To implement these ideas and ensure fairness, there must first be a working system in place to report and ban all hackers/cheaters, as well as a matchmaking system that ensures fairness and uniformity (see the bottom for more thoughts on this).
I will add more modes when I've thought about all the little details needed to make it practical/necessary to implement and not turn into a completely new game.
Hangout Mode
This is the normal mode, the one that we have now. You join random rooms or a friend's room. You can stand there and do nothing, talk, fight, play as you wish. There is no time limit. The matching system would be as it is right now.
Team Deathmatch
The classic two-team fight to the death, with a limit of 10 minutes, and the first team to reach 50 kills wins (these numbers can change). When you select this mode, you get matched randomly. Now, the game matching system has to be fairly good for this all to work out. I would argue that this is the hardest part to code, and the players' experiences reside heavily on how fair the matching system is.
Each member of the winning team gets rewards of XPs if they're below level 50, coins, and perhaps 1-10 gems. There wouldn't be exclusive rewards given to the alpha of each team to prevent the possibility of wanting to steal each other's kills within a team. Once you leave your den, you may not run/howl back and heal yourself again. The den is where you respawn with full health, but unlike the hangout mode, it's not a "safe place," meaning the other team can attack you in your den after 5 seconds of respawning. When you're respawning, you are rendered invisible to the other team. This idea is to prevent the entire team from staying inside their den and do nothing, ruining the whole match.
You can use tactics such as hiding, running, skill loading, etc. Other teams can block your port if you're the alpha, so you have to pick the appropriate timing and location to create a port for your team. That's part of the game challenge. All players' locations are shown on the mini-map.
Free-For-All
No friends here, only enemies. Everyone is out to kill everyone. 8 players in a server with a scoreboard similar to the coop scoreboard. Perhaps even bump it up to 10 players, depending on how much the server can handle.
Now, the devs can choose to implement one or both of these options.
A. Be the first reach to get X number of kills in Y minutes to win or
B. Get the highest kill number at the end of Y minutes and come out a champion.
Rewards for the winner would be additional coins, XPS, and/or gems.
From my perspective, team balance has two main factors:
Fairness: the two teams have roughly equal chances of winning.
In order to determine whether a game is fair, we need a measure of the averaged attributes/skills of a team. But this choice might not be sufficient enough to capture the team dynamics in many applications. Depending on how much of an impact a high attributes/skills player can have on a team, a team with one high attributes/skills player and many low attributes/skills players might have a good chance or almost no chance of winning against a team with moderate attributes/skills players.
Uniformity: where there is not much deviation between the best and worst players in the server.
Even though a game is fair, it might still not be fun for all the players involved. If a game involves players with a wide variety of skill/attribute levels, players with low skills/attributes might feel that they are just being strung along by the more skilled/high attributes players rather than controlling the flow of the game and enjoying themselves. Similarly, a low skill/attribute player in a game of mostly high skills/attributes players might feel demoralized, or anger their teammates.
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You can see how the current matchmaking system of the game lacks both fairness and uniformity (especially when you're a level 50). Still, one thing it does an exceptional job at is the waiting period to enter a server---which only takes a few seconds. As a result, there is a greater imbalance when it comes to team matchmaking and the player uniformity overall in a server. This leads me to think that once you level up to 50, the wolf's matchmaking system is entirely random in regards to your attributes and skills. My suggestion if the devs ever add a new PvP mode: keep the matchmaking system that we have now for the old PvP mode and implement a new matchmaking system for the new PvP mode. This way, players with all kinds of attributes and skills can still hang out together in the old PvP mode.