Team Stacking - Match Balance

[Thomas]

Problem:

An issue that's been around a long time, and one I'm not particularly fond of. Essentially what happens is that groups of players 'stack' one team and devour the other team. It might be a clan or group of friends that communicate well, or just players with more experience. The problem is that the opposing team is generally less experienced players, and the absolute curb stomping they receive cause them to have a poor experience with the game. This can lead to raging, complaining, calling hacks, or simply quitting.

And while I dislike how often it happens, I dislike even more how often it happens at the same time. I can hop from game lobby to game lobby, and run into three or four different clans all stacked on the same team facing off against random groups of players significantly less experienced (and leveled) than they are. They might be practicing for upcoming tournaments, trying to rapidly increase their bounty/hunter points, or just hanging out; but I feel that they would have a more interesting time having a match against one of the other clans/groups that are more around their skill level and experience, and let the random players get some confidence and practice by playing against each other.

In an effort to remedy this, I'd suggest (like others before me) a system to more 'fair' matches and lobbies.

Considerations:
There are a few things to keep in mind when trying to solve the problem:

• Guns of Icarus Online does not currently have a system to 'rank' players by skill. (The current level system is not skill based)
• You still want friends and clans to be able to play together.
• Should it be optional or mandatory?
• If optional, how do you encourage players to play fair matches/discourage them from playing unfair matches?
• Do rank players by their Role performance, or overall performance?
• Take into account that this is a highly complex team oriented game. Player performance is directly related to their teammates performance.

Possible Solutions

The first steps to make even teams is to develop a system for ranking players based on skill. The current level system gives a general indication for experience, but it can easily be ignored or avoided to give a false impression of low experience/skill.

GoIO already keeps lots of player data and statistics, which is a great place to begin. As per the considerations, you first have to choose whether to do an overall skill rating, or one based purely on the chosen role. You might be a great pilot, but a terrible gunner for instance. Although if you tend to engineer a lot, you might have a very high engineer rank, but a very low gunner rank, while your skill at gunning might still be very high.

I would suggest using weighted statistics to give a ranking for each role. So your overall accuracy will affect both your engineer and gunner ranking, but has a much greater affect on your gunner rank. Where your ability to repair affects all your roles, but engineering the most, and piloting the least.


Then you have to take into account the team. A bad pilot can really reduce a gunner's accuracy by swinging the ship about randomly, where a bad engineer can keep your ship from staying alive, despite your great piloting skills. And a really good pilot and gunner can prevent the enemy from doing significant damage to your ship, giving you a lower rebuild/repair score.

This part is the hardest to consider, and my best suggestion would be to just use the win/loss ratio as you playing that role as a large part of your rank overall. So even if you get a low score from someone else's performance (good or bad), in the long run, your performance should level out to where it belongs. Which also brings up the point that your rank shouldn't be from the beginning of your GoIO career to the end of it, but perhaps just an average of the previous 50 matches or so for each role. Even if you do awful in the beginning, you'd still be able to get near the highest ranks by improving. (Or you can just use a +/- system to increase or decrease their score based on win/loss/performance).




Once you've hammered out a way to rank players, you need to start tossing individual players together to form teams. At this point you have to consider the desire of players to play with their friends. For this, it's pretty easy to use the 'Form Crew' and let them get into a ship (or possibly 2 ships). I wouldn't recommend letting them fill three ships, as that would make it much harder to find a match against equally skilled players.

For random players, you can have them pick their first and second role choices and then be put into a queue. Once enough players are found (8-12) they can be tossed into the 'Form Crew' lobby in their respective roles on the ships. At which point they can discuss the ships they're going to use, and the loadouts they're going to bring. I would recommend to not let them swap roles or ships, as that might change their rank/scores; and more importantly invites people to be stubborn about their role (ie: People saying they won't fix the ship as the engineer unless someone lets them be captain). At this point, they should also be allowed to vote for a map. Once they hit ready, they'll be tossed into a final queue that will pair them with an opponent, and whichever map has the most votes (total the votes from both sides) will be the one that's played. Or just do a random map.

Now that each player has a rank, and they can play with their friends, and are put into ships/teams, you have to look into how to compare ranks. Do you do it player to player? As in if you have someone with a score of 200, do you find another player with a score around 200 and put them on opposite teams? Or do you take an average or weighted average of the players on the ship, then match it by a ship to ship basis? How would you go about weighting the scores? For instance, I find that pilots have possibly the largest impact on a ship's performance. So you might give their score a higher weight than the gunners or engineers.


