 What's up everybody, I'm the Mangus, you were awesome and I've been enjoying the hell out of Fault. I've had some really great games, I've been playing heroes I've barely touched in Paragon, like Kuang, and I've been refining my Darbash gameplay. Fault's unique aspect and item system combined with these skill-focused ability changes have me rooting for the success of Strange Matter Studios. But here in Fault, there'd be monsters. Those monsters are coordinated five stacks, often consisting of X-Master Paragon players that straight shit on us poor so-look-you commandos. I have nothing against people playing as a team. There is absolutely nothing wrong with playing with your friends or meeting new people by buddying up on Discord. It's one of the things that makes games fun, but at this stage in the development of Fault, I think that players solo queuing into a stacked team is having an overall negative effect on growth. Now, I don't mind losing. I don't mind getting outplayed, but when you suffer a crushing, unrecoverable defeat at the hands of a well-coordinated team that starts the game off with a full deathball jungle invade followed by a tower dive killing your mid laner, it's straight to moralizing. You get so far behind that no one can farm, everyone gets shit on, and no one gets to learn anything from the match. As an experienced player, I know it's going to happen and I just shake it off and move to the next game, but I've seen many, many people losing their minds when this happens, calling the game broken and logging off or hurling insults at everyone else. It's not a good look. People wanting to experience a Paragon-like game or having that joy ruined, and any new players who just happened upon the game will in steam are instantly driven away. Sometimes it's not even a stack. Maybe it's just a good team that wards well pings when someone is missing from their lane and keeps an eye on the map, but just knowing that five stacking is possible leads people to instantly assume that any kind of coordinated play is due to stacking, which is also a problem. Instead of saying, hey, the mid laner seems to be alerting everyone when I rotate, so let's watch out for that. People instead say, oh, for fuck's sake, it's another five stack, just surrender now and save some time. So what's the solution? Well, the obvious fix is to just make your own stack. You can use Strange Matters Discord to find a team, or the Fault Hub Network Discord is also a great place with plenty of players willing to group up. You'll probably find out pretty quick that five stacking doesn't just instantly guarantee wins, and it may change your outlook a bit, but having a good coordinated group where everyone knows what role they want to play sure does help out a lot. But this solution isn't for everyone. Lots of people just want to be able to sit down quick, queue up for a game, and play without having to deal with a bunch of people that they don't know, and then you have that one guy who refuses to use push to talk, but also refuses to turn his fucking TV down. I hate that shit. I'm a pretty chill dude most of the time, but I've straight yelled at a guy in a Warcraft raid that had a hot mic and a baby crying in the background. I mean, for fuck's sake, if you need to take care of your baby, then what are you doing playing this game? People acting like I'm the monster in that situation. Anyway, if you're a social butterfly, then just join one of these Discords and find a team, but if you're an awkward fuck like most of us are, that really isn't a fix. Another solution I've seen through the stack problem is for games to implement specific modes designed for team play. You can't queue into normal matches with more than three people. This is a neat option, but I don't think Fault currently has a large enough player base to segregate the community like this. You would just be extending queue times and straining the matchmaking system. Possible idea for the future, but a no-go for now in my opinion. I think the best way to handle things is a combined approach. Limit the size of parties for now until the game grows a larger player base. Once they have a sufficient number of concurrent players, I don't know what that number would be, they can start having a team league. It would be stupid to limit party size forever, but at this stage of the game's development, allowing teams to queue into casual seems to be doing more harm than good. People assume that any kind of team coordination is a result of a five stack instead of just good old fashioned good play and while the perception may be wrong, the fact that it's a standard perception of the game will be detrimental to Fault's growth going forward. If you guys have your own solution that you think could be applied to this problem, please let me know in the comments below. I would be really, really interested to see what you guys think because these are the only solutions I could really think of. I truly hope that something can be done because Fault is fun as all hell. I've had some really good back and forth games. I've had a few come from behind victories and I've had teams pull a win out over me when I thought the game was all but one. However, these games are too few and too far between. Most games of Fault are decided in the first 10 minutes and five stacking or even the perception of five stacking is one of the contributing factors to this. If you enjoyed the video, please hit that like button and subscribe for more. But for now, this is the Man Goose signing off. You guys have a good one. Man Goose!