Community Question: Restoring Team Balance

(badman) #1

Thanks everyone for submitting massive stacks of Community-based Community Questions! One that immediately piqued our interest came from Humate and concerns the small and yet precarious matter of balanced teams. Playing in a match that has significantly more players on Team A than on Team B isn’t fun for anyone, so we’d like to get your thoughts on the following this week:

What’s the best way to rebalance teams that have wildly different amounts of players on them?

We’ve assembled a few of the most common things in the poll above this post. Please cast your vote for your favourite or, if none of them seem adequate, suggest all-new ways of tackling this age-old multiplayer problem. We look forward to your suggestions!

(DarkangelUK) #2

Auto-balance at the end of the round. Allow /callvote shuffle mid-way through if needed.

(Dormamu) #3

Auto-balance teams at the end of the round.
Or… give the weak team 2 bots bodyguards/player :smiley: . Every noob will have a ccbot medic and a bobot soldier to protect him from the incoming fire :smiley:

(tokamak) #4

With imbalance we’re talking quantitative imbalance rather than qualitative imbalance right?
Depends on how relevant wins and losses are to your overall progress. If W/L or some rating system matters then you can’t just frivolously swap people about without compensating them.

If there’s no consequences then I really like the automatic swap of the lowest scorer.

(rorgoroth) #5

Autobalance at the end, use accounts + global stats to shuffle to stop all kinds of ****tery from rating ho’s :rolleyes:

(Humate) #6

In terms of discrepancy in numbers, a shuffle is a bit extreme particularly if its a 3 map campaign.
Usually you just wait for new players to fill the spots. Or a few players will switch on their own accord.
In terms of a massive skill discrepancy, I would shuffle via skill rating.
I would even give the dominated team, the option to concede a map after x amount of gametime with an autoshuffle on the next map.

(SockDog) #7

I don’t think any of these things solves the problem, if you’re lucky a shuffle will work, at other times it may have no affect or worse totally kill the server population. That’s to say you’re even able to join a server that has this functionality turned on or voting enabled.

To repeat myself (and I won’t bother clogging this thread with arguments in followup, you can read all those in the CQ Skills thread) it seems that if you can’t balance teams by ensuring an even spread of player skill then you should in some way balance the teams as a whole through handicaps, boosts or other means (items, events etc). The aim there of course is to narrow the chasm but not close it. The better team should win but that should come down to them playing better not due to them having 2 very skilled players on their side. And yes I know this can be deemed as unfair and maybe is, yet is it any more unfair than facing a team that quite obviously can’t be beaten.

And to be clear, I repeat myself not to push an agenda or seek glory for some idea. I want to push for an alternative approach to the problem as we just seem content to repeat what was done last time, the time before that and the time before that. Can we try to think outside the box? Is there more ‘Other’ votes with ideas?

(DJScream) #8

Auto-balance at the next maps warm-up and move the people with the lowest scores. Could be better than at the end of the map because players might leave just before the map ends. Also players might want to finish the map on the side where they started.

Maybe auto-balance mid-game if the map just started with few min warning that auto-balance coming.

(BioSnark) #9

For numbers imbalance, move the person(s) who last joined, not person(s) with the lowest score unless, of course, score has no correlation to skill. Attempting to balance a game by moving lower skilled individuals onto teams with less players would indicate a disturbing laps in logic given that teams that are loosing significantly often suffer higher attrition.

For significant skill imbalance, the thing I suggested in that other thread that shall not be referred to,

and/or

Auto-balance teams at the end of the round

(Salteh) #10

Yeah! :slight_smile:
Also, do not allow people to join the other team if the difference in player count is >= 2 :smiley:
8 vs 10 is not ideal, but acceptable. 8 vs 11 is just nasty :(.

(Ruben0s) #11

I don’t know. Auto-balance at the end of the round sounds good, but from my own experience this is not really effective. Most people disconnect at the end of a round/beginning of a new round, so there is still a really great chance that teams end up uneven after the “shuffle”.

