Let me start by saying what this post is NOT:
- this is not a rant that the game is broken
- this is not a bug report
This is a "it sucks to be solo because too many duos / teams make the game not fun, and actively push solo players into undesirably passive roles."
There are a bunch of variables in play here:
- Sound is an on-going work in progress. It makes little difference how slow and deliberate you creep if your opponent's boots never make a sound, regardless of speed / surface. It is not possible to reliably "sense" enemies on any map.
- Even if the game does not have native voice chat, it is absurd to assume teammembers are not verbally communicating over discord or some other similar 3rd party service.
- The wipe is sufficiently far enough along that everyone is using top tier or second tier ammo. This means if not M995, then M855A1 and analogues for other calibers.
- Armor is behind the curve in the meta. Helmets and sub-tier 5 armors are meaningless against PMCs. Armor is meaningless against headshots.
- the snap-to-aim is so fast it is measured in fractions of a second. And recoil is a drawback that diminishes over time as PMC skills and gear improves.
- The nature of random encounters is a coin flip. Are you going to see them first or are they going to see you first?
Therefore, it should come as no surprise that teams beat solo players. It is why a team is formed in the first place. However, while teams stomping on solo players is fair and just and correct – it isn't a lot of fun for the solo player. This leads me back to the title of the post, I would like to know the breakdown of:
- how many raids take place over a time period
- how many of those raids have at least one team
- what proportion of the total number of PMCs in the raid are included in a team
- what are the sizes of these teams (2-5)
and then a second level analysis would be a breakdown by map and roughly the start times of raids (can be sorted into 4 hour increments).
This information would be useful for clarifying if this is even really a problem in the first place.
- what if I'm just getting bad luck with raids, where the % of raids with teams is less than 10%, but I'm getting all of them. That isn't the game's fault, just my rotten luck.
- even if teams are prevalent, if it's dominated by two-mans, and only 1 duo in a raid, that isn't a problem.
However, my hypothesis is that every raid has at least one team in it and on average, at least 75% of all PMCs in a raid are in a team (spread out over multiple teams). This is the data I would like to see confirmation for or against.
Even if teams are common, large, and solo players are the minority – what would you want to have done about it?
I'm only going about the effort of typing up this post to make the case for the following:
- depending on PMC numbers for the map, the number of teams is limited to less than 50% of the PMCs in the raid
- no team can exceed two members
- team members generate noise in addition to their individual movements to better announce their presence when they are in proximity to each other (within 30 meters).
