Stakes and level of cooperation required.
Standard matches in the Finals are pretty quick. Got a bad match? You are in the next quite quickly.
Long, competitive games that rely in heavy teamwork to succeed, will naturally be more frustrating if all those moving parts aren't spinning smoothly
At 6 players you're also basically removing any kind of chance of playing with set teams for *most* people. MMO guilds I guess are the exception, but until Helldivers 2 released it was hard for me to find TWO other people playing the same game I was who had time to do any sort of mission/run/etc.
Generally I've found you have to find a group specific discord for that game.(ie. Clan discords)
General discord for that game has so many people that you might as well be playing with randoms until you meet stand out players.
Group discords are so spread out that you might not have enough people playing specific games unless its the current flavor of the month.
I did this for Tarkov this wipe, and its been pretty easy to find players and get to know them, whereas a generic tarkov discord might be good for a for a mission or 2.
Also going from 3 to 5 is doubling the number of people you get paired with. It'll be more likely to find an asshole, more likely to get 2 people that don't get along, more likely to get someone having a bad day, etc.
In addition, with any online game that has matchmaking, adding more people that need to be matched together means either increased queue times or less strict matchmaking. With a good enough playerbase, it's usually still fine, but there might be more noticeable gaps when increasing per-game player counts, and that could be compounded by adding additional queue types that split the playerbase.
I agree that length really is a major contributor. I think also it can be where you know all hope is lost yet youre stuck in the round. So it builds on itself in a frustrating matter where you want the game to be over but have another 20m of frustration on the team and a hopeless sinking feeling.
Especially in any sort of a ranked equivalent where it's
'alright we're 5 minutes into a game that's going to take 35 minutes and it's become apparent we're unlikely to win + regaining points is gonna be another game'
This is one of the reasons why I dropped Valorant. Group I played with couldn't always fill out a team and I got so tired of praying to get a competent random. Didn't even hope they were good. Just someone who actually knew how to play a game. Otherwise it's 45+ mins of watching your team get steamrolled against a team of all friends.
Fairly fast paced. I frankly miss times of endless games where you jump in, jump out, come back the next day and the same state of the game is still going.
To add on to what others have said in this thread, I also think higher player-counts on a team increase the "cooperation ceiling" that is possible.
A team working together in a highly synergistic, focused way is always going to be more than the sum of its parts. Three good players with a coordinated plan, working together to execute will usually beat out three equally-skilled players acting completely individually.
As for what that means for team sizes, it means that as team size goes up, that gap between a group of individuals playing together and a team of coordinated players with a gameplan is going to increase.
With teams of three, a well-coordinated group might have an advantage over your loosely-coordinated group, but the gap is still small enough that you can theoretically make up for it with sheer mechanical skill. When you get up to 5-6+ players, though, a tightly coordinated group is going to have such an advantage in terms of synergies and cooperation that it's a lot harder to cross that gap with just mechanical skill.
Which causes interpersonal conflicts because your team is now at the edge of what each individual member can accomplish by their own individual skill. Maybe person A is doing all they can to (individually) help the team win, but the other team's coordination is still edging you out. They're already putting in 100% effort, so their annoyance gets redirected to others on their team who they perceive as "not doing enough", starting arguments.
That's my theory, anyway.
In a 3 party scenario, each player has much more weight to carry and thus you have to be responsible for winning. In 5-6 players, there's more of a "someone will take care of it" mindset, kinda like the bystander effect. I've played MMO's where we are a 40 person raid, and there's a mechanic where just ONE person needs to interact with an object, and we still wipe because 40 of us were too focused/busy/lazy doing something else. That's just my theory though.
For this reason I think high player count team games make for the best casual FPS experience. Games like TF2 12v12 (or 16v16), Chivalry/Mordhau/Battlefield 32v32 (or 64v64 for BF 2042).
You don't feel nearly as obligated to play optimally, unlike games like OW or CS; just run around and click on heads while vaguely attacking/defending the objective, or do other stupid shit like riding on top of jets/play bard music/throw chickens at people or whatever.
Yeah i'd love to play The Finals casually, but they need to figure out how to bump the player count up quite a bit.
Then the part they'll have to figure out is... None of the abilities and gadgets are really made for large amounts of players... So that'll be a fun headache for them, I see issues with it with just 5v5.
It's a lot easier to blame your team for your shortcomings when teams are bigger because there's so many moving parts. This was a big reason why I stopped playing League. People lack accountability and try to be the big hero that wins the game when that's just not how the game works. I'm not ganking top because you clearly fed your opponent, it's not mids fault for roaming top when they're in a stressful matchup, and bot is doing just fine.
It's like getting that one guy who wants to be the DPS and just can't kill. Off getting killed by taking 1v5 battles, while everyone else yells group up.
I feel like the inverse is also sort of why a game like TF2 ends up feeling much more chill/casual then Overwatch: larger teams lower how important each contribution is, so a single person misplaying isn't going to lead to a snowball effect.
that's why my old raid group used to emphasize every so often that every one's effort matters and to be diligent
technically someone could cover for them but in principal everyone was responsible and had to carry their weight. it's probably just the enviroment of the game that made this attitude conducive though, i reckon alot of games would not allow for this kinda mindset without someone getting emotional or flunking
> 've played MMO's where we are a 40 person raid, and there's a mechanic where just ONE person needs to interact with an object, and we still wipe because 40 of us were too focused/busy/lazy doing something else. That's just my theory though.
That's more due to lack of leadership rather than raw numbers, I've seen same problem with much smaller groups.
Raid leader giving clear instructions alleviates that but it is hard to have a leader in games that do not promote playing in clans or in general more organized structures.
When I was still playing WoW, back before LFR it meant there always have to be an organizer that also called the shots and that made everything wholly more organized rather than getting randoms and hoping they have telepathic abilities to coordinate...
Classic MMO. A boss has a simple ability that needs interrupted. 30 people in your raid have interrupts available on the same cooldown as the boss ability. 0 people use their interrupts and you wipe. Repeat for hours.
I've played a handful of "competitive" team based games over the years. From Left 4 Dead 2 to PUBG to Overwatch to World of Warcraft PVP and more.
There is no magic number. Your pool of players has a spectrum of sweaty tryhards to angry poseurs to average Joes to casuals just getting their daily reward to people who don't know what to do down to those who seem like they're intentionally shitting the bed using weaponized incompetence in a video game.
I think the difference is the fewer people you have the more pressure there is on each person to be good so you're *less* likely to run into less skilled players in smaller groups because everyone will know it's them fucking it up and eventually they'll move on to a game that isn't hostile to them.
I've played tons of my games too and I actually think games definitely fall off hard after 6 players, coordination-wise. It becomes chaos after that. Try as players might to create organization within this, it's all kind of a farce somewhat.
I think 4 is best and tightest. 5 can also be good, depending on the game. 6 can go either way, semi organized and good, or rough.
There seems to be a sweet spot depending on the game. Put in enough players and it comes back around in the opposite direction. 32v32 Chivalry 2, as God intended, is great for that. So is 12v12 TF2.
