Team Switch Penalty/Reward Idea
THE PROBLEM:
While we're all hoping for Team Swap to be removed, something occurred to me today (as I was trying to balance a server). Most people dislike trying to help a losing team in BfN for more than one reason but the glaring issue is the penalty for changing teams.
THE SOLUTION:
I AGREE that kills/score should be removed from players when they switch teams to a winning team but when they switch to a losing team, they should receive a bonus or (at minimum) not lose their points.
This game was super fun and though we didn't pull the comeback, I think more people would be prone to changing sides and sharing this type of enjoyment, if there was incentive to try to balance lobbies:
Maybe I'm going out on a limb but it would (at minimum) help the current PvP trend of team stacking until a decision is made regarding removing the switch option?
EDIT: For implementation, I would award a larger bonus for the larger deficit and base the bonus from 25% to 100% increase.
I think, rather than trying to penalize or reward Team Swapping players, the entire mechanic should be changed.
What I think is needed is an actual lobby where you can clearly see the players on both sides and which gives you a clear option to change teams while in the lobby between rounds- providing a 30-45 second window to do so should suffice. Players should also be required to signal "Ready" before the end of that waiting time to signify that they are present.
During this intermission lopsided teams can be present if there are not enough players to fill out both sides.
Once the waiting period ends and the next round launches any players who have not signaled "Ready" should be ejected to Giddy Park and the system should then evaluate the remaining players and how they are dispersed between teams. If the teams are lopsided the system should step in and forcibly relocate players- preferably taking into account performance data from the previous round (if any is available) to ensure that both teams overall have similar performance based data associated with them by swapping over key high performance players. Players who are grouped can either be exempted from this process (allowing lopsided team performance) or can be "chosen last" and split up in an effort to get team balance approximately even.
If both teams remain full the overall performance of each team can be compared and if there is a high disparity key players can be forcibly swapped as described above.
"Performance data" could be as simple as the player's overall PvP K/D ratio over time for Team Vanquish or for Turf Takeover their overall Objective score. I suppose you could also substitute a simple Rank comparison for recorded PvP performance data but that doesn't necessarily balance high performing TV players or Objective focused TT players onto both teams evenly since a comparitively poorly performing player could still achieve high ranking just by being tenacious.
Once the round starts everyone should be locked into their team. Players could still quit back to Giddy Park but there's not much to be done there.
Players joining a game in progress would be added to the team with the lowest player count but in cases where both teams have open slots joining players could potentially be evaluated against historical PvP performance data and added to one team or another based on how their PvP history effects the overall performance based team balance. This does allow for teams to still be lopsided in terms of participants but still appear balanced according to performance statistics.
It most certainly wouldn't be perfect but it could be better than the system we have now which simply keeps you on the same side regardless of what happens or how badly one side is being steamrolled game after game.