I'd recommend doing it on a ship average, as finding a compatible player for every player might be difficult.




Then it's a matter of playing the match, recording the stats afterwards, recalculating the ranks. Then you have to consider what to do with the players after. The people who entered as a team might want to remain a team, so they should likely be tossed back to the 'Form Crew', where the random players who were put together may or may not want to be on the same team again. I'd recommend tossing them back to the main lobby or right back into the queue if they so choose. They can always friend their previous team mates and try to form a crew after. And this helps keep the teams balanced and fresh.



Other Thoughts:

Ultimately this should be optional, allowing players to still form their own matches and go wherever they please. But to encourage for more fair teams more often, I'd recommend that the Bounty system and achievements only work in the Ranked play. This allows players to still group up for practicing, but discourages them from stacking unfair teams for 'farming' points and achievements.


Finally, the whole idea of Ranked/Fair Matches may be beyond the scope of GoIO (skirmish). These types of ranking/scores are often used in other types of games that have a much larger player base, and aren't as heavily team oriented. I am uncertain whether Muse has the resources to attempt this, or if the game is capable of using it successfully. During a sale period or event, the number of players increases to the point where it could be used, but during the lower population times, it might take far too long to get even matches. And players may end up facing the same people over and over again due to the match length and them leaving and entering the queue around the same time repeatedly.

If it were to be put into place, there may have to be other considerations, such as allowing for unfair teams during a low period. One such system might be to spend a minute looking for teams with a score within a certain range of each other, then after that minute the range increases. Thirty seconds later it increases again, after two minutes it might take anyone. At which point, the aftermatch calculations would have to be weighted. The difference between the loss and addition of points would be affected by the difference in rank. A team with a score of 1500 might not see an increase in points at all if they beat a team with a score of 300, and the team of 300 might not see a reduction. While if the team with the score of 300 won, they might have a huge increase in rank/points, where the 1500 would suffer a huge loss.

Then you might have to also have the queue system weighted to discourage setting the same teams against each other repeatedly, and even so that one person doesn't get to be the captain/pilot over and over and over again.



TLDR:
A not entirely friendly issue that is quite complicated to solve, and may never see an acceptable resolution.


Thoughts?

[Cl ick to Ca p t ain]

Intermediate and Expert lobby options in the same way there are novice lobbies I think would help this greatly, in example say intermediate lobbies can only be joined after having a class reach level 5, and expert would only be accessible after level 10.

Beyond that I don't know, since people obviously rather play on teams that contain their friends and clan members I think this will always be a problem.

Maybe once the new scrimmage season starts with all of it's changes and additions more clans will put emphasis on arranging more frequent scrimmages.

[Thomas]

The only issue with that is that player rank =/= player skill. It's just based on achievements. The novice system was put in after many of the oldies had passed that bar. And many of the novice players aren't aware that they'll be kicked out of the novice matches once they pass level three.


Once you reach a certain point, you can easily ignore the achievement system, and maintain a fairly low level while still having lots and lots of experience.


With tiers of matches (5-10, 10+) many players will try to stay below that bar, since the higher tier you go, the more difficult the matches will be. (Also another reason you see more stacked teams, it's easier to pub stomp than it is to take on another organized team).


Although it would help temporarily, as the novice players move into the next level and face similarly experienced opponents, and the already well experienced players have already passed that point.

[NoWuffo]

Hi, Imma rant for a bit...
I do agree that stacked teams can definitely lead to unilateral games, which makes the whole scenario kinda lame for both teams. No one likes getting thumped over and over, but then again beating new players with no real competition isn't really that enjoyable either.

I know this all first hand because I often do fly with my clan. Especially with this most recent WANTED season, half of my clan has a price on their heads, so we're definitely going to stack our team to defend their bounty. That's an entirely different situation, a flaw in my mind with the Bounty system.