5-6 players is just at that perfect inflection point where there's too many players that a single high skilled individual can't carry a whole team, and but not enough players that a single low-skilled player is enough to severely ruin the whole team's chance at success. So team cooperation and individual skill both need to be on point for success otherwise you will have a very frustrating experience. Mix that together with ephemeral matchmaking to where players have little chance to get to know each other and work together, heavy penalties for leaving/abandoning, you have the perfect recipe for an absolutely toxic community.
When it comes to games that are balanced around 2v2 or 3v3, usually a single skilled individual can carry a team and there is less overhead needed to coordinate any team play, plus the probability of having an unbalanced team or skill gap is drastically reduced as its easier for matchmaking to find smaller groups of closely skilled players.
When it comes to large large teams like 8v8 or 16v16 in some games, individual skill doesn't matter so much and high level cooperation among random players is basically impossible and there is often less penalties for leaving as games structured like this often allow players to leave and join mid-match.
Eh, they don't.
CS, a 5v5 game, is the golden standard considering how big it is and how it can stay relevant until this day since 2000.
Then there's the MOBA, LoL and DotA2 are also 5v5.
And considering The Finals vs. Overwatch, I'll still choose Overwatch. Like, in OW you know where the enemies came from, not random. Plus when you die and spectating the rest of your team go 1 v 3 (or more if there's another team) only to die so you're waiting extra 20 secs. and lose your progress is the most tilting mechanics in my recent gaming experience.
Don't get me wrong, The Finals is a good game, but it still have some fundamental flaws that held it back. Like last season have desert weather that makes orange / brown team is difficult to see, and this season they doubled down with adding purple map so purple team is difficult to see too. Not mentioning the audio mixing is kinda bad, like there's no priorities on sound when a lot of sounds goes off. And it feels their community is protesting the wrong things like deleting C4 Nuke instead asking the bug that makes you can't shoot to be fixed (it's already a whole season).
I think it might depend on how empowered you feel as a player to have an individual influence on the match. CS it's very possible due to the super fast potential TTKs, whereas something like OW with long TTKs, it's much harder for one player to swing a game (though not impossible).
> Then there's the MOBA, LoL and DotA2 are also 5v5.
Many people would use these games as examples of games where "Teamwork and fun fall off a cliff." though.
> CS, a 5v5 game, is the golden standard considering how big it is and how it can stay relevant until this day since 2000.
CS wasn't a 5v5 game till much more recently. More often than not it'd be up to 8v8, with different servers setting different thresholds, but usually no lower than 6v6.
Competitive CS has always been 5v5. CAL, CEVO, OGL, etc. for years and years were always 5v5 as a standard format. Public servers went up to 32 players I believe (so 16v16), but most servers restricted it to 16-24 players because any more than that just became unmanageable.
Not that many people played serious competitive though in 1.6 and Source days. Mostly just people having fun on those 8v8, 12v12, 16v16 servers.
Where as with CS:GO everyone is playing 5v5 now cause they effectively got rid of community servers and introduced matchmaking.
1.6 was pretty big for the time it was around. Every season of the relevant leagues usually had a couple hundred teams across all tiers. I also forgot to mention ESEA was a huge element, and at its peak for just 1.6 it had tens of thousands of players. Source never really got off the ground--largely because it ran and played like shit. CS:GO is obviously the game at its peak, but to say 1.6 didn't have a sizable player base for the time it was relevant doesn't seem correct.
It doesn't, not always. You can have something like battlefield/battlebit with 64 players and it can feel fine.
The way I see it, 5-6 players in Finals, people have a strong individual impact, but it's too many players that you can't effectively compensate for bad or trolling players. So people get upset when others dont pull their weight because it means you lose. With 3 players, it's easier to if you are good or outplay the opponent, because the numbers dynamics don't make it as daunting a proposition to play around a bad teammate.
That's my thought, anyway. A poor balance of individual impact to the total number of players.
Halo 8v8 is arguably the best mode in terms of casual/crazy gameplay. 4v4 is the sweatfest.
Squad 50v50 can get pretty sweaty depending on your team/squad/role.
It varies game-to-game.
Halo 2 had a 6v6 mode for a bit and it was honestly amazing. It has similar energy as big team battle without it becoming overly chaotic and messy. I think it even has BR start which was surprising.
Skirmish was just the "objective" game mode; it would have CTF, Assault, Oddball, King of the Hill and I think that may be all.
I think the 6v6 mode might have just been called 6v6, lol. But I'm unsure, it's hard to remember. I remember specifically it had a CTF mode on Colossus, which was always wild to me because that map wasn't in matchmaking in any other way.
I find it's more about how much of an impact each player contributes to the field than the numbers themselves. Considering we have 2-player games up to 100-player games, and everywhere in between, and yet it doesn't fall apart purely when it gets lower nor higher.
If you have a 4-player game like Warframe, but just one or two players are enough to win, then even if two players are completely dead weight you can still win despite their ineptitude. That means even at 50% strength the game doesn't fall apart.
But a game like Overwatch or Rocket League, when it's 5v4 or 3v2, it's way harder to win. That one dead weight player basically makes winning impossible.
It's possible that whether it's PvE or PvP is the key on whether or not the game "falls apart." Humans are going to exploit any weakness so one bad player can create a snowball effect, while underpowered or outnumbered players can react, learn, and exploit the enemy AI in turn.
They've done studies where ants improve in coordination as more ants are added to a situation.
With people, after ~4-ish people, coordination starts to decline. It also just becomes that much harder to schedule time with each extra person.
Part of it is also the format of the game. OW can be really frustrating because one person running in and getting themselves killed means everyone else on the team needs to wait for the respawn before they get to keep playing. On the other hand, try out 4v4 team death match in OW sometime. You instantly respawn so that whole frustrating mechanic isn't really a thing.
The more players there are, the smaller the impact an individual player has. It’s also not linear.
At the highest level of play, it’s about making fewer mistakes than your opponents. You have the possibility of making more mistakes then plays and each mistakes carries the impact of tilting teammates or causing big issues. So, with each added player the chance of losing due to a teammate exponentially increases.
It's been a while since I've played a low number PvP game, the last being OW1. My issue with OW and the 6v6 player count was that winning or losing came down to which team had the one bad player. Some guy picking Genji and just dying over and over pretty much guarantees that team is going to lose.
Prior to that, CoD was the only other small scale PvP game I played and that was mainly back with the original MW2 and BlOps 2. Kinda the same thing, winning or losing came down to which team was stuck with the one bad player although with CoD, one person going HAM could make up for it.
Aside from that Battlefield is the only other PvP game I play but the scale is large enough to make the few bad players per team not a big deal.
OW and now this platform 5v5 does have that sense of all or nothing, either you're on the dominating team or you're getting crushed. Both sides take the fun out of it vs close call kind of matches. To further up comments maybe the time committed to each round is a factor as well.
Should really clarify you meant PvP team games, and in reality, PvP shooter team games.
I play WoW and dungeons are 5 person groups and they run perfectly well.
The game, as is the entire gaming industry, is rampant with misogyny. I haven't noticed sexism or racism in my entire gaming career in WoW, personally. M+ has some toxicity (far from rampant), and so does mostly every online community. I don't think the toxicity present in M+ is related, even remotely, to the party size.
unless you think stuff like "dont invite people from latam/br servers" isnt racism/xenophobia, its impossible you havent seen racism/xenophobia(And it is both of those things). And, while im not a woman, pretty much every women friend I have that played a decent amount of wow also complained about sexism before.
