- Hide the identities of the players during the game. If players don't know the identities and skill level of their opponents, the risk associated with trusting an opponent to coordinate an attack will be much larger. One could argue that knowing the identity of your opponents and your history of games with them is useful information to determine and adapt your game strategy, but I think that whoever your opponents are, should never really affect your play. Ideally, players should always aim to play the best possible moves, considering all possible moves their opponents might play.
This is a great suggestion. The worst examples I am seeing is because of familiarity between those that play all the time and the fact that without needing to say anything they know they can rely on their opposite to play in a certain way based on many previous games with them.
Further to this, the "metagame" i.e. not the results of any individual game but a significant series of games over time, result in them taking actions not because it was seen as best interest in a specific game, but the trust of all future games between 2 players. This causes bad outcomes in individual games as there is implied collusion between the 2 regulars that often play each other. Take out the knowledge of who you are playing and this disappears, which is much better for the game!
I think the rules forbid precisely what is made explicit: you cannot employ prearranged teaming, nor teaming via chat during play. For more clarity, we might want to ask Martin0 what else, if anything, is covered under those rules.
@reasons in this phase we are trying to clarify the rules. Rehearsing the exact same wording doesn't make it much clearer. The term "teaming" is disputed right now. Do you have any idea about what this term might mean? If you do, please share it with us. If you don't, then you can't claim that you understand the rule, in which case you are not in a position to offer an informed opinion about the issue at hand: Was the game #379049 played by the rules, or some players gained an advantage by violating the rules? Please don't obfuscate the matter by stating your opinion about what the rules should be. We are talking about what the rules are right now.
Getting an answer by @Martin0 would be great of course, but I must note that currently we don't have many competing definitions of "teaming". Only one (#36) has been presented so far. It would be helpful if we had at least another one, so that we have something to discuss.