The problem in my mind is with the whole segregation in general of players based on skill. Yeah, new players will sometimes get stomped by lvl 10+ teams who have been flying together for months. That's why there's the 1-3 beginner's matches. However, I go into those matches all the time as a trainer, I'm allowed to go in there to be a resource to them to learn. The problem I see all the time at that level is before I arrive, it's often the blind leading the blind. Players who've flown a few dozen times all of a sudden believe they're masters, and start teaching others sometimes entirely false or bad advice. I didn't get to become as good of a pilot as I am now by going against just any other players, I got to where I am now by flying against better players! In that exchange, yes I normally lost, but I took something away from that loss that made me better.

By segregating based on skill level, you're potentially depriving up-and-coming players the chance to learn from better players and become better themselves. With any conditioning or training, there's a certain plateau effect unless you're pushed beyond your comfort zone. Whenever my clan plays with new players, we'll often break up our ships so we have one good crew on each side, or better yet we invite promising players onto our ships and try to train them up. We get loads of praise from lower level players for the tips we give them, because otherwise they wouldn't have known certain tricks.

Yes, you do get the occasional complaint about stacked teams, and people suggesting that we go easy or dumb down our builds. My response to this is absolutely not. I will never "dumb down" my play or not go at my opponent with everything I got. I'll give them build and loadout suggestions before a match, and then critique their play after the match, but I'm always going to show them what good competition is in hopes that they can learn from it and strive to be better. For every complaint we get, there's normally two praises telling us to keep it up, because even new or inexperienced players want us to throw everything we got at them and not baby them.

With the amount of teamwork in this game, I fell like segregating by skill would do more harm than good to this community. Players learn from other players, they learn from their successes but even more-so their failures. We already have a 1-3 beginner's matches, but that alone has flaws, and regardless you still see brand new players skipping them and trying to enter a competitive match. We need to perfect the system we have already rather than try to segregate it out further.

[Cl ick to Ca p t ain]

The only issue with that is that player rank =/= player skill. It's just based on achievements. The novice system was put in after many of the oldies had passed that bar. And many of the novice players aren't aware that they'll be kicked out of the novice matches once they pass level three.


Once you reach a certain point, you can easily ignore the achievement system, and maintain a fairly low level while still having lots and lots of experience.


With tiers of matches (5-10, 10+) many players will try to stay below that bar, since the higher tier you go, the more difficult the matches will be. (Also another reason you see more stacked teams, it's easier to pub stomp than it is to take on another organized team).


Although it would help temporarily, as the novice players move into the next level and face similarly experienced opponents, and the already well experienced players have already passed that point.

I think that  player rank =/= player skill doesn't factor in as much as you'd think it does since instead of skill I'm worried more about playtime, a level 5 regardless of skill is going to have a large amount more experience and understanding of not only ships and guns, but also heeding the captains instructions as to loadouts than say a level 3 coming out of novice matches. Then the level 10 tier of games I highly doubt you'd get a second gunner on your ship bringing all the wrong ammos at the level 10 tier. So you see it isn't about Skill at all, it's about the fact that the matchmaking as it is now is quite unbalanced and new player arrogance is unfortunately a big problem.

Example,
Just yesterday, I was only playing with just one ships worth of Knights in pubs and was continuously 5 - 0'n lobbies because no matter how I tried to tell the other team that they shouldn't ready up without loading out their ships they thought they were they be all end all in videogame knowledge and didn't listen, flying goldfish and squid with two gunners, wrong gun combos, with their pilot as a part of the crew, and their captain an engi or gunner. Our team wasn't even so much stacked, it was a simple matter of the other ship on my team was more experienced and thus wasn't making these rookie mistakes. I mean we literally ran into a goldfish/squid team that one ship had two gunners, and the other didn't even have a pilot, both ships were all level 1s and 2s and they refused to listen to me no matter how I tried to tell them how much of a mistake that was.

Novice matches are well and good in concept but they mostly only server to agitate, and players in the 1-3 area avoid them because of the restrictions. Instead, since the tooltips on ships and guns are quite descriptive as to what does what, remove the restrictions from novice matches (or keep them and also have the ranked lobbies for 1-3 without restrictions) and instead have ranked matches in tiers, where lower ranks simply cannot play at higher tiers. Also as a preemptive anti troll measure, higher rank players can't play at the 1-3 tier. Also, for those that want the old publobby system there can be "unranked" lobbies where everyone can join.

It would look a bit like this,
Novice, restricted lobbies
non restricted Rookie tier 1-4
Intermediate tier 5-9
Expert tier 10+

I also think that this would give new incentive to actually rank up early on for some players.