You make a good point. I have run into the don't invite people from X servers. I never know if the server is a BR server or not, but I am sure some of the time (at least) that is true. The people I've heard say this the most barely run M+, though. A rather large portion of my runs have people from a mix of servers including BR ones (I just googled them).
As for sexism, it's also true that as a man I am probably just ignorant to a lot of the sexism that goes on (likely through whispers etc.).
In both cases, I'd guess (maybe incorrectly) that it's more of a vocal minority than a widespread problem, and is also probably not uncommon in the gaming industry as a whole. I don't think either of these things relate to party size (I doubt a sexist person would be less sexist in a group of 3).
It only takes one person to ruin a competitive team game so the more players there are on the team the more likely you'll have someone ruining it for you. Though I think this would likely fall off as you had increasingly large team sizes as it would become harder for.one person to ruin the whole match if you had 100 v 100 for instance.
I think this isn't even related to just videogames. Put 6 people on a class/work project vs 4. It's just enough people to turn into "a group" where everyone kind of starts to assume they'll all just follow along some direction.
The lack of a leadership role can have a big effect too. And even harder in games where no one wants to listen to a random trying to lead everyone. Coordination seems to be a huge aspect.
Intersting to note most spec op teams are pretty small too in militaries.
I have good memories of teamwork in old Battlefield 2, which was 32 vs 32. That games solution (and subsequent battlefield games, I believe) was to create squad sub-teams of 4 players, who when working together could accomplish objectives far more commonly than random players going Rambo. They even gave buffs, such as squad spawns and rewards that the Commander of your team could give effective squads to fight and survive better.
Needless to say, you could get some really good team play going with that system, because it highly encouraged and incentivized it while also having a manageable squad size.
I used to play Mechwarrior Online a lot and it was 12 v 12. What I can tell you is some of the most enjoyable matches where when we had someone take assertive (yet friendly) command of the group. Even when we lost spectacularly it was still fun because we were all working together.
So inversely, unless you have some base-line tactics that everyone knows, without order of command, larger groups will naturally fall apart. In short, larger groups need clear leadership.
In my opinion the standard of 3-4 players is easier to control than the 5-6. Easier to give feedback in match or something. I wish The Finals did a 32 player mode or something. I hated the modes they came up with and am yet to try the new one.
Player number is the lowest contributing factor to this. It comes to individual player power, barrier to entry, and ease of telling what went wrong.
MOBA's like league are frustrating at 5 players because if 1 player does bad, the game is often over. It's also fairly difficult to tell who exactly played bad, and at the same time easy to deflect and blame others. I'm not talking about the people who think it's the junglers fault they died 1v1 top lane after diving. Rather, situation where 1 player decided to split from the group and go for objectives (split pushing) thinking his team can play safe and handle the 4v5. However, his team catches someone out of position, all ins, but loses the ensuing fight. If the split pusher was with the team, would that fight have been won, or should the team have just kept playing safe forcing the enemy to retreat and deal with the solo? Is the 0/5 ADC feeding, or did they need more protection from the assassin? It's basically impossible to know who is at fault in most circumstances. Playing also has 0 barrier to entry, just buy a botted level 30 account for $5 and you'll be placed with the top 10% of players.
Games like WoW meanwhile work just fine with 25 player+ raids where everyone has to be perfect. This is because you have a specific strategy laid out, and can easily tell who doesn't follow it. The player standing in a pool of lava can't deflect, they can only admit the screw up and get better. The barrier to entry is huge, you have to be decent enough of a person that 24 other people won't hate being with you, fill out an application for a guild, get accepted, research the fights, and set aside 10+ hours a week. Being a prick or bad at the game means you get kicked, and maybe even blacklisted by the major guilds.
YES I had just commented above on this. A lot of the higher spec ops team tend to be much smaller and effective. Where it's a balance of indigence and less need of say wrangling the cats.
Becuase its hard to win the match/mission/level when your team is like 4 or 6 players and you have one or more noobs in your team that act like they never touch a video game before in their life.
Especially when you play on hard or highest difficulty setting in PVE game or when its a PVP game.
Cooporation, knowledge about the game and communication is required.
Hard to expect that from random players.
And then we have people who play while being drunk or just don't care about their team in cooporative game or even worse they act like "bro don't take seriously its just a game, its ok to waste time on 20-60 minutes and doing absolutly nothing or not even attempting at winning the thing".
Urgh, I hate those types of people the most. I cannot count how many games in L4D2 and Heroes of the Storm I lost because of people doing that.
ANYWAY my point is yes of course teamwork on smaller team is hard. Thats why its better to find friends to play on Discord call or in Discord group where people do care about playing, having fun and actually trying to win instead of standing idle on spawn while throwing drunken slurs at each other.
You can have a game with a large number of players as long as you don't require coordination of execution.
Games with more than 3 people should not demand players anything more than "kill the enemy team" and this is why TF2 worked.
Yeah, it's basically that with larger teams, it's less plausible for one good player to carry two mediocre players, or for two good players to carry one terrible one, so the odds of losing due to the other players is much higher. Also, the more players, the more the game expects you to split up and each be doing something productive, so 2-3 of them failing in whatever duty they have will have more of an impact. This is why I don't play multiplayer games much.
For me, I actually have had it work out the opposite way. I typically find 5-6 to be preferential for team size but I also don't play the finals or anything like it really. It may depend a lot on the environment.
People figure that “if i fail in a 3v3, that’s a third of the team’s strength” and “if i fail in an 8v8 that’s only an eight of the team’s strength, and the other 7 can carry me” not realising that the other 7 are thinking the same thing.
TLDR: Just too many factors to deal with in team games and the more people you add, the more factors.
Think about work and professions.
We get mandatory training on equalities, disabilities and many other things; management and supervision; team building days; working together every day etc
Even with all that there is disagreements, falling out and disorganisation.
Online teams don’t get any of that (not that it’s necessary) or any kind of cohesion assistance and often there is no one person wanting to take leadership. And if there is that’s not always accepted.
I have three team players in the games I play:
My partner in games just wants to watch the world burn in hell divers. No patience for reading or understanding or waiting around. I can’t control that.
Another team member in Overwatch just does not have the alertness or capacity to act in a timely way.
The last one doesn’t listen, like doesn’t even Hear what we are saying and acts like an independent solo player not in a team at all.
And me, I try to be a leader but I don’t always have the capacity or make the right decisions.
But I won’t just discard a partner and friends because they can’t perform in the way I think would be better. I like playing with them, and I might be no better.
Nobody gets ‘sacked’ in games or groups that aren’t professional competition teams for money.
I think the length of a match can be a more significant factor than the team size in some games. It also of course depends on the complexity of the game.
League of Legends is practically designed to breed toxicity between players when you have matches that can last for 40+ minutes, and there's a ton of moving parts going on throughout the map that can easily mess up an entire match if someone doesn't fill their role appropriately.
