I suspect teams are balanced by level. If that’s true, they’re really balanced by patience.
Can someone elaborate ?
I would balance teams on something else. Dirty Bomb already has such a method of player evaluation. It’s the xp. Both objective monkeys and K/D worshippers receive it.
For example, consider this screenshot:
http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/34113354133823814/0289A4CC1B925DDF3F13EACFD9F0EFF4540DA219/?interpolation=lanczos-none&output-format=jpeg&output-quality=95&fit=inside|1024:768&composite-to=,|1024:768&background-color=black
SCORES: xp K/D level
Blue team scores:
29992 40/14 5
29514 53/21 5
23847 34/24 5
22441 37/19 5
21189 34/29 4
Red team scores:
19529 37/45 6
12804 14/34 6
12235 24/51 8
8678 20/51 6
If levels were a good estimate of skill, the second team should win. Keep in mind the attacker team probably got at least one ragequitter and that’s why it shows one player less. But something else happened. They got easily beaten. And the map is Underground, it’s not like those 2 proxies had to spend a ton of time fixing and escorting an EV or running unarmed with an objective.
I would measure skill by proportion of xp the player earned compared to total xp earned in a match. For example, the sum of xp in this match is 180229. So for each player I calculate:
player_score/total
Then it would look like this:
Blue team:
0.16
0.16
0.13
0.12
0.11
Red team:
0.10
0.07
0.06
0.04
According to my method, the weakest player on defenders is slightly better than the strongest on attackers. Which looks about right, especially when you consider you tend to get higher scores including K/D if you are on team with great players (because you get to pick leftovers and desperate players who jumped into dangerous routes).
You can argue that defenders earn higher scores on average because they are not one man down (objective, EV) and they need not put themselves in danger. I argue that my method would still be much more fair than shuffling teams by “level” !!!
But how to calculate “b0rsuk score” if it’s only available at the end of match ? Well, keep track of last 5 “b0rsuk scores” and take an average from them.