[boelter]

Since we're having such a productive debate, here's my take.

I like that scramble is an option. My utopian ideal of democracy makes me think that a vote for scramble would be the best option, but of course it would fail to griefing and abuse. So we have mandated auto scramble, enforced by Valve's mysterious conditions. This is no better, in fact, worse. The whole point, to my understanding, is to avoid a stack-influenced steamroll. After all, nobody likes getting rolled. However, auto scramble actually does nothing to prevent this in (best case) 50% of matches.

I really do think that it also affects team play, or even individual play. For example, I am a mediocre player. Every once in a while I'll get a few lucky crits and have a great round. I can even hold my own and sometimes score highly on a team that's clearly over-matched. Now, if everyone else is screwing around or disconnecting (be it because of the stack, or impending auto scramble), my incentive to end up at the top of the score board is diminished, because I fear that I'll be considered one of the top players by the scrambler, and end up as an "anchor" player for one of the new teams. What this will do is give the new team I'm on a poor leader with maybe two of the good players from the stacked team, and any chemistry the underdogs were building is gone, as is the drive to hold our own as underdogs.

Obviously that's not always the case, and auto scramble can greatly improve a match up. However, so can a lucky auto-balance when the newbs start bailing. I think Takara and DataStorm have the right of it, auto scramble isn't a good solution here. Glouch's point -- stacking and auto scramble are both bad, it's a matter of which is worse -- I'm leaning towards auto scramble is worse. Bloo's suggestion might be the best, if it could be implemented well. I think that would prove difficult. Perhaps I don't spend enough time playing to know how bad the stacking problem is, but I think a better alternative may be to disable spectator again.