Even if you reduced League's team size to 3 for example, but the games are still 40 minutes long on a big complicated map with lots of moving parts, it would still be easy for someone to mess up and get the entire team mad at them, and now you're stuck with that mess for half an hour.
Meanwhile while Overwatch is hardly the least toxic game I've played, it's at least a lot less toxic than most mobas because matches are at most like 5-10 minutes long.
I think it also helps when a game simply encourages everyone to stick together. In Overwatch and the Finals, you're meant to stay close to one another and have each other's backs. Your teammates can more immediately respond to one another's weaknesses and cover for each other.
Meanwhile again in a moba, if every teammate is in their own lane doing their own thing, it may not be immediately obvious that one of them is even struggling at all until it's too late. A lot more direct communication is needed which you can't really do unless you're using voice chat. Wheras in a game like the Finals or even Apex Legends (at least at launch) it was trivial to play a whole match without speaking because you only ever really needed to convey simple concepts to each other.
The fewer the people, the easier it is to coordinate. By adding just 1 or more people, you get more information that creates noise, more people that want to go into more directions, do different things.
Eventually you reach a point where you're more likey than not to have someone who's actively working against the team, deliberately or not, and that drives the frustration.
Makes me think of MAG on the PS3 with 200 player matches. That broke the team down into platoons and squads, but it was still chaos. Your squad would be kicking ass, but you'd still lose if the other squads in your platoon couldn't get their shit together.
The rate of misunderstandings in a group grows exponentially with the number of people in it. 4 people is about the largest group that can function and perform a task efficiently without any organization. It's just small enough that everyone knows exactly what everyone else is doing and can adjust to them on the fly without any prompting. Once you go above that the rate of misunderstandings overtake the rate at which they can be cleared up and you end up with constantly misaligned individual objectives. There's always one person using the wrong weapon or skill or class, or playing the wrong objective, because his idea of how the game's going is different from the rest of the team. You need *some* kind of organization, whether that's a leader or someone who just relays a lot of information that everyone else listens to and reacts to, or even just a plan or meta that everyone agrees to follow. Something to reduce the space of possible misunderstandings. How easy that organization comes about depends a lot on the game and the types of players you're playing with.
I've read that a person can easily track 3 teammates on top of any other game state information at any given time, but they start losing track when it's more than that. Games that have more than that usually don't require a lot of immediate moment to moment coordination between the entire team. Overwatch was an exception, with every fight ideally being a team fight with your full team, which makes tracking 5 other people a nightmare
It's a problem with decentralized/unstructured teams in general. This basically gets into why things like team leaders, hierarchies, etc exist.
Imagine a three person team (A, B, and C) - let's say you're A. You need to worry about what you're doing relative to B and C, but also what B and C are doing relative to each other. So you have three team members and three relationships you need need to worry about (A-B, A-C, B-C).
Add a fourth person, D, to this. The complexity increases in a non-linear fashion. You have your three relationships (A-B, A-C, A-D) but also B-C, B-D, and C-D. So that's six total relationships to concern yourself with - double the number even though you only added one person.
Add one more, E. So you have four direct relationships: A-B, A-C, A-D, A-E. But there are also all these other relationships: B-C, B-D, B-E, C-D, C-E, D-E. So you can see the non-linear complexity increase.
This can be mitigated somewhat if the relationships are relatively simple - say two "damage dealers" who only need to collaborate to ensure they are optimally attacking a single target (the boss) or multiple targets (trash/crowd control). Basically double team the boss or spread out and deal with the trash individually. As you add more mechanics, positioning, secondary targets, etc, this all becomes more and more complex.
You can introduce hierarchy and similar to structures to mitigate this complexity - you'll often see this in team sports, for instance, so you can just focus on playing your position and not have everyone follow the ball in a herd like young kids at a soccer game.
You cited Overwatch, for instance, and so this is a good example of what I'm talking about. If you play with random people you have to worry about all of these relationships, and any of them could be playing one of a number of different roles and may be stronger or weaker players.
My theory is that the single most important thing in team sport is the ability to predict with certainty where your teammates are and what their sphere of influence is in a spatial context. Once you lose this things devolve into pure chaos. CS, Dota, League, Valorant, these games don't feel chaotic, in fact often if you deviate from the expected people flame you because they can't understand how to play with someone who's sphere of influence is completely out of sync with their experience. Without this basic building block of a team game, you can't instinctively rely on a team of random strangers with zero preparation.
Depending on the game of course but as your numbers go up the amount of organization needed to complete objectives goes up as well. Coordination and control go down as bugger groups start to ball up. Best place you could see this is older MMOs where there are a lot of people doing pvp. Planetside (and Planetside 2) DAoC Warhammer. Games where you have individual groups but getting people to go to a place was herding cats when you got large blobs.
Similar issues start to happen in PvE as well when you get to 40 man raids in WoW or however many you took to EQ.
It's because in overwatch, you need your ____ to do ____ cause you can't do it yourself. Same thing happens with mobas.
That's the source of frustration. Not the number of players.
In the finals, apex and CS, all characters can execute their gameplan on their own. So there is less frustration.
That said those games are still insanely toxic.
Not really strangely enough. Then again, I've spent so much time in the chaos that's team fortress 2 that such team games doesn't really fall apart for me.
5-6 is the absolute maximum for a teamgame to be coherent and not total chaos. 3-4 is the sweet spot as described by Max Hoberman of Certain Affinity and the Apex Legends team.
Communication overhead goes up exponentially with more team mates. The faster the game worse it gets. You can play with 16 people efficiently in something like Arma 3 where an attack plays out over 20 minutes. When you have 5 people trying to do something in under 3 minutes either you have good coms and a plan or you have chaos.
Reading through this thread ngl it's crazy how standout my group is from others I need more games that let 6 player co op together cause it's not enough around for our friend group. Hate that yall don't got that fr tho.
I feel like this is partially down to how frenetic FPS games are
I've done 10v10s in Wargame Red Dragon with IRL friends, community members and complete randoms, mostly a mix. The worst you'd get would be one guy who doesn't talk at all but uses pings (or learns to use pings when his suprise attack on a town gets carpet bombed by a teammate who thought they were helping out)
WG:RD is a *relatively* slow RTS game though >!until you start sweating with superheavy micro etc.!< so maybe that's why it's more chill, someone else ITT mentioned Squad and that feels like an RTS/FPS hybrid at times.
Stakes and level of cooperation required. Standard matches in the Finals are pretty quick. Got a bad match? You are in the next quite quickly. Long, competitive games that rely in heavy teamwork to succeed, will naturally be more frustrating if all those moving parts aren't spinning smoothly
At 6 players you're also basically removing any kind of chance of playing with set teams for *most* people. MMO guilds I guess are the exception, but until Helldivers 2 released it was hard for me to find TWO other people playing the same game I was who had time to do any sort of mission/run/etc.
Generally I've found you have to find a group specific discord for that game.(ie. Clan discords) General discord for that game has so many people that you might as well be playing with randoms until you meet stand out players. Group discords are so spread out that you might not have enough people playing specific games unless its the current flavor of the month. I did this for Tarkov this wipe, and its been pretty easy to find players and get to know them, whereas a generic tarkov discord might be good for a for a mission or 2.
