[Darvin]

I think we have to distinguish between skirmish and the MMO game explicitly in all such threads as these. Naturally a certain degree of politics would add to the MMO experience, but in a skirmish match most people like alliances to be locked at the start of the game. It's not that you never want in-game alliance formings and breakings, it's that you usually want to know who is your enemy and who isn't.

With that said, I've found in the past that too often you'll get opportunists jumping teams. In theory, in most games only one player needs to lose if everyone else joins the same team. That kind of defeats the point of the game, seeing as everyone knows what the outcome of such a gangbeating will be.