I accept, when a clan stack is a PURE roll it can be frustrating – even for the stackers. I’d like to say that if my clan were stacking and this happened, at least 1 of us would switch sides to even up (or attempt to even up) the game. But you can’t say it only happens when clans stack.

Still, it sounds like fun. I can hear the piteous whining now…

I’m not a big fan of generalizations. I like to stay intellectually objective. I read your entire post xeno, and I disagree for you on one fundamental point: You claim that clan stacking is fun. For who? The stackers, obviously. The ones who aren’t in the circle of friends, even if you’re on the side they stacked on, don’t have fun. I don’t have fun when we win dustbowl in 3 minutes. I don’t have fun when the BLUs throw themselves at us in unorganized ragged hordes who get blown up before they get anywhere.

Vice versa. Clan stacking took the fun out of this game for me and will probably continue to taint any teamVteam game of this nature for long to come. I support playing with your friends; just scramble the damn teams.

If not, then the other team is over-powered and 12 people on the other side aren’t having “F, a U, and an N” because of the selfishness of people who press TAB at the start of a game and wait for some good players to join a team before they follow them. Or perhaps worse, don’t bother to switch teams when they are obviously unfair.

-1

Stacking to me is just a colloquialism for “I play too much Counter Strike and thus have no experience in teamwork.” It’s one thing to complain about the same 3 or 4 players dominating you in separate events each. It’s another thing to complain about how that spy started sapping your sentry and that soldier came rushing in, leaving your sentry hapless and unrepairable until the damn sapper is off.

And clearly, none of your teammates are interested in helping you distract the soldier for the mere one second you need to remove the sapper and repair teh sentry, like that pyro who just ran by you to get back to his little backburner hole-up for a couple more kills he won’t get because the enemy realized what he was doing 60 seconds into the match.

Also, it’s not true that they won’t only attack clans verbally! I’m usually on with mah lombax buddy, and they’ll go “You invisible head shot scripted cheaters! GAH!”, because they probably realized that we ARE friends. Because of our screen names. :O

As someone who only plays on public servers, I understand that pub games suck more often than not, due to a refusal to communicate and a gung-ho lone wolf attitude that people bring from other FPSs. If I had a clan, I’d be tempted to stack, but surely the clan can start their own private dedicated server? It’s the “let’s go pwn sum nubs” attitude of certain gamers that annoy me- those who enter a public game, clan stack, and wipe the floor with their disunited enemies. I can’t see how steamrolling your opponents is fun if they’re not putting up a cohesive defence.

But then again, our public server is populated with 10+ clan mates in the evening, so we are always clan-stacking on BOTH sides.

Personally, I view clan stacking as a lower form of griefing, no good games come out of it unless the clan is rubbish. Sure, we can grin and bear it, and I do, but does that make it any better? Of course not.

If you want to play with your mates, that’s all well and good. If you’re going to do it on a pub, and those friends happen to be experienced clanners, put some of them on the other team. Make it interesting, and fair.

-1 respect points.

One problem is that most people will leave the losing team as soon as it becomes apparent they are being stacked against. This creates a high turnover within the losing team, which makes teamwork harder.

Another problem is that people on the losing team is rarely populated by more than a few players that are interested in anything more than their own point totals. I don’t know if these players are listening, or if they just mute everyone else in the server and ignore the chat box, but either way anything you say goes unnoticed. Two or three people on a team working together doesn’t usually swing the tide against a clan-stacked team.

That being said, you are spot on with the WHY of people team stacking. It is FUN! Even if I am playing with clan mates and losing, it is still more fun than playing alone, simply because there are people to react to things with.

As I said; “The goal of clan stacking isn’t to win – it’s to enjoy the game. The game for which teamwork was intended to play a vital role.”

The fun isn’t derived from endlessly crushing the opposition – it’s the gibbs that emerge as a result of that. Asking your medic over voice to “gimme kritz!” and then watching some helpless BLU’s get blown to pieces infront of you. That is what TF2 is all about. Not quite mindless chaos, but pretty damn close.

I also think it depends on the server how much of a difference clan stacking makes. On good, public (usually vanilla) servers teamwork happens naturally just through the flow of the game. Clan stacking hardly upsets the balance, but yes – on some servers, and with some teams it can be terrible.. I wouldn’t say usually though. Usually, it just makes me want to kill them all the more.