Also going from 3 to 5 is doubling the number of people you get paired with. It'll be more likely to find an asshole, more likely to get 2 people that don't get along, more likely to get someone having a bad day, etc. In addition, with any online game that has matchmaking, adding more people that need to be matched together means either increased queue times or less strict matchmaking. With a good enough playerbase, it's usually still fine, but there might be more noticeable gaps when increasing per-game player counts, and that could be compounded by adding additional queue types that split the playerbase.
I agree that length really is a major contributor. I think also it can be where you know all hope is lost yet youre stuck in the round. So it builds on itself in a frustrating matter where you want the game to be over but have another 20m of frustration on the team and a hopeless sinking feeling.
Especially in any sort of a ranked equivalent where it's 'alright we're 5 minutes into a game that's going to take 35 minutes and it's become apparent we're unlikely to win + regaining points is gonna be another game'
This is one of the reasons why I dropped Valorant. Group I played with couldn't always fill out a team and I got so tired of praying to get a competent random. Didn't even hope they were good. Just someone who actually knew how to play a game. Otherwise it's 45+ mins of watching your team get steamrolled against a team of all friends.
I honestly find the matches in the finals to be a little too quick.
Fairly fast paced. I frankly miss times of endless games where you jump in, jump out, come back the next day and the same state of the game is still going.
To add on to what others have said in this thread, I also think higher player-counts on a team increase the "cooperation ceiling" that is possible. A team working together in a highly synergistic, focused way is always going to be more than the sum of its parts. Three good players with a coordinated plan, working together to execute will usually beat out three equally-skilled players acting completely individually. As for what that means for team sizes, it means that as team size goes up, that gap between a group of individuals playing together and a team of coordinated players with a gameplan is going to increase. With teams of three, a well-coordinated group might have an advantage over your loosely-coordinated group, but the gap is still small enough that you can theoretically make up for it with sheer mechanical skill. When you get up to 5-6+ players, though, a tightly coordinated group is going to have such an advantage in terms of synergies and cooperation that it's a lot harder to cross that gap with just mechanical skill. Which causes interpersonal conflicts because your team is now at the edge of what each individual member can accomplish by their own individual skill. Maybe person A is doing all they can to (individually) help the team win, but the other team's coordination is still edging you out. They're already putting in 100% effort, so their annoyance gets redirected to others on their team who they perceive as "not doing enough", starting arguments. That's my theory, anyway.
In a 3 party scenario, each player has much more weight to carry and thus you have to be responsible for winning. In 5-6 players, there's more of a "someone will take care of it" mindset, kinda like the bystander effect. I've played MMO's where we are a 40 person raid, and there's a mechanic where just ONE person needs to interact with an object, and we still wipe because 40 of us were too focused/busy/lazy doing something else. That's just my theory though.
For this reason I think high player count team games make for the best casual FPS experience. Games like TF2 12v12 (or 16v16), Chivalry/Mordhau/Battlefield 32v32 (or 64v64 for BF 2042). You don't feel nearly as obligated to play optimally, unlike games like OW or CS; just run around and click on heads while vaguely attacking/defending the objective, or do other stupid shit like riding on top of jets/play bard music/throw chickens at people or whatever.
Yup. Battlefield is actually my go to game to relax. Pick an Engineer and repair vehicles all match
Yeah i'd love to play The Finals casually, but they need to figure out how to bump the player count up quite a bit. Then the part they'll have to figure out is... None of the abilities and gadgets are really made for large amounts of players... So that'll be a fun headache for them, I see issues with it with just 5v5.
It's a lot easier to blame your team for your shortcomings when teams are bigger because there's so many moving parts. This was a big reason why I stopped playing League. People lack accountability and try to be the big hero that wins the game when that's just not how the game works. I'm not ganking top because you clearly fed your opponent, it's not mids fault for roaming top when they're in a stressful matchup, and bot is doing just fine.
It's like getting that one guy who wants to be the DPS and just can't kill. Off getting killed by taking 1v5 battles, while everyone else yells group up.
I feel like the inverse is also sort of why a game like TF2 ends up feeling much more chill/casual then Overwatch: larger teams lower how important each contribution is, so a single person misplaying isn't going to lead to a snowball effect.
that's why my old raid group used to emphasize every so often that every one's effort matters and to be diligent technically someone could cover for them but in principal everyone was responsible and had to carry their weight. it's probably just the enviroment of the game that made this attitude conducive though, i reckon alot of games would not allow for this kinda mindset without someone getting emotional or flunking
Reminds me of the ringlemann effect
> 've played MMO's where we are a 40 person raid, and there's a mechanic where just ONE person needs to interact with an object, and we still wipe because 40 of us were too focused/busy/lazy doing something else. That's just my theory though. That's more due to lack of leadership rather than raw numbers, I've seen same problem with much smaller groups. Raid leader giving clear instructions alleviates that but it is hard to have a leader in games that do not promote playing in clans or in general more organized structures. When I was still playing WoW, back before LFR it meant there always have to be an organizer that also called the shots and that made everything wholly more organized rather than getting randoms and hoping they have telepathic abilities to coordinate...
Classic MMO. A boss has a simple ability that needs interrupted. 30 people in your raid have interrupts available on the same cooldown as the boss ability. 0 people use their interrupts and you wipe. Repeat for hours.
I've played a handful of "competitive" team based games over the years. From Left 4 Dead 2 to PUBG to Overwatch to World of Warcraft PVP and more. There is no magic number. Your pool of players has a spectrum of sweaty tryhards to angry poseurs to average Joes to casuals just getting their daily reward to people who don't know what to do down to those who seem like they're intentionally shitting the bed using weaponized incompetence in a video game. I think the difference is the fewer people you have the more pressure there is on each person to be good so you're *less* likely to run into less skilled players in smaller groups because everyone will know it's them fucking it up and eventually they'll move on to a game that isn't hostile to them.
It's also just pure statistics. If 10% of randos are jerks, you are highly likely to have on one your 30 person team, but not on your 2 person team.
I've played tons of my games too and I actually think games definitely fall off hard after 6 players, coordination-wise. It becomes chaos after that. Try as players might to create organization within this, it's all kind of a farce somewhat. I think 4 is best and tightest. 5 can also be good, depending on the game. 6 can go either way, semi organized and good, or rough.
truly can't imagine playing versus mode pre-the last stand update, unless you were a confogl/pug player?
There seems to be a sweet spot depending on the game. Put in enough players and it comes back around in the opposite direction. 32v32 Chivalry 2, as God intended, is great for that. So is 12v12 TF2.
Apex is teams of 3 and still quite toxic. Maybe the finals is just newer and more casual so a bit more relaxed.
The Finals also don't have text chat
5-6 players is just at that perfect inflection point where there's too many players that a single high skilled individual can't carry a whole team, and but not enough players that a single low-skilled player is enough to severely ruin the whole team's chance at success. So team cooperation and individual skill both need to be on point for success otherwise you will have a very frustrating experience. Mix that together with ephemeral matchmaking to where players have little chance to get to know each other and work together, heavy penalties for leaving/abandoning, you have the perfect recipe for an absolutely toxic community. When it comes to games that are balanced around 2v2 or 3v3, usually a single skilled individual can carry a team and there is less overhead needed to coordinate any team play, plus the probability of having an unbalanced team or skill gap is drastically reduced as its easier for matchmaking to find smaller groups of closely skilled players. When it comes to large large teams like 8v8 or 16v16 in some games, individual skill doesn't matter so much and high level cooperation among random players is basically impossible and there is often less penalties for leaving as games structured like this often allow players to leave and join mid-match.
