4Game

Over the past week I've been hosting my own lobbies to try and figure out how I can escape all the complaints that come from playing with randoms and id like to share the lobby control methods I found to be successful.

Note: No hard numbers were recorded, just anecdotal

First the game rules were always the same. No visual tasks, confirmed ejects off, short kill distance etc.

This just helped to find players that wanted to play in a way similar to myself.

On this note, players who asked for rules to be changed, I never kicked, but I did inform them that rules wouldn't be changed, and then gave them a few seconds to leave if they chose. Once I start confirming that rules would stay as they were, I noticed more people leaving before the round started, and those that stayed appeared to stay longer.

Next was what I think was my most successful, which was banning those that were quick to yell start in the chat the moment the lobby hit 10 players. Now I'm sure some of the people banned were wildly confused, but once I started banning people that rushed to say start, almost no-one would ever leave at the start of the match which leads me to believe that a lot of the people who rush to say "start" are rushing to see if they need to lobby hop again.

Then there was a bit of skill culling. If after a few rounds I noticed someone consistently doing things like randomly voting, or lying about seeing someone vent just because they think the person in the imposter, I would give them the boot.

The last major thing which should be a must regardless, is kicking toxic players. Those that are extremely rude/racist, those that third imposter on purpose, and those that sell out their imposter team mates.

With these lobby rules throughout the week, I had a number of lobbies that would retain the same players for a couple hours (sometimes until the lobby broke) and the game play was great.

A couple more things I threw in that I'm not certain on the effect on game play were monitoring names. Players that joined with blank names or things like "I", or ".", or unreadable names would get kicked, as well as players who were unable to match their name color to their character color (personally I play with the name brown and I leave if the brown color is already taken). I assumed this just helped to avoid confusion which could take away from game play value but as I said I'm not certain on the actual effects.

Once I started following all these rules, after about 3-5 matches the lobby would have a pretty solid 8 players (myself included).

if anyone has any questions ask away, and if you decide to try this lemme know how it goes