 

[Echoez]

It would look a bit like this,
Novice, restricted lobbies
non restricted Rookie tier 1-4
Intermediate tier 5-9
Expert tier 10+

Would never agree with this unless achievements were playtime based and not achievement based. Currently level means nothing, being forced to do pointless achievements just to play on a higher tier would frustrate a lot of players me included.

[Mattisamo]

It would look a bit like this,
Novice, restricted lobbies
non restricted Rookie tier 1-4
Intermediate tier 5-9
Expert tier 10+

Would never agree with this unless achievements were playtime based and not achievement based. Currently level means nothing, being forced to do pointless achievements just to play on a higher tier would frustrate a lot of players me included.

This, I'm currently a level 9 pilot, but has flown for 1k + games. Personally I wouldn't class myself as Intermediate so maybe base the tiers around the amount of games played since more games (usually) means better understanding of the game for example:

Novice: <50 games played.
Rookie: 50-100
Intermediate: 100-xxx
Expert: xxx<

Obviously these numbers would have to be tweaked here and there but just as an idea

[Cl ick to Ca p t ain]

It would look a bit like this,
Novice, restricted lobbies
non restricted Rookie tier 1-4
Intermediate tier 5-9
Expert tier 10+

Would never agree with this unless achievements were playtime based and not achievement based. Currently level means nothing, being forced to do pointless achievements just to play on a higher tier would frustrate a lot of players me included.

This, I'm currently a level 9 pilot, but has flown for 1k + games. Personally I wouldn't class myself as Intermediate so maybe base the tiers around the amount of games played since more games (usually) means better understanding of the game for example:

Novice: <50 games played.
Rookie: 50-100
Intermediate: 100-xxx
Expert: xxx<

Obviously these numbers would have to be tweaked here and there but just as an idea

That's an idea, though those numbers seem a little low for me.

Novice: <100 games played.
Rookie: 100-249
Intermediate: 250-499
Expert: 500+

Is where I'd put it at, but a solid idea since like you guys said going by level wouldn't work.

[Thomas]

Match count does sound like a better indication of player experience. One thing I'd keep in mind is population though. The more we divide up the players, the harder it becomes to fill up the lobbies. It is a -lot- more feasible than a rank/score system based on skill/performance. Could always consider doing that along with some kind of queue system, so that instead of setting it to balance ranks/scores, you're balancing ships based on player experience (so you could end up with ships filled with a range of experienced players, as long as the other team has players within a similar range).

This also allows for a better coaching environment, since the higher experienced players can do their best to teach the less experienced; something they may not get in segregated matches (like NoWuffo pointed out).


-----------------------------------------


Personally I'd still like to see some skill or performance based rank. Just because of the fun of trying to get that number higher, a little more competitive setting. And also that both player level and game experience are only loosely related to skill level. You can have great players that just don't bother with achievements and so end up staying low level, and you can also have players with high levels because they spend all their time just trying to do the achievements (you've met these people, they're the ones that will start a match and burn moonshine for the full 240 seconds before actually trying to play; and then they'll keep going for ram kills.) Play time/match count is a perfect way to determine experience of a player, but lots of experience doesn't make them highly skilled. It's still a good way to estimate or guess their relative skill level.

------------------------------------------------------

Upon further reflection though, ranking/scoring players by skill may also lead to a more volatile community. As nice as it would be to see how you stack up against other players, and give you something to work at beyond achievements (as well as it being a balance method); some people might end up taking it too seriously. Since your personal performance is tied in with your teammates performance. One 'bad apple' (or even just a newer player) can cause some serious problems on the ship and result in a poor performance. Despite your best efforts and abilities, you could get creamed just because your engineer just brought a mallet with both chem spray and fire ext. This can result in some very competitive and angry players lashing out and harassing other players; leading to a pretty dark community. I want to believe that we'd be above that kind of thing, with an active CA base and lots of supportive players of all ranks and skill levels; but competition can bring out the worst in people.

Still might be worth that risk. The desire to play on top and not having to worry as much about getting creamed by a stacked team might keep players around longer, and maybe even bring more in.

