I was going to say...
"Friendship is Magic", but after hearing the latest news about the series, what I'm going to say is,
"Meh".
Playing Halo with or against close friends means more kills, according to a new study titled Friends FTW! Friendship and competition in Halo: Reach by US researchers Winter Mason and Aaron Clauset. The pair conducted an online survey of Halo players and also used the Halo API to suck down anonymous data describing 2,445,617 …
I play a lot of multiplayer online, used to be Uncharted 2 and now I play Killzone3 and some Uncharted 3.
Friends split over teams. I have been in Uncharted 2 matches where a group of 5 friends is distributed over 2 teams, the spare member will help his friends to the detriment of the other players, occasionally you can boot them. But when it happened to me I just went for my friends.
Killzone 3 is easy to invite friends between teams, but there is also the fun aspect of getting your friend back, sneak around the map. find them and shoot them in the back.
I see a lot of the same players - friends of friends of friends ect. NOONE helps the other team, but will relish going up against their friends, friends vs friends can be some pretty hectic matches. I have never helped the opposing team, but I have swapped teams at the beginning of a match to join with friends.
Now teaming with friends.
Best thing is the communication, where the enemy is, where infiltrators are, calling for medics, changing classes to what the team needs. This is much stronger than running a group of randoms. The class issue is surprisingly important, as people have their favourites and don't like to change.
I personally like random matches as I get more points (top of leader board more often), but with friends you get more wins and I am almost always top 3.
Thursday nights are Halo Night for me and a group of about 5-7 other people I regularly play online with. Now we don't always get to play together as a bigger team, but there's nearly always 5 or 6 of us playing on that evening together.
Indeed, we do tend to get better kills (or in the case of objective games, better chance of achieving the objectives) than players of around the same skill who are not playing together as a group. However... we also get more betrayals... FROM OUR OWN TEAM MEMBERS! For is this is a kind of joke. We're not playing this thing as if it's life or death, we're playing it for fun and will quite often kill each other if a humorous opportunity arises e.g. getting a friend into a warthog then driving said warthog off a cliff (failing or succeeding to jump out ourselves to safety in the nick of time).
Also the opposing team need not fear us being split up and winding up with one of us on their side. In fact, they will find themselves better off, as our team mate on the opposing time will go out of their way to find *us* and kill us, ignoring other players, and vice versa!
The only thing we've come to conclude is that this is a cultural thing. People from other nations e.g. America tend to stay loyal to their team and go about unsportsmanlike conduct to better the majority of friends. Also small children, and younger generations also tend to have a similar attitude of aggressively ganging up on their opposition using weight of numbers and betrayals and any other underhand technique they can think of. We simply don't. The only time we'll gang up on anyone, is amongst ourselves, when we know no offence will be taken and only hilarity will ensue.
Alternatively rather than its because people want to maintain relationships, couldn't it be ease of slipping into teamwork through familarity with the other player?
As for friend on other team, I always thought that usually manifested as hunt them down ruthlessly and despatch violently.
Never played Halo multi though, CS was more my game.
The only thing friends do to alter my online behavior is reducing my team killing urges. I don't tend to crash a helicopter full of friendlies far out of bounds if some of them are my mates. With PUGS whenever half the team have under .5 k/d ratio I generally start killing the 8yo nubs. As General Minus says man why did you get in the way of me bullets?