If one thing makes me rage it's players joining a server, and waiting for the usual suspects to autopopulate before deciding which is the strongest looking team.

I may have been unlucky here, but this seems to have been happening a lot recently, and it breaks the game for myself and others. I've played a few maps over the last day or so where the teams were tragically unbalanced, scramble didn't kick in (maybe because myself and another brave sole were scoring as best we could and keeping the rest afloat), and the games were aweful.

So, radical suggestion here:

Remove the ability to join a specific team when joining a server, and let auto-allocate do it's job. Perhaps allow people to switch teams after they have been in game for five minutes or so just in case they want to team up with a friend.

I know choosing your team is an age old feature on pretty much every FPS game ever, but none the less I am not sure what purpose it serves on a public server other than allow the stack.

Discuss.

I'm someone who always, always does autojoin. But yeah, there are people like Dazed who think they are any good and complain about things all the time, but always join the winning team.

But removing the option to be able to join a specific team is stupid. If 2 people join the HH server, they might wanna play together. So taking them this option might be a bit too much.

We just have to try to reach these peoples mind. They actually should realize it that what they are doing is just stupid.

I also wanna point out that the Hampshire Heavies #1 has a very very high skill level for a pub. We have people like Heisenberg who are insanely good and play like a working membrane of a team. Of course there are more, like Tigerteeth, Jolly, Dis86, FUCKEN OCTOPUS and muuuch more who are doing such an amazing job of playing. But sometimes one team gets 2 - 3 people who arent that good and then you realize it very fast that you are loosing, just because you dont have the amount of good players.
After all, its working pretty well, and those people like dazed should just be so nice and stop joining the winnig team.

I understand that people want to play on the same team, hence my suggestion to allow them to switch teams after a few minutes, so perhaps I'm not being as stupid as you state.

Actually if you look at the BF and COD games you don't get a choice of team by default and need to use the switch team option and suicide to change.

But oddly enough I agree with Tox (there's a first ) on this, yes there is some team stacking (I'll admit I have been guilty of it at times) but why shouldn't people play with their mates?

Changing this option isn't going to help the servers in anyway but will just alienate those that are with people who are about.

Most steamrolls, especially on 5cp maps, come from bad or even terrible class choices for the first round which usually gets fixed after some whining from the losing team or an autobalance.

...

I ALWAYS try to deliberately join the team that I think is the weaker one, hence why you rarely see me in the same team as Fluff and some of you others that have some skills.

I haven't seen a stack on HH#1 for a long time.

Well it does happen from time to time, and it certainly happens on HH2. I also don't doubt that poor class selection is a bigger deal.

None the less, I thought the idea might have been worthy of discussion.

Stacking never struck me as a widespread practice on HH1. Granted I don't play as much as some of you guys but I usually pay attention to how and when people assign to teams. The people which can truly influence the outcome of a game and do not auto-assign are very few and far between in my experience.

I agree that the team's choice of classes (which is downright stupid and/or selfish sometimes) matters more. Sadly I can think of no way to prevent this ... apart from binding "IF YOU GO 3rd ENGY/SNIPER/SPY I'LL PUT AN ANGRY BADGER IN YOUR MAILBOX" to M1

Edit
On second thought, in case this is a problem that mostly concerns HH2: I guess that making this change would disqualify the server for that new quick-join system (whatever it's called) which accounts for a big influx of players. Or is that unrelated?

Sorry chaps, but I always Auto-Assign (with very few exceptions) and usually go medic and more often than not on HH2 the teams are horrendously stacked.

It's actually one of the things that caused my four month absense from the HH servers, which is a shame as it's where I usually had the most fun.