[zlater75@hotmail.com]

I wouldn't feel comfortable with dividing people or trying to label by skill in some way. I know the intention is good and the issue is there but just saying it'd be best if it was just indicated some way and maybe a vote option for balancing teams, maybe? But would it work practically is the question and couldn't we already try balance out the matches if we're 4 ships and 2 are mixed, help the other by switching teams?
A teamswitch option might be great to help this. On the other hand we might want to practise and train clanwise and then a stomp can be unavoidable. Also someone might invite a friend to get them to know the game and promote it. How will they or trial members join the official more serious skrims if limited? No restrictions, please, but some tool to swap ships in match lobby or more effort in balancing out matches would maybe help a bit. As long as it can't be misused. Maybe captain majority vote from winning team? Sometimes it's a good challenge to learn against the hard teams but it's also down to what way they play and the mutual respect.

[Richard LeMoon]

I made a few suggestions in this thread that would greatly help this issue in a more passive manner. Though basing it on level instead of 'real' skill is a stopgap, showing players the levels of crews before they joined any match would discourage many lower level players from joining a stacked game.

If there was any match locking, I would not go with hard levels of 1-4, 4-7 whatever, but make overlapping sets. 1-3, 2-5, 4-7, 5-9 and so on. Otherwise, you can suddenly be thrust into the next bracket without being ready. At level 4, you could join either 2-5 or 4-7.

The easy team switching ship option has been suggested in another thread, and is a good idea.

On to the rant...

NoWuffo, I got the same rant from a Cox captain in a string of about 10-15 matches where every match was 5-0/1. Could have been you, but I didn't really pay attention. The excuses in your rant really illustrate the problem.  I would hear advice to the new player that cycled in maybe once every 3-5 matches, counter to your claims both here and in the matches. Most of the time it was simply telling your crews to bring the best possible loadouts for the best possible builds. Most of the players would only stay for one or two games after getting insta-killed over and over. They learned nothing, other than what I told them in the match.

Another excuse was that Cox had just gotten out of a challenge match with another clan, so the 'stacking' I saw when I first came on was incidental. That is totally fine. However, I have to mention here that as Cox members started to leave for the night, any time a higher level player would join the match, someone on your side would insist they join the 'winning' team, leaving the other side with max level players lower than the lowest level players on your team. Any request to level the teams out or to switch one ship to the other side was ignored or derided, with the now-familiar mantra of "We will tell the other team what to bring, and give them advice, but we will not blah blah blah (we just want to have the best everything)."

Then there was the excuse of the Cox team 'practicing'. Practicing? Really? Against 'pugs'? How is any strategy you learn by stomping ships that are not even remotely a challenge transferable to higher level matches? That is like a pro boxer beating the crap out of neighborhood kids and saying it is practice for tonight's match. If you want to 'practice' like that, go to the practice map. In matches, show more good sportsmanship.

Then one of your captains had the gall to try to say it was my fault for not supporting the other ship in a few of the matches. These were new captains that charged straight into your traps, while your ships barely moved to shred them. They had no strategy at all. You offered them no strategy advice of how they could beat you, despite your constant claims. While they were charging in, I was instructing my crew where the guns and components were, when to shoot which guns at what range, and when to or not to fix things with which tools. The other ships had no such benefit. I was also trying to advise the other captain to hold back and stay grouped.

The icing on the cake is when I heard this gem: "I am streaming. I am not going to handicap myself against anyone." I really have to wonder how many people loved watching Cox stomp new crews over and over. From what I gathered, all Cox team members were also communicating outside of the game, giving basically everyone the advantage of 'Captain chat'.

Sir, not only was that intentional team stacking on the part of Cox, it was a disgrace and show of pure, poor sportsmanship. You are wrong on every point you made, and this is exactly why there needs to be better tools to use against the piles of excuses proposed by others like you. At least one first time player told me he was not going to play anymore because not having a chance at all was not fun. I encouraged him to try more novice matches, but first impressions are hard to break. That is lost revenue for Muse, both in the sale of items, and word of mouth game sales.

As for your claim of 1 occasional complaint per 2 praises or whatever from players that want you to throw everything you have at them, this is just ridiculous. It is leaving out the majority of people that just simply get fed up and leave without saying anything. What you have there, son, is a sever case of confirmation bias. If two players have told you they like how you act, and stay around, but 100 leave without saying anything, you have failed. However, you latch onto the two positives with an iron grip and hold them up for all to see with a "Look mom, I done good!" If everyone voiced their opinion, you would get a far different picture.

