wow.

If this continues hopefully all the regular players will wander over to the Tomb after the are banned for being to good...

No no, if the difference between the two teams is 5 or more flag captures, then everyone with 3 caps or more on the winning team is banned.  So, it's even more retarded than you're thinking it is.

I remember thinking that was a weird rule when I first saw it - then I realized they never enforce it and it would be absurd to try because it is constantly broken by the best players and half the time you can't rebalance the teams because it's a situation like leg + noobs vs. a few ok to good players + noobs.
It is a kind of nice idea, if teams are unbalanced they should be balanced - in reality it's hard to achieve without some automation. If they are going to do something like that they should base it off the point ranking system - the total points for each team should be as equal as possible, if there is a significant deviation in points COMBINED with a big spread in the score, then autobalance the teams by forcing a player swap.

glad to hear it!

I can argue both sides of this disagreement for boredom's sake :P Please do not flame me for the following message. I am trying very hard to be impartial.

Well, Machinehead advertises FC as a newbie server, so as a result he wants newbies to win. That can be seen as good, because it boosts their confidence and might make them come back. After playing for a while they may think they are actually getting better and will move on to different servers, enriching the entire CTF community in effect. We all started as noobs some time ago, especially me. I only started playing HL2 DM last December, and only occasionally. June was when I started to play in earnest, right before the CTF switch. I'm sure we can all agree that newbies deserve a little bit of leeway or else some may not come back. I was sick of getting killed repeatedly in CTF when I first played on FC, but I noticed that the more experienced players would often switch teams around to fair things up, circa June 2006. This may be an explanation for the rules that Machinehead lists.

However, from a more experienced player's view, the FC rules may seem like crap. A lot of the time, we just want to kill, kill, kill. Or repeatedly cap. For many, these point spread rules are seen as limitations on competition. Peace can't switch teams because the mod is biased into making teams even by number of players, not by skill. As a result, for being possibly the only person to capture flags on the server, he is in danger of being banned simply because the number of captures is off by more than 5. I have seen this rule flash through the server all the time and usually, it is not a problem. However, in the case only one player is really capturing and the other players are only looking for kills, the point balance can quickly shift. It's no secret that even on the Tomb we often get odd point spreads, such as 20-0 on pedestal or 15-1 on dirtwork, etc., but we usually don't worry too much about it, unless clan stacking outside of scrims is involved. The process to even teams by skill is far to difficult and could result in one person against three, with the one capturing and the other three only killing him and not going for caps, which is a little bit ridiculous, to say the least.

My own opinion? Machinehead should evaluate the impact of his rules on his server membership. Soon, if not already, experienced players unhappy with his rules will begin to leave FC in flocks. Then we shall see if Machinehead can run a server only filled with noobs.

Notice this post does not mention points. We shall pretend points don't matter in this argument, even though everyone knows they do, even those who say they don't care :P. Come on, we're all a little pissed when a noob takes 50 points off a you for a spawnkill or a typekill. :)

Just my two cents. Anyway, I hope this matter is resolved peacefully.

-elf

If you think it's bad, go to the HL2CTF forum and look what's happened.  People are needless to say, pissed.