Any chance we can finally get team auto balance?

(Bauer) #1

Getting really tired of poorly matched teams and just unbalanced teams in general. It really isn’t fun to play 3 against 5 and just get owned round and round again. Force team balancing please!!

(QUIK420) #2

This is only really a problem on Small Teams and Standard to a degree. Comp and Old Skool have auto balancing done pretty well. Small teams its a problem because with only 8 players and no auto-balancing there tends to be stacking on the winning / human team which ends up being 8 humans on one team vs a team of bots. Standard has the same problem but at least there is the potential for the teams to fill up and even out.

(Hdserialkiller) #3

Sat in a comp match for 15 min with another dude waiting for someone to join. Finally did and then that person quit. No matches found on old skool sat there for a while no one joined. Force team bal in standard please.

(nephandys) #4

If they can do this without breaking up Xbox Live parties or other formats of groups of players that want to play together, more power to them. If not, I’d prefer to decide whether I want to split up from my friends and play against them (which we do frequently) rather than be forced to do so.

(QUIK420) #5

Well unfortunately, competition only starts if there’s at least 4 people playing so its harder to fill. OS games can get pretty full but that seems to happen more towards the night time (eastern time)

(thesuzukimethod) #6

how does OS team balancing work? i ran in a couple matches yesterday where my side had between 4-7 players, while the other side had between 5-8…(and since there were no bots the differential kinda sucked). there were times when it was even (we even had a +1 for a few minutes), but most of the time it was -1 or -2, and for a few stretches it was even -3.

does it wait till match end? does it force people into the low side? what happens if you join friends and they’re on the + side? etc etc.

(Sleepy) #7

Got Brink a week ago on that amazon sale. Been playing standard for the past weekend. Can’t find any game with full teams on other game modes…

Asking players to auto balance Standard is just impossible. I tried going to the team with less people (trying to make 8vs3 become 7vs4), as soon as I switched to the other team… Guess what, one guy jumped to the full team (so it’s 8vs3 again). I tried staying in the team with less people, and hoping the team would fill up eventually. It doesn’t. Rounds after rounds, people either quit or swith to the full team as soon an opening is available.

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with this. It’s human nature to want to be on the potential winning team (more men = more firepower = better chance at winning). It’s just that I think this is killing the already small Xbox Brink community. The game is fun when it’s balanced. It’s not so fun when you have to fight superior number round after round and wonder why there is no auto team balance.

I like this game. It’s great when I get to play Brink with 2 full teams. Sadly, it’s rare. I know I’ll keep playing and hope they’ll try to fix this somehow.

(wolfnemesis75) #8

They could add a mode that does auto balancing and only adds a bot to even out the teams. It could be called Hyrbrid Mode or something. After a match ends, the teams are divided up based on xp. So if there is 4 players on one side and 3 on the other, after the match ends the teams are shuffled and there’s one bot. Another human can replace the bot. If another human joins after that, then a bot is added to the Defending team. The attacking team gets the human player. No team switching during a match. Basically a bot is added to even out a team only as players join. After every match, the teams are split up based on XP and swapped from Security or Resistance. The cap for this mode could be 12 total players instead of 16. Keeping the total players down would ensure that its a full mode most times and with the match balancing, always even. :slight_smile:

(SinDonor) #9

I concur. Only issue is with XBL party chat. Certain games (Seach and Destroy on MW2) are able to disable party chat, so should this mode. It can help prevent cheating if one guy is on the enemy team and he’s shouting out all teammate locations to his buddies in the XBL chat.

I also wish that Brink would recognize when a team is out manned and up the difficulty of the bots on the losing team. Those hard AI bots are a PitA on Campaign mode.

(thesuzukimethod) #10

Every option proposed (here, other places) for auto/force team balance seems complicated in terms of coding and organization (although they are great ideas), and it has the potential of breaking up groups of people who play together…so i propose a secondary mechanism…shame/infamy through sarcasm.

Basically, create a set of tiered achievements/trophies that reflect escalating levels of staying on the overmatched side…something along the lines of:

10 overmatched victories: Y other teams suck?
25 overmatched victories: I am THE BOSS of Brink
50 overmatched victories: OMFG - Best Brinkster eva!!?!?

the thresholds would have to be determined…i.e. 8v1 is clearly overmatched, but what about 6v3…b/c the bots do help some.

You could also have an ach/trophies for:
Wins with an undermatched team: More than your fair share
Losses with an undermatched team: Toughing it out

The key would be for the undermatched trophies to be poorly publicized - so when a bot stomper (my pet name for people who like to roll this way) gets one, they have to look up the explanation…which should be not particularly charitable, sufficiently dry, and a little biting.

anyway - now that i have that out of my system, i guess the work week can begin.

(Pelendran) #11

Oddly enough, I don’t mind team un-balance because in reality, they AREN’T. It’s still an 8v8 no matter how you shake it.

Even funnier is when it is 8 Humans vs 1 Human, because a lot of the time I’ve been on an all Human team, the Medics if there are any seem to always refuse to revive anyone other than their buddy. At least Bots will revive you if they’re nearby.

If anything, I’d just rather see the bot difficulty scale based on the number of humans on a team. The less humans on the team, the more difficult the bots should be.