I'll leave off with this. If this was baseball (or whatever sport your country prefers) game, what I saw was like pitting a pro team against a stream of Little League kids after the main 'pro' game. The pro team brought only its 'A game', trying to claim that the kids were never going to learn if they went easy on them. Inning 1 ends by slaughter rule, 3 outs on the first three kids, and 50 home runs for the pro team. Over and over for 10 games straight.

Stop pretending to do this garbage for other players' good. This is pure pride buried in excuses. Your rant is null.

/counterrant

[NoWuffo]

Hi LeMoon, how are you?

First off, I don't appreciate you calling myself and my clan out like this in a open, public forum. This is a very pointed attack and is unwarranted. I actually remember you and your complaints, that's who I was basing most of this post about, but I never did nor would I ever bring up your name. Attacking another person or group like you did is kinda low class.

As to your counter-points, I am sorry those matches went so poorly for yourself. I'm not going to argue back and forth with ya on the forums. If you want you can pm me directly and we can hash out our differences privately, I think that'd be more appropriate for the discussion at hand. Thanks.

That's an idea, though those numbers seem a little low for me.

Novice: <100 games played.
Rookie: 100-249
Intermediate: 250-499
Expert: 500+

Is where I'd put it at, but a solid idea since like you guys said going by level wouldn't work.

If there was some sort of segregation, I think matches played would be a good litmus test. You can't play just sheer numbers of matches without picking up a thing or two. I also like the idea of having overlapping levels, to avoid the immediate transitions.

Maybe a good way to do this would be when you set up an arena , you can set a level cap or skill cap of some kind. You could then specifically invite players you still want to play with into it (friends, newbies you're training up, lower level fellow-clan members, ect). That might have some merit there.

[Thomas]

I would never suggest to absolutely force even teams. Players should still be able to set up matches where they can put players where ever. All I'd like is an option that lets players get into more fair matches. Think of it like an official and unofficial match choice. Where the official uses one of the suggested methods to sort of force and highly encourage even matches, and the unofficial uses the old system of people just piling in. But you would have to have a system to encourage players to use the 'official' matches more. Such as achievements, stats, and bounty systems only working there, where the unofficial is more of a fun practice with no repercussions.


I do like Richard's idea of staggering the limits (although I'm still pushing for my overtly complicated system), as this can help prevent the population from being squeezed into little chunks. We do have lots of players, but we don't have massive amounts of them. And the more we 'cut up' the population with limits (such as only rank 1-4, 3-5, 4-7, 6-10, etc), the harder it can become to fill the matches. The staggering can reduce this, but not remove it.

For example if we have 100 people online and we use strict limits (1-3,4-6,7-10) we could end up with a group of (40, 50, 10) respectively. If we stagger it (1-4, 3-5, 4-7, 6-10) we might end with (50, 40, 50, 20), since most people will qualify for at least two different divisions. This is highly exaggerated of course. But it shows the problem we might run into, with some groups getting quite low in numbers at certain times, making it difficult to find a match they qualify for.

[StrawberryDelite]

How about, instead of ranking players, we simply get the root of the problem: Stacked teams

If a certain match ends up having the exact same crews on one side winning multiple times in a row with the other side constantly having different captains and crews and still constantly losing, people will have the option of marking the match as stacked. After X amount of people mark the match as stacked, it'll appear as so in the lobby.

If any two matches get marked stacked, then the matches will automatically be merged so as to have two stacked teams fighting against each other. Marked matches should also have higher priority for anyone with 2+ ships in the "Form Crew" option.

If there are an uneven amount of stacks and someone decides that they want to rise up to the challenge, then joining the match will show them a list of other members who want to try fighting them as well. From there, they'll have access to another chat in which they can organize each other into going to "Form Crew" and matching up against the team.

This'll be to prevent those level 1 engineers going in as a captain on a ship that obviously wouldn't work, but, at the same time, allow players who actually know what they're doing to group up and rise to the challenge. Honestly, in my experience, the real challenge to fighting a stacked team is just finding a team that doesn't include a level one engineer as captain.

If the teams are obviously still stacked (Either the first game goes 5/0 or a team wins three times in a row), both teams will be given the option of requeuing for a different match.

This way, we have a simple system that will ensure that people who want to play together will still get to stick together without having to fight against unorganized teams without forcing anyone into tiers.

[The Churrosaur]

"Teams are being scrambled"