@teflonlove said:
Well, the point I was trying to make in an apparently too concise way:
If the teams on a server are broken beyond repair, don’t waste your time and change the server instead.
In some cases one might be able to improve the balance by switching to the other team (which can be a nice challenge), but the cases you mentioned already describe a situation where you are on the losing team and giving your best does not help.
As everybody, I have been on both sides of broken and beyond teams. And I actually rather be on the losing team for a little challenge and sometimes it would help to have another merc than those of my choice.
Provided the players are somewhat sensible and skilled, it’s interesting to find your role with limited options. Especially for Stopwatch, where you have to cover both sides with your loadout.
For example on Bridge: Do I pick Nader to blow up the generator as attacker or pick Arty to destroy the EV as defender? Do I pick an engineer to help repairing the EV or Red Eye to provide smoke during repairing? Do I pick Aura to establish a solid defense or Phonix to more efficiently help pushing during attack? Does my loadout fix missing roles my team mates left open so far?
IMHO this provides a kind of depth that many other “hero based” games lack.
Yes, I totally agree that this is a very unique thing and for stopwatch which is one of the most fun modes to play. I wouldn’t want to change that for stopwatch.
You could also have another objective mode, where you could chose among all mercs and one where you could only chose 3 mercs. But distributing among many game modes would again limit the players for one game mode.
What would you think to make objective a “sandbox” mode where you can learn the maps and have unlimited merc choices and stopwatch leave as it is? Would that make every new player chose and stick to objective mode (would that be a bad thing? 
)?
One could look at that like a beginners mode.
In the end in every playerbase you have players which play to win, play to have fun only and try hard wnbpros. In course of countless hours playing the same game, you get to a point where you want to increase the difficulty. battlefield series, this is the hardcore mode. In enemy territory you also had jaymod and noquarter servers which had stuff like double jump, huge player numbers (32vs32) and was generally belittled from an etpro mod player, where you had much more recoil, less ammo and start from xp 0 every game.
I just think that serving to every class of gamer in a game, would make the people keep playing the same game. For me, increasing the playerbase is equal to increasing the customer count: you need to make the customer not just come once, but regularly.
Objective would be sandbox level (noquarter/jaymod).
Stopwatch felt always harder and would be hardcore level (etpro).
Ranked would be competitive level (scrims, clanbase).
)?