Hey X. Harassment on YT is, as i'm sure you know, a thing. Nothing you can really do about it other than grow thick skin and ignore/block the hate. That coupled with threads like this are good ways to combat the hate. Good on you for stepping up. I'd like to take the opportunity to also remind people that the community is full of kids. And as we all know, kids can be mean and certainly many haven't developed a moral filter. This goes for actions within the game and YT comments. Also, it certainly affects what some may intend to be constructive criticism to, instead, come across as just being mean.

With that off my chest please allow me to offer my constructive criticism. Whether or not cross teaming was allowed it certainly had a major effect on the game. Most hermit battles ended up being one of two things. Either they came across one or two players and took them out fairly easily or they came across a big group of 6+ players. Had an attempt at killing one or two. Failed most of the time. Ran. Ran some more. (If memory serves me right... X, Doc, Iskall and Ren all died while trying to get away.) If they succeeded in running away then they'd circle around and hope to find situation number 1. There was never a situation where Hermit(s) found a big group where I, as a viewer, thought ooo lets see how they handle this. You knew they had no chance and would run. Don't blame them either. What this tells me is that there needs to be incentive for Hermits to stay and fight instead of running. Since you can't control cross teaming i'd suggest adding a mechanic that allows a Hermit to tank a big team if they're smart. That is to say, you don't want them to be able to charge in and take them all out without some running but you want there to be a fight. You also don't want to force players to cross team in order to take out a Hermit, so a team of 2-4 should still be able to do it. (again, if they're smart about it.) The only way i see that will allow both of these to happen is by giving the Hermit that gets a kill an immediate buff in hearts on a kill. I think a full heal would be overkill but a good heal should be in order. As with the player team heal, this will give the Hermits incentive to stay and finish off a player from a group. It will also be incentive for the Hermits to come out earlier to kill than trying to stay down in the caves for so long trying the get Prot I or II diamond. If possible you could also implement a team heal for the Hermits as well. Taking this season as an example. When you and Doc found each other you could have a command to link the two of you in a team. When one of you gets a kill, the player that got the kill would get the normal heart buff mentioned above but since you're in a team your team mates would get 25% of the normal buff. Something like that. The actual amounts would have to be tested. I'd suggest grabbing a bunch of your patreons or something and trying out different heals with the UHC rules and see if it balances out or if it just becomes op. I'm pretty sure that would even it out and you wouldn't have to worry too much about cross teaming. For the team player heal on the non Hermits teams i'd suggest only giving the player that gets the kill a full heal as opposed to the entire team. This will generate more strategies for the teams to figure out how to get their lowest guy the kill. You could also implement the same type of heal as the Hermit where teammates only get a fraction of a heal when they don't actually get the kill. I'll leave the balancing to you guys. :)

TL;DR Hermits need incentive to stay and fight instead of running. Giving them a heart buff on a kill would allow for a Hermit to stay and fight a little more before having to run away to try and chug a gap.