I play for the most part on the side that I want to play on and will continue to do so. I don’t care if its the winning team or not. The reason for this is because whether you win or lose, you still get the same reward. I’d rather lose in a glorious and incredibly close battle, than to steamroll the other team to win. The quicker that a game ends, the less exp I get.

(QUIK420) #12

[QUOTE=Pelendran;367226]Oddly enough, I don’t mind team un-balance because in reality, they AREN’T. It’s still an 8v8 no matter how you shake it.

Even funnier is when it is 8 Humans vs 1 Human, because a lot of the time I’ve been on an all Human team, the Medics if there are any seem to always refuse to revive anyone other than their buddy. At least Bots will revive you if they’re nearby.

If anything, I’d just rather see the bot difficulty scale based on the number of humans on a team. The less humans on the team, the more difficult the bots should be.[/QUOTE]

I like this idea. I remember back when Brink first came out and any time you played with bots on Hard they would literally be able to turn and head shot you to death even if you got the jump on them and they weren’t facing you. I remember playing a cpl games where the teams were very uneven (I was the only human maybe one more) but my team still stomped the all human team because I was playing with hard bots lol. I think they should re institute this in standard mode. If people are stacking then they will have a hard time playing with auto-headshot bots and might even up the teams so they can actually have a chance at having fun haha.

(Bauer) #13

Some good suggestions in here for ways of implementing auto balance and sorry to say some bad ones saying the game is fine with just bots on your side (if that were true there would be less complaining about bots :P). So anyone from SD fancy letting us know if it’ll ever happen in a later patch? Can’t be hard to implement as basically every game that lets you change teams mid match has it already! Keep up the good word guys, you’ll eventually have Brink up to the basic standards of a multiplayer only game :slight_smile:

(kronus126) #14

Yes please!! This is my biggest gripe with the game. 6v2 is no fun!!!

(lobster) #15

I just got this game during the Steam sale and team balancing is absolutely TERRIBLE. I have joined tons of servers where the teams are 8 vs 1! Of course that one guy would be me. It is a waste of potentially good matches. Instead of taking the 8 players and splitting them up 4v4, the game stacks them all to one team based on which side they prefer (resistance or security). Of course I picked the not so popular Security side and constantly find myself in a game where it’s just me versus 8 human players. They just push the bots back to spawn, then proceed to spawn camp/kill. I’m finding myself in more and more of these matches and it’s becoming frustrating.

The teams should be split up by how many players are active, not the side they chose during character creation.

(SinDonor) #16

I’d only agree with the Auto-Balance option on an auto-balance game mode.

If I join a public standard match to play with 2-7 of my friends, I want to play WITH them, not against them.

If we all decide join the auto-balance game mode, then we will expect to be playing vs each other sooner or later.

(H0RSE) #17

[QUOTE=SinDonor;367818]I’d only agree with the Auto-Balance option on an auto-balance game mode.

If I join a public standard match to play with 2-7 of my friends, I want to play WITH them, not against them.

If we all decide join the auto-balance game mode, then we will expect to be playing vs each other sooner or later.[/QUOTE]
Perhaps this is why console games forgo using auto balance or team shuffle - because many people on console are joining games with friends. perhaps they feel it would be a wasted mechanic.

With my experience on PC, games tend to be much more intimate, with it just being the player and the game (no groups of friends)

(V1cK_dB) #18

[QUOTE=H0RSE;368412]Perhaps this is why console games forgo using auto balance or team shuffle - because many people on console are joining games with friends. perhaps they feel it would be a wasted mechanic.

With my experience on PC, games tend to be much more intimate, with it just being the player and the game (no groups of friends)[/QUOTE]

My experience on PC is the complete opposite.

(lobster) #19

[QUOTE=thesuzukimethod;367221]Every option proposed (here, other places) for auto/force team balance seems complicated in terms of coding and organization (although they are great ideas), and it has the potential of breaking up groups of people who play together…so i propose a secondary mechanism…shame/infamy through sarcasm.

Basically, create a set of tiered achievements/trophies that reflect escalating levels of staying on the overmatched side…something along the lines of:

10 overmatched victories: Y other teams suck?
25 overmatched victories: I am THE BOSS of Brink
50 overmatched victories: OMFG - Best Brinkster eva!!?!?

the thresholds would have to be determined…i.e. 8v1 is clearly overmatched, but what about 6v3…b/c the bots do help some.

You could also have an ach/trophies for:
Wins with an undermatched team: More than your fair share
Losses with an undermatched team: Toughing it out

The key would be for the undermatched trophies to be poorly publicized - so when a bot stomper (my pet name for people who like to roll this way) gets one, they have to look up the explanation…which should be not particularly charitable, sufficiently dry, and a little biting.

anyway - now that i have that out of my system, i guess the work week can begin.[/QUOTE]

That is a terrible idea. I want balanced teams, not trophies and achievements.

(H0RSE) #20

In all my years of heavy PC gaming, which was around 10 - 15 years, I never once met up with friends to play a PC game. PC gaming was always “me” time. The only time I played with friends was if I was already playing and they happened to show up, which was usually only in MMO’s