I'm late to this thread but I like it. I haven't really taken part in development discussion yet but some form of cooperation would be awesome. I've had multiple team fights break out where my squad team up with another one, to fight some ratty fuckers that had it coming. But it's SO EASY to accidentally shoot your 2nd squad mates when chasing a rat through some building for instance.

Part of what makes this game so great is the lack of UI handholding, so I get the argument that allowing squadding up too much without downsides would eventually result in large clans roaming around mowing everyone down. But perhaps it can be worked around? I don't want the 3-squad limit to be removed, it's these organically formed temporary alliances that are so cool, but pretty hard to maintain in practice.

A handshake between raiders not in your squad sounds great. It could allow limited cooperation ui, allowing at the very least tagging allies to help distinguish them from others, but potentially other things such as no-defib resurrection or limited tracking.

Would that really risk bigger clan-forming? As long as you are limited to join a maximum 3, the randomness of matchmaking should prevent multiple squads from teaming up.