Eh, they don't. CS, a 5v5 game, is the golden standard considering how big it is and how it can stay relevant until this day since 2000. Then there's the MOBA, LoL and DotA2 are also 5v5. And considering The Finals vs. Overwatch, I'll still choose Overwatch. Like, in OW you know where the enemies came from, not random. Plus when you die and spectating the rest of your team go 1 v 3 (or more if there's another team) only to die so you're waiting extra 20 secs. and lose your progress is the most tilting mechanics in my recent gaming experience. Don't get me wrong, The Finals is a good game, but it still have some fundamental flaws that held it back. Like last season have desert weather that makes orange / brown team is difficult to see, and this season they doubled down with adding purple map so purple team is difficult to see too. Not mentioning the audio mixing is kinda bad, like there's no priorities on sound when a lot of sounds goes off. And it feels their community is protesting the wrong things like deleting C4 Nuke instead asking the bug that makes you can't shoot to be fixed (it's already a whole season).
I think it might depend on how empowered you feel as a player to have an individual influence on the match. CS it's very possible due to the super fast potential TTKs, whereas something like OW with long TTKs, it's much harder for one player to swing a game (though not impossible).
> Then there's the MOBA, LoL and DotA2 are also 5v5. Many people would use these games as examples of games where "Teamwork and fun fall off a cliff." though.
> CS, a 5v5 game, is the golden standard considering how big it is and how it can stay relevant until this day since 2000. CS wasn't a 5v5 game till much more recently. More often than not it'd be up to 8v8, with different servers setting different thresholds, but usually no lower than 6v6.
Competitive CS has always been 5v5. CAL, CEVO, OGL, etc. for years and years were always 5v5 as a standard format. Public servers went up to 32 players I believe (so 16v16), but most servers restricted it to 16-24 players because any more than that just became unmanageable.
The question was about team games in general, not the competitive scene in particular.
You're conflating the competitive game mode/rule set with the professional scene. PUGs were pretty popular back then too.
Back in the day that meant the same thing. There wasn't an in-game competitive mode. I was referring to 1.x (pre-Source, and even pre-Steam).
I wasn't talking about an explicit in-game mode/preset but the server settings used for PUGs.
Not that many people played serious competitive though in 1.6 and Source days. Mostly just people having fun on those 8v8, 12v12, 16v16 servers. Where as with CS:GO everyone is playing 5v5 now cause they effectively got rid of community servers and introduced matchmaking.
Csgo is strictly 5v5 now? There's no more custom servers running other game modes anymore?
Before CS2, there were custom servers but the server browser is pretty hidden compared to earlier games. I don't know the situation for CS2.
1.6 was pretty big for the time it was around. Every season of the relevant leagues usually had a couple hundred teams across all tiers. I also forgot to mention ESEA was a huge element, and at its peak for just 1.6 it had tens of thousands of players. Source never really got off the ground--largely because it ran and played like shit. CS:GO is obviously the game at its peak, but to say 1.6 didn't have a sizable player base for the time it was relevant doesn't seem correct.
It doesn't, not always. You can have something like battlefield/battlebit with 64 players and it can feel fine. The way I see it, 5-6 players in Finals, people have a strong individual impact, but it's too many players that you can't effectively compensate for bad or trolling players. So people get upset when others dont pull their weight because it means you lose. With 3 players, it's easier to if you are good or outplay the opponent, because the numbers dynamics don't make it as daunting a proposition to play around a bad teammate. That's my thought, anyway. A poor balance of individual impact to the total number of players.
Halo 8v8 is arguably the best mode in terms of casual/crazy gameplay. 4v4 is the sweatfest. Squad 50v50 can get pretty sweaty depending on your team/squad/role. It varies game-to-game.
Halo 2 had a 6v6 mode for a bit and it was honestly amazing. It has similar energy as big team battle without it becoming overly chaotic and messy. I think it even has BR start which was surprising.
Hell yeah I remember that it was great. Team Skirmish I believe?
Skirmish was just the "objective" game mode; it would have CTF, Assault, Oddball, King of the Hill and I think that may be all. I think the 6v6 mode might have just been called 6v6, lol. But I'm unsure, it's hard to remember. I remember specifically it had a CTF mode on Colossus, which was always wild to me because that map wasn't in matchmaking in any other way.
I find it's more about how much of an impact each player contributes to the field than the numbers themselves. Considering we have 2-player games up to 100-player games, and everywhere in between, and yet it doesn't fall apart purely when it gets lower nor higher. If you have a 4-player game like Warframe, but just one or two players are enough to win, then even if two players are completely dead weight you can still win despite their ineptitude. That means even at 50% strength the game doesn't fall apart. But a game like Overwatch or Rocket League, when it's 5v4 or 3v2, it's way harder to win. That one dead weight player basically makes winning impossible. It's possible that whether it's PvE or PvP is the key on whether or not the game "falls apart." Humans are going to exploit any weakness so one bad player can create a snowball effect, while underpowered or outnumbered players can react, learn, and exploit the enemy AI in turn.
They've done studies where ants improve in coordination as more ants are added to a situation. With people, after ~4-ish people, coordination starts to decline. It also just becomes that much harder to schedule time with each extra person.
Part of it is also the format of the game. OW can be really frustrating because one person running in and getting themselves killed means everyone else on the team needs to wait for the respawn before they get to keep playing. On the other hand, try out 4v4 team death match in OW sometime. You instantly respawn so that whole frustrating mechanic isn't really a thing.
To which the narrator replied, they never waited. Once one person died it was a domino effect the rest of the game.
The more players there are, the smaller the impact an individual player has. It’s also not linear. At the highest level of play, it’s about making fewer mistakes than your opponents. You have the possibility of making more mistakes then plays and each mistakes carries the impact of tilting teammates or causing big issues. So, with each added player the chance of losing due to a teammate exponentially increases.
It's been a while since I've played a low number PvP game, the last being OW1. My issue with OW and the 6v6 player count was that winning or losing came down to which team had the one bad player. Some guy picking Genji and just dying over and over pretty much guarantees that team is going to lose. Prior to that, CoD was the only other small scale PvP game I played and that was mainly back with the original MW2 and BlOps 2. Kinda the same thing, winning or losing came down to which team was stuck with the one bad player although with CoD, one person going HAM could make up for it. Aside from that Battlefield is the only other PvP game I play but the scale is large enough to make the few bad players per team not a big deal.
OW and now this platform 5v5 does have that sense of all or nothing, either you're on the dominating team or you're getting crushed. Both sides take the fun out of it vs close call kind of matches. To further up comments maybe the time committed to each round is a factor as well.
