You bring up an excellent ethical question; With kicking as a reactive solution, you have the problem of it being subject to the individuals voting to kick. While a proactive solution would be more 'polite', I think that you have to rely on the etiquette of the 'experienced' players already on the server to handle it.
that's a valid point, but i honestly do not trust the average gamer to always act as "politely" as they should, which is why i favor a more proactive approach in not assuming that players will use proper etiquette.
Would preventing the person from joining eliminate the (universally) undesirable situation of kicking the person? Yes
yes, it would universally (or at least universally offer this solution for server admins) eliminate this problem, which is exactly why i posed the idea
Specifically, you prevent lower-leveled but above-average players from experiencing the harder difficulties, and if an unskilled high-level person joins, you still (presumably) end up kicking them, which still has the same ethical issues attached.
good points. so the first part, yes it's true about preventing lower-leveled but above-average players from playing at a harder level, BUT that would just be for a server set by the admin to prevent them joining. making the logical assumption that not every single server admin would use this setting, players would still have other servers on a more difficult level available to play in.
for the opposite with unskilled high-level players joining and end up getting kicked, it's true that people would still end up facing that ethical decision, which again idealy players would be polite and use proper etiquette (sadlythis not always guaranteed). at the very least, we make an attempt to avoid that issue, which even though it may still occur, there was some effort to prevent it.
Overall, while I think the ethical question is valid, it applies universally as opposed to this specific problem, and therefore should not merit precedence over the problem itself.
well, any issue that universally applies to the game in any form should result in even the most basic attempt to prevent or minimize the effects of that issue. giving server admins the option to set their server to restrict admittance to low-leved perks at least helps eliminate the possibilty for a situation to arise where an unskilled low-level player is allowed to join and pose the ethical question of having to kick them. i'm not suggesting that more focus should be on this issue as there's a more specific and larger issue behind it, BUT if there's a relatively easy way to address the issue that could provide some assistance then it'd be wise to impliment it.
granted the specific problem of getting unskilled players on hard difficulty servers is still present, the potential of that happening is reduced to a degree. as stated above, the specific problem is still the consequence of a flawed rank system that can result in unskilled (regardless of level) players ruining games. it's also important to note that if the ranking system was designed to accurately reflect the "skill" or players, then in theory we should never see "unskilled high-leveled" or "skilled low-leveled" players as players without skill would never get higher ranked perks and players with skill would never be stuck with low ranked perks and would instead rise to the top at a quicker rate. unfortunately, that's something that is out of our hands and is the responsibility of TW to address
