5 is the good happy medium for a squad size, the amount of times your the fifth player to join your friends is crazy. They could have just rounded up or down the player count so you don't get odd squads.

Its a more casual oriented shooter that focuses on "team play" but won't let you join your friends or switch teams like previous titles (when teams are unbalanced and not to close to the end of game) because of stacking . It feels like EA is pushing the focus of playing the objective but no you can't do that with all of your friends you only choose 3. Oh and if your friends do happen to get on the same side, we will fully dismantle the server to seperate you, and make you painfully rejoin each other.

Big squads of sweats would be such a low percentage. There could be equally as many good players on the other side. 

BF2 was 6 - it worked much better than four in game.

Yes, this is actually an industry wide problem with no easy solution unless the community itself is honest about who they are actively cooperating with in-game - with Discord and like, it is so easy to pretend everyone is independent, and there is always one bad apple group that will use such things and smash a server for a win, because that is apparently just so much fun.

Agreed, personally I don't think it should be a problem to have up to 16 friends join together and just fill in squads randomly. This is a team based game but I can understand that some players might find it discouraging to face players that actually play as a team instead on just playing on the same team, so my solution would be to split them evenly on opposite teams. This way you stick together and I suppose matches won't feel too skewed to one side.

If there are 2 big groups, then they should put each group on opposite sides and fill in the missing players with random players. They should promote faction wars, i think it would make battles more epic and they should go for server rentals instead Micro transactions (skins, so on...)

Groups under 8 or 2 squads should be kept together and over 2 squads should be split evenly on opposite teams. If they added a COMs system like squad, it would make it even better and easier to communicate between squad mates and leaders. 

Yeah, I could live with team splitting if need be. However, my counter argument would be that if the option is there for people to roll in parties of 16 - more often than not you might encounter larger and organised parties as you matchmake. 

It's a balancing act for sure, that in the long run, private servers might alleviate through player choice (i.e. inspect the server and player list before joining). 

I agree. That said, with the older titles there's "precedent" so to speak for larger and more organised teams. I would argue that the solution is commander mode in these instances. 

Commander mode permits several separate squads to be coordinated towards a common goal. Of course, squads wouldn't always follow the commanders orders - but I can attest to many BF4 matches coordinating efforts and getting results with completely random squads.

I've created a seperate post asking for a "squad leader voip channel" to fill that command and control void that we have now. During the beta, trying to prevent zerging by typing in team chat almost always resulted in people having a sook in what is supposed to be a "team and objective oriented" series.

"Hey lads, we should split up and flank xyz, instead of funneling into xyz?!" would often get responses of "shut up" etc. 

On some occasions, I did manage to drum up some action through team chat - but it's not the same.