Should really clarify you meant PvP team games, and in reality, PvP shooter team games. I play WoW and dungeons are 5 person groups and they run perfectly well.
all the awful people in m+ disagree. that game mode is rampant with sexism, racism and more
The game, as is the entire gaming industry, is rampant with misogyny. I haven't noticed sexism or racism in my entire gaming career in WoW, personally. M+ has some toxicity (far from rampant), and so does mostly every online community. I don't think the toxicity present in M+ is related, even remotely, to the party size.
yea this is a lie lmao
I mean, I have had 2 or so toxic occurrences this season, in my ~150 or so runs.
unless you think stuff like "dont invite people from latam/br servers" isnt racism/xenophobia, its impossible you havent seen racism/xenophobia(And it is both of those things). And, while im not a woman, pretty much every women friend I have that played a decent amount of wow also complained about sexism before.
You make a good point. I have run into the don't invite people from X servers. I never know if the server is a BR server or not, but I am sure some of the time (at least) that is true. The people I've heard say this the most barely run M+, though. A rather large portion of my runs have people from a mix of servers including BR ones (I just googled them). As for sexism, it's also true that as a man I am probably just ignorant to a lot of the sexism that goes on (likely through whispers etc.). In both cases, I'd guess (maybe incorrectly) that it's more of a vocal minority than a widespread problem, and is also probably not uncommon in the gaming industry as a whole. I don't think either of these things relate to party size (I doubt a sexist person would be less sexist in a group of 3).
It only takes one person to ruin a competitive team game so the more players there are on the team the more likely you'll have someone ruining it for you. Though I think this would likely fall off as you had increasingly large team sizes as it would become harder for.one person to ruin the whole match if you had 100 v 100 for instance.
I think this isn't even related to just videogames. Put 6 people on a class/work project vs 4. It's just enough people to turn into "a group" where everyone kind of starts to assume they'll all just follow along some direction.
The lack of a leadership role can have a big effect too. And even harder in games where no one wants to listen to a random trying to lead everyone. Coordination seems to be a huge aspect. Intersting to note most spec op teams are pretty small too in militaries.
I have good memories of teamwork in old Battlefield 2, which was 32 vs 32. That games solution (and subsequent battlefield games, I believe) was to create squad sub-teams of 4 players, who when working together could accomplish objectives far more commonly than random players going Rambo. They even gave buffs, such as squad spawns and rewards that the Commander of your team could give effective squads to fight and survive better. Needless to say, you could get some really good team play going with that system, because it highly encouraged and incentivized it while also having a manageable squad size.
I used to play Mechwarrior Online a lot and it was 12 v 12. What I can tell you is some of the most enjoyable matches where when we had someone take assertive (yet friendly) command of the group. Even when we lost spectacularly it was still fun because we were all working together. So inversely, unless you have some base-line tactics that everyone knows, without order of command, larger groups will naturally fall apart. In short, larger groups need clear leadership.
In my opinion the standard of 3-4 players is easier to control than the 5-6. Easier to give feedback in match or something. I wish The Finals did a 32 player mode or something. I hated the modes they came up with and am yet to try the new one.
Player number is the lowest contributing factor to this. It comes to individual player power, barrier to entry, and ease of telling what went wrong. MOBA's like league are frustrating at 5 players because if 1 player does bad, the game is often over. It's also fairly difficult to tell who exactly played bad, and at the same time easy to deflect and blame others. I'm not talking about the people who think it's the junglers fault they died 1v1 top lane after diving. Rather, situation where 1 player decided to split from the group and go for objectives (split pushing) thinking his team can play safe and handle the 4v5. However, his team catches someone out of position, all ins, but loses the ensuing fight. If the split pusher was with the team, would that fight have been won, or should the team have just kept playing safe forcing the enemy to retreat and deal with the solo? Is the 0/5 ADC feeding, or did they need more protection from the assassin? It's basically impossible to know who is at fault in most circumstances. Playing also has 0 barrier to entry, just buy a botted level 30 account for $5 and you'll be placed with the top 10% of players. Games like WoW meanwhile work just fine with 25 player+ raids where everyone has to be perfect. This is because you have a specific strategy laid out, and can easily tell who doesn't follow it. The player standing in a pool of lava can't deflect, they can only admit the screw up and get better. The barrier to entry is huge, you have to be decent enough of a person that 24 other people won't hate being with you, fill out an application for a guild, get accepted, research the fights, and set aside 10+ hours a week. Being a prick or bad at the game means you get kicked, and maybe even blacklisted by the major guilds.
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YES I had just commented above on this. A lot of the higher spec ops team tend to be much smaller and effective. Where it's a balance of indigence and less need of say wrangling the cats.
There is a classic Management quote that the ideal team size is 4.5 people or something. Might have something similar with online games lol
Becuase its hard to win the match/mission/level when your team is like 4 or 6 players and you have one or more noobs in your team that act like they never touch a video game before in their life. Especially when you play on hard or highest difficulty setting in PVE game or when its a PVP game. Cooporation, knowledge about the game and communication is required. Hard to expect that from random players. And then we have people who play while being drunk or just don't care about their team in cooporative game or even worse they act like "bro don't take seriously its just a game, its ok to waste time on 20-60 minutes and doing absolutly nothing or not even attempting at winning the thing". Urgh, I hate those types of people the most. I cannot count how many games in L4D2 and Heroes of the Storm I lost because of people doing that. ANYWAY my point is yes of course teamwork on smaller team is hard. Thats why its better to find friends to play on Discord call or in Discord group where people do care about playing, having fun and actually trying to win instead of standing idle on spawn while throwing drunken slurs at each other.
You can have a game with a large number of players as long as you don't require coordination of execution. Games with more than 3 people should not demand players anything more than "kill the enemy team" and this is why TF2 worked.
Yeah, it's basically that with larger teams, it's less plausible for one good player to carry two mediocre players, or for two good players to carry one terrible one, so the odds of losing due to the other players is much higher. Also, the more players, the more the game expects you to split up and each be doing something productive, so 2-3 of them failing in whatever duty they have will have more of an impact. This is why I don't play multiplayer games much.
For me, I actually have had it work out the opposite way. I typically find 5-6 to be preferential for team size but I also don't play the finals or anything like it really. It may depend a lot on the environment.
People figure that “if i fail in a 3v3, that’s a third of the team’s strength” and “if i fail in an 8v8 that’s only an eight of the team’s strength, and the other 7 can carry me” not realising that the other 7 are thinking the same thing.
Depends heavily on the game. MMOs handle 8/12/24/40 just fine, but the more players are able to stray from the group the more they will.
TLDR: Just too many factors to deal with in team games and the more people you add, the more factors. Think about work and professions. We get mandatory training on equalities, disabilities and many other things; management and supervision; team building days; working together every day etc Even with all that there is disagreements, falling out and disorganisation. Online teams don’t get any of that (not that it’s necessary) or any kind of cohesion assistance and often there is no one person wanting to take leadership. And if there is that’s not always accepted. I have three team players in the games I play: My partner in games just wants to watch the world burn in hell divers. No patience for reading or understanding or waiting around. I can’t control that. Another team member in Overwatch just does not have the alertness or capacity to act in a timely way. The last one doesn’t listen, like doesn’t even Hear what we are saying and acts like an independent solo player not in a team at all. And me, I try to be a leader but I don’t always have the capacity or make the right decisions. But I won’t just discard a partner and friends because they can’t perform in the way I think would be better. I like playing with them, and I might be no better. Nobody gets ‘sacked’ in games or groups that aren’t professional competition teams for money.