(tokamak) #12

Balance at the end of the round seems a bit redundant for that reason. You want balance during the match, not after.

(edxot) #13

maybe the best aproach would be an intelligent server that chooses what must be done.

1 - change 1 player for other side
2 - shuffles teams

i prefer changing a player than offering xp. after playing et and etqw i think the forced swap works better.
the second option is necessary because all of us have seen this happens before: 12v10 and the team with less players is winning.

but it would require the server to have the perception of winning/losing sides.

(tokamak) #14

The xp-reward in ETQW simply was way too low as was always offered right before you were about to win.

A 5% xp bonus or something the next match, or if you’re playing a F2P, in-game credits, that’s the kind of stuff that will make people switch sides.

(Dormamu) #15

Other

  • If the maps are played in a campaign (and to preserve the teams but allow the losing team to have a fighting chance), give the losing team buffs for the next map, they can be: increase acc, increase damage (something like dmg x 0.1 - 1.5), lower times to plant, disarm, complete obj), the buffs can be multiplied according to how many maps are and the difference in the score at the end of a map (1map x0.5, second map x1.5, third map x2.5, etc)
    The simple example (from the W:ET) will be to keep the winning team at rank 1 Battle Sense(or a lower Rank) and give the losing team, flack jackets, adrenaline rush, Improved Health, Trap Awareness, Faster Reload, Full Revive, etc. The buffs will be implemented and tweaked in the beta :smiley:
    This way you keep the already teams, give the losing team a fighting chance and make the game more challenging for the winning team, everybody wins :smiley:
  • or allow the losing team at the end of a map to have higher number of players for the next map tagged as “Reinforcement” to show the incoming players what team to join to create balance.
  • or implement a GameMaster AI system to help keep the teams balanced, swap the players to the losing team, you can introduce an option (like the “Complaint popup F1/F2” ~ “Do you wish to join the other team to balance teams F1/F2”) to allow the players on the winning team to create balance if they want and not to be hijacked by the system :smiley: Allowing the players to chose to balance teams will give you an increase in balanced games and a decrease in quit after the shuffle :smiley:
(tokamak) #16

give the losing team buffs for the next map, they can be: increase acc, increase damage (something like dmg x 0.1 - 1.5), lower times to plant, disarm, complete obj),

There´s nothing wrong with mechanics to help the losing side but that´s one surefire way to make the game incredibly frustrating. The combat itself needs to play out on a level playing field.

If you want to offer an advantage to losing or outnumbered players then shorten their respawn rate. That´s the correct way of shifting the odds while keeping the fights fair.

(BioSnark) #17

Since Dormamu’s brought up campaign unlocks, the unlock system has always provided stats modifiers that solidify player and team wide advantages, as well as discouraging playstyle adaptability. Rather than again arguing that the system should be scrapped, I’ll suggest that if one team has twice as much experience as another, players on the latter team earn experience points (unlock points, don’t care about epeen score) twice as fast.

It may not be as effective but moving around a lot of players during a match is detrimental to deployable and vehicle play, class balance, cohesion and holds of strategic locations.

(tokamak) #18

I’ll suggest that if one team has twice as much experience as another, players on the latter team earn experience points (unlock points, don’t care about epeen score) twice as fast.

Excellent idea if it indeed doesn’t touch the epeen score. You can even make the -unlock- points directly proportional to the xp difference. Beautiful.

(DarkangelUK) #19

Excellent idea? Really? If higher XP and unlocks are what unbalances the teams, then the XP system is broken. If giving the other team double the XP fixes it, then the XP system is broken. If keeping everyone at the same XP is what keeps the game balanced, then the XP system is broken and should be done away with to keep it balanced. Omfg what a terrible idea.

(Dthy) #20

Wait, didn’t we all agree that XP is pointless? Why include an idea if it’s pointless?