R6 Siege needs the “avoid as teammate” (blacklist) feature
From a player’s perspective, I see three main problems with Siege, important first:
- cheaters
- moron teammates
- everything else: sound, maps, operators, etc.
I’ve commented on cheaters many times before. This time it’s about the second most important problem in my opinion: moron teammates. Quite often, there are people who you play with in a team once and don’t want them on your team ever again. Therefore, Siege needs the “avoid as teammate” feature.
It could be an additional button similar to report buttons, or a button directly on the scoreboard. After marking a teammate to avoid, you would see it on the scoreboard. In future matches, matchmaking servers would try to avoid placing that person on your team.
From the developer side, it’s relatively easy to implement. I’ll get into the technical things a bit to prove I have an idea what I’m talking about.
Player IDs look like this: f67508fb–fd32–414e–8c8c–e1dff7b2eb92 (KingGeorge, if you’re wondering). You can see them on TabStats. It’s 36 characters, counting the hyphens, or 32 without. They look like hexadecimal numbers (0–9,a,b,c,d,e,f).
Each hex digit takes 4 bits of memory to store, meaning one byte can hold two digits. Therefore, one ID needs 16 bytes of storage. In a properly organized database even less, because it could use private sequential IDs. This means that one server could easily store billions of those in memory, and much more on disk.
The game could also store the IDs of people to avoid locally, and send them each time to a matchmaking server. If you had 1000 people on your list, it’s 16 kB. In terms of network usage, it’s nothing.
People you report for whatever reason could be automatically added to the avoid list. Maybe this mechanism is already in place and working? Probably not, but who knows.
I believe this mechanism would greatly improve matchmaking experience. Over time, you could weed out a lot of bad seeds. And it would give people a sense of control. Currently all you can do is to report someone. Most probably it won’t have any effect, and everybody knows this. It’s an empty gesture. Contrast this with blacklisting: you click and at least you know that if circumstances allow, you won’t be in a team with that person ever again.
By circumstances I mean that if everybody has a list of people to avoid, there might be conflicts. In middle ranks you get matched with the same people rather rarely, so it shouldn’t be a big problem. If there’s a lot of avoiding to be done and not everybody can have their way, a server would just flip a coin on conflicting requirements. The avoid list is not meant as a guarantee, it’s a best effort thing.