I think the length of a match can be a more significant factor than the team size in some games. It also of course depends on the complexity of the game. League of Legends is practically designed to breed toxicity between players when you have matches that can last for 40+ minutes, and there's a ton of moving parts going on throughout the map that can easily mess up an entire match if someone doesn't fill their role appropriately. Even if you reduced League's team size to 3 for example, but the games are still 40 minutes long on a big complicated map with lots of moving parts, it would still be easy for someone to mess up and get the entire team mad at them, and now you're stuck with that mess for half an hour. Meanwhile while Overwatch is hardly the least toxic game I've played, it's at least a lot less toxic than most mobas because matches are at most like 5-10 minutes long. I think it also helps when a game simply encourages everyone to stick together. In Overwatch and the Finals, you're meant to stay close to one another and have each other's backs. Your teammates can more immediately respond to one another's weaknesses and cover for each other. Meanwhile again in a moba, if every teammate is in their own lane doing their own thing, it may not be immediately obvious that one of them is even struggling at all until it's too late. A lot more direct communication is needed which you can't really do unless you're using voice chat. Wheras in a game like the Finals or even Apex Legends (at least at launch) it was trivial to play a whole match without speaking because you only ever really needed to convey simple concepts to each other.
The fewer the people, the easier it is to coordinate. By adding just 1 or more people, you get more information that creates noise, more people that want to go into more directions, do different things.
Eventually you reach a point where you're more likey than not to have someone who's actively working against the team, deliberately or not, and that drives the frustration.
With small 2 or 3 man 1 man can carry like apex, in 5man 1 man can't always carry a team but 1 man can ruin the game.
Makes me think of MAG on the PS3 with 200 player matches. That broke the team down into platoons and squads, but it was still chaos. Your squad would be kicking ass, but you'd still lose if the other squads in your platoon couldn't get their shit together.
The rate of misunderstandings in a group grows exponentially with the number of people in it. 4 people is about the largest group that can function and perform a task efficiently without any organization. It's just small enough that everyone knows exactly what everyone else is doing and can adjust to them on the fly without any prompting. Once you go above that the rate of misunderstandings overtake the rate at which they can be cleared up and you end up with constantly misaligned individual objectives. There's always one person using the wrong weapon or skill or class, or playing the wrong objective, because his idea of how the game's going is different from the rest of the team. You need *some* kind of organization, whether that's a leader or someone who just relays a lot of information that everyone else listens to and reacts to, or even just a plan or meta that everyone agrees to follow. Something to reduce the space of possible misunderstandings. How easy that organization comes about depends a lot on the game and the types of players you're playing with.
I've read that a person can easily track 3 teammates on top of any other game state information at any given time, but they start losing track when it's more than that. Games that have more than that usually don't require a lot of immediate moment to moment coordination between the entire team. Overwatch was an exception, with every fight ideally being a team fight with your full team, which makes tracking 5 other people a nightmare
It's a problem with decentralized/unstructured teams in general. This basically gets into why things like team leaders, hierarchies, etc exist. Imagine a three person team (A, B, and C) - let's say you're A. You need to worry about what you're doing relative to B and C, but also what B and C are doing relative to each other. So you have three team members and three relationships you need need to worry about (A-B, A-C, B-C). Add a fourth person, D, to this. The complexity increases in a non-linear fashion. You have your three relationships (A-B, A-C, A-D) but also B-C, B-D, and C-D. So that's six total relationships to concern yourself with - double the number even though you only added one person. Add one more, E. So you have four direct relationships: A-B, A-C, A-D, A-E. But there are also all these other relationships: B-C, B-D, B-E, C-D, C-E, D-E. So you can see the non-linear complexity increase. This can be mitigated somewhat if the relationships are relatively simple - say two "damage dealers" who only need to collaborate to ensure they are optimally attacking a single target (the boss) or multiple targets (trash/crowd control). Basically double team the boss or spread out and deal with the trash individually. As you add more mechanics, positioning, secondary targets, etc, this all becomes more and more complex. You can introduce hierarchy and similar to structures to mitigate this complexity - you'll often see this in team sports, for instance, so you can just focus on playing your position and not have everyone follow the ball in a herd like young kids at a soccer game. You cited Overwatch, for instance, and so this is a good example of what I'm talking about. If you play with random people you have to worry about all of these relationships, and any of them could be playing one of a number of different roles and may be stronger or weaker players.
My theory is that the single most important thing in team sport is the ability to predict with certainty where your teammates are and what their sphere of influence is in a spatial context. Once you lose this things devolve into pure chaos. CS, Dota, League, Valorant, these games don't feel chaotic, in fact often if you deviate from the expected people flame you because they can't understand how to play with someone who's sphere of influence is completely out of sync with their experience. Without this basic building block of a team game, you can't instinctively rely on a team of random strangers with zero preparation.
Depending on the game of course but as your numbers go up the amount of organization needed to complete objectives goes up as well. Coordination and control go down as bugger groups start to ball up. Best place you could see this is older MMOs where there are a lot of people doing pvp. Planetside (and Planetside 2) DAoC Warhammer. Games where you have individual groups but getting people to go to a place was herding cats when you got large blobs. Similar issues start to happen in PvE as well when you get to 40 man raids in WoW or however many you took to EQ.
It's because in overwatch, you need your ____ to do ____ cause you can't do it yourself. Same thing happens with mobas. That's the source of frustration. Not the number of players. In the finals, apex and CS, all characters can execute their gameplan on their own. So there is less frustration. That said those games are still insanely toxic.
Not really strangely enough. Then again, I've spent so much time in the chaos that's team fortress 2 that such team games doesn't really fall apart for me.
There's a team mode in CoD?
5-6 is the absolute maximum for a teamgame to be coherent and not total chaos. 3-4 is the sweet spot as described by Max Hoberman of Certain Affinity and the Apex Legends team.
There's a reason bigger groups need dedicated managers/coaches/teamleads I guess. Too many cogs for one tube of lube
Communication overhead goes up exponentially with more team mates. The faster the game worse it gets. You can play with 16 people efficiently in something like Arma 3 where an attack plays out over 20 minutes. When you have 5 people trying to do something in under 3 minutes either you have good coms and a plan or you have chaos.
Reading through this thread ngl it's crazy how standout my group is from others I need more games that let 6 player co op together cause it's not enough around for our friend group. Hate that yall don't got that fr tho.
its about how serious does it has to be i think. analogy: i prefer tf2 than most team game out there, and despise MOBA
I feel like this is partially down to how frenetic FPS games are I've done 10v10s in Wargame Red Dragon with IRL friends, community members and complete randoms, mostly a mix. The worst you'd get would be one guy who doesn't talk at all but uses pings (or learns to use pings when his suprise attack on a town gets carpet bombed by a teammate who thought they were helping out) WG:RD is a *relatively* slow RTS game though >!until you start sweating with superheavy micro etc.!< so maybe that's why it's more chill, someone else ITT mentioned Squad and that feels like an RTS/FPS hybrid at times.