the winning team). I feel this would go a long way to making that a reality.

The game could also do with something that tells you how your reward points are calculated so that players are aware of how their actions effect the reward track. I ran into some people who thought that autobalancing would end in a net loss in reward track points because number of kills were factored into it, and that the autobalance reward was only an extra 15 reward points, equal to a single kill. There needs to be a way for people to learn how it’s calculated so they don’t make decisions based on false information.

if you join a team from the start of the game you shouldnt get auto balanced, the most annoying thing is when you are on a team from the start and as soon as its obvious your teams winning 3ppl leave other team and boom. you get auto balanced, it would be ok if everyone just accepted it and played anyway (with a kinda win some loose some mentality) but its just so easy to go, fk it im leaving, which just leaves you screwed for the rest of the game. Worst there is zero penalty for doing that, dosent count as a loss or anything for people leaving.

NeonSlug.5402:

if you join a team from the start of the game you shouldnt get auto balanced, the most annoying thing is when you are on a team from the start and as soon as its obvious your teams winning 3ppl leave other team and boom. you get auto balanced, it would be ok if everyone just accepted it and played anyway (with a kinda win some loose some mentality) but its just so easy to go, fk it im leaving, which just leaves you screwed for the rest of the game. Worst there is zero penalty for doing that, dosent count as a loss or anything for people leaving.

At present, I always volunteer for auto-balance. Sure, it gets me hammered a lot but it’s fun to turn a losing team into a winning team (admittedly, not so often but it happens) and it means you have a guaranteed win bonus.

So, I don’t mind the current system but I can see the annoyance with it. But that’s why I suggested a few incentives to keep things a little more even so that there is less unbalanced teams and consequently, less auto-balance. If you incentive people to join the underdog and not quit when you are behind, it could help.