Can't Change Sides

Like the new stacking guidelines, but a couple of time today, we could not switch to the other side, and the message said TOO MANY PLAYERS (even on a 5-2 stack).

CowboyUp can confirm this happened to him too

I have made three changes yesterday.

One - deliberate stackers are to be immediately banned.

Two - jaymod team balance has been activated. This prevents players from moving to a bigger team. It is the only technical way to prevent humans from stacking the teams. Since our repeated attempts at using human intervention have failed badly, it is time to acknowledge that we need a technical solution.

Three - I have also disabled omnibot team balancing. This is to prevent the omnibots from moving to the smaller team whenever someone changes teams. This prevents the omnibots from "helping" people to stack. When people leave one side for the other, the omnibots will no longer switch teams to compensate.

So the bigger team remains one player bigger, and jaymod team balance will then prevent anyone else from joining the now-bigger team. The next player to join the server must join the smaller team. No one else can follow the stacker to the bigger team until people leave or admins use their !putteam command to fix the teams.

Admins may also !shuffle when needed.

The onus is still on the admins to maintain team balance. They will need to move both players and omnibots when the teams get messed up. However, now the players no longer have the freedom to jump back and forth perpetually trying to find an advantage. So the admins should not have to waste so much time trying to move people only to watch them restack the teams five minutes later.

Admins need to watch the teams and use !putteam to move players and bots into balance. The bots will no longer enable the stacking behavior by moving to adjust for the stacking. Once one team gets extra players no one will be able to join it because there will be too many slots taken.

These two measures together (banning those who deliberately stack, and  making it extremely difficult to change teams so it becomes very difficult to stack) should finally fix the endless crisis of team stacking.

This is actually in the player's favor, as it will be more difficult for you to deliberately stack, so there will be less need to enforce the new "no deliberate stacking" rule. Otherwise we would very quickly ban half the players. This way it is harder to stack.