Auto Join Team = Blue Team

[Professor_Frink]

So I've always wondered about this...on TV6, when you select "auto" to join a team, you will always get put on the blue team if the team sizes are equal. The only way it will put you on red team is if red team is down a player.

Most players tend to think of the auto-join as a "random" team assignment if the team sizes are equal ("I'm not team stacking, I clicked auto-join!") - which it is not.

Any way to change it so that there's a 50/50 chance of going blue/red team if team sizes are equal?

[Bronze Fox]

For any A/D map, auto will always put you on Blu unless it's not an option.

[Zork Nemesis]

For any A/D map, auto will always put you on Blu unless it's not an option.

Also applies to Payload. This is actually how the game was programmed and isn't affected by our server setup. I'm sure there's server mods that do give the random team option a truly random outcome though.

[cam]

After being bugged by that for freaking ever and thinking that it was a bug exclusive to TV6 (i could have sworn TV7 dustbowl was different) I did some testing and it looks like this is the case. That's so weird! When I click on random I want RANDOM.

[black_and_blue]

Yes, this is by design.

Originally random always meant random, but a long time ago (I think it was during the first year after the game came out), Valve decided that Attack/Defend maps were better balanced when the attacking team had the extra player, so they released an update that always put random players on BLU.

[Professor_Frink]

Interesting that it is by design. I bring it up because often times, players on TV6 choose the random team assignment in an attempt to avoid team-stacking. More importantly, it is used most just after a server reset and red team is generally in need of an extra player at this point because many people join late, go afk, etc right after a map reset. I would love to see stats on TV6 stage 1 right after a map reset vs. any other time. I see red get steamrolled often there....

[frostdillicus]

I don't think Red getting steamrolled on A/D maps after a reset/map switch is limited to TV6. Defense takes a bit more team coordination than offense does. People just pick their favorite class and go which usually leads to terrible class makeup. Sure, some people look and say, "Oh hey, we don't have an engineer," and will go that way. A lot of people don't.

Also with people spawning in at different rates, if your defensive players (Medic, Demo, Engineer etc) that require some sort of setup time (Uber, Sticky Traps, Buildings) might not get enough time to set things up.

I'm sure everyone already knows all this, I'm just bored at work.

Also, there is no such thing as random on computers. They need to change the button to say pseudorandom. You know, cause nerd.