How to make it detrimental to have a low-rated teammate die

Obviously, there are many games where a team wants all of its member to live. However, it is often advantageous for a team to have its low-rated player die if there is a much higher-rated teammate. This situation is more likely to be the case when there is a greater rating disparity between teammates, in full share games, and with larger maps. In theory, for good and fun game design, it shouldn't be advantageous for a team to sacrifice its low-rated player for that reason, or otherwise be disadvantaged by comparison if the low-rated member lives.

I am talking about in games with large rating disparities between teammates here; the kind you might get in all welcome games, or the Duelist's recent 2v2 tournament, or the recent Seton's 2v2 tournament, or the recent Seton's 4v4 tournament, etc. In addition to it creating an undesirable dynamic for the team itself, it also often creates an undesirable dynamic for the enemy team, where they have the bizarre situation of being better off actively trying to not kill the lower-rated enemy player if the player has a much higher-rated teammate.

What could improve this situation?

Share until death is one potential solution, but it is too punishing in some cases, yet it is still sometimes advantageous for a team to lose its lower-rated teammate in others. Perhaps units shouldn't give as much reclaim when they die due to player death in share until death games? Perhaps you have a better idea?

For full share, perhaps there could be a delay for transferred unit usage/resource generation for a teammate. For example, perhaps there could be a 30-second period where all of the transferred units are stunned and the transferred mass extractors are toggled off during that period. (The 30 seconds is an arbitrary suggestion; the point is that there would be some sort of delay, not necessarily 30 seconds specifically.)

Perhaps there should be an additional share condition option called partial share. Partial share would share some portion of a player's units the way full share does, but it would also kill some portion the way share until death does. This sounds nice in theory, but what portion of the player's units would it transfer vs kill, and how would it determine which are killed vs transferred? Perhaps it should kill units occupying 1/3 of the dying player's used unit cap, chosen at random, when the player dies? Perhaps you have a better idea?

What do you think?

pfp credit to gieb

This already exists, Sheikah made a mod for me where (some percentage of) units blow up but structures don’t with it prioritizing lower tech units.

It comes down to not playing with fullshare, and on well designed maps

put the xbox units in the game pls u_u

@ftxcommando said in How to make it detrimental to have a low-rated teammate die:

This already exists, Sheikah made a mod for me where (some percentage of) units blow up but structures don’t with it prioritizing lower tech units.

It is called structure share. Also it doesn't save a percentage of units. It only saves structures and engineers

@penguin_ said in How to make it detrimental to have a low-rated teammate die:

What do you think?

That getting rolled over after you killed the weakest enemy is just deserved.

I've had 6v6 games where my team killed 7 enemies, starting with one we had complete vision on...

I second what jcv said. It's part of the game. It is a sometimes unfortunate part of the game, but I think it's much more interesting.

Essentially what you're asking is, "how do we make killing the worst player fun for everyone except that player?"

Is that really the question you want to be asking?

Stupid ideas:
Having lower unit cap
There was a mode that makes it so base is transferred to killer 😄 (that is to much i guess, lol)

idea with at least some potential:
Getting less score in the tournament - but this can also lead to lower rated player giving his stuff to higer rated and hiding his ACU
AND need some non standart tourney structure kinda like round-robin

TA4Life: "At the very least we are not slaves to the UI" | http://www.youtube.com/user/dimatularus | http://www.twitch.tv/zlo_rd

This is a real problem with maps like 4v4 astro without fullshare. If one side has high rank and low rank players on same team for balance, and the low rank player is front, he can die easily, as happened to me several times. Then, the high rank player can build additional mexes and easily dominate the game. This is primarily due to the close proximity of the mexes on astro. I have won many astro games because of this, even though I died early.

@penguin_ said in How to make it detrimental to have a low-rated teammate die:

or the Duelist's recent 2v2 tournament, or the recent Seton's 2v2 tournament, or the recent Seton's 4v4 tournament, etc. In addition to it creating an undesirable dynamic for the team itself

This undesirable dynamic is because of the tourney setup itself, namely having a rating restriction or captain picking. This causes a bigger rating gap in teams which causes it to be more efficient for the lower rated player to give his base.

It’s similar to the issue of 1v1 tournaments with huge rating variance. People gotta control for maybe 500 or so rating range between players for the tournament to be engaging. Captain picking allows for that by essentially forcing all teams to comply with the mean rating.

The easiest solution would be to require some baseline equality between players in the captain picking just the same, so players are still 500-600 rating within each other there. Can also probably stretch the rating variance depending on the size of the teams.

This post is deleted!

@zlo said in How to make it detrimental to have a low-rated teammate die:

There was a mode that makes it so base is transferred to killer (that is to much i guess, lol)

There still is? But I have never seen it used.

@jcvjcvjcvjcv said in How to make it detrimental to have a low-rated teammate die:

There still is? But I have never seen it used.

Yes, it is called "traitors."

It is part of the base game. It is in the same list as you will find "full share." There are two other options in there that you have also never heard of because people generally never play with them on.

The main problem with these game modes is, if you know your ACU is going to die, you can ctrl-k all your stuff before your ACU dies. Then the other team inherits nothing.

You would basically have to turn off ctrl-k to be able to play on those modes.

There is also a new game option "no tech sharing" for which I added a mod for full share in the vault : fullshare but not for tech.

This means if the player you kill is the last/only one for that faction you limit their unit options for the rest of the game.