I mean it just screws everything, especially if you are doing one of the “landing maps” (Battery for example.). In all the “unbalanced” servers I have played in, the people have understood and accepted a little “manual” team shuffle, by commands or adminning.
So please unless you run a “stupid n00b covops only” - server, do it without teambalance.
How on Earth does forcing balanced teams equate to “stupid n00b covops only”? My mind boggles even trying to imagine any kind of possible link between these 2 statements. Care to provide some more detail cos you’ve totally lost me.
Well it was a bit extreme, I agree, but still autobalancing ruins the game in my opinion.
OK, care to explain why?
Forcing Balanced Teams ensures that new players joining the server must join the team with fewest players, so the teams are even in terms of numbers if nothing else. If this were not so, players could join either team and would probably do so based on preference (i.e. they prefer playing Axis or Allies or they prefer playing a certain Class and one team offers them the opportunity to do so where the other doesn’t, even if it means they’ll be joining the team with the most players).
You then end up with unbalanced teams, which is no fun for anyone.
One alternative is to enable Shuffle Team voting, which rarely works as the superior team (which without forced team balancing would probably also be the team with the most players) will almost never consent to being shuffled.
Another is to have an Admin present to force team shuffling, but this is not always the case.
Either way the problem with shuffling is that, even if a vote succeeds, or is forced by an Admin, players can always switch teams if they don’t agree with being shuffled.
I’m totally lost as well, could you perhaps provide an example?
In my opinion Balanced Teams are nice, and I would even like to see the Bani/RTCW option to autobalance teams when players starts dropping off one team and nobody switches voluntarily. Too many people join the stronger team as it is on pubs, and it sure wouldn’t be any better with Balanced Teams off (except if everyone switched to the same team, because then everyone would win :moo: ).
And “manual” team shuffles by the ref works just as well with Balanced Teams on.
With whom are you playing with?
I mean when I play, (normally on some 12 people server.). We command each other, like “Jahuu join the allied team their covop just left for dinner.” And we get a pardon me -BEEP-Head we just kickvote him/her/it. But with autobalance we get the gazillion amount of spectators who all want to join the allied team and no-one goes to the axis side, and the game is screwed. With unbalanced teams we see the people how they themselves represent them and then it is easier to select whether to kick them or not.
Have you ever played on a small, cozy, un-balanced server?
Allright maybe I am wrong I will sleep over this and then think if I still agree that will prove it to me.
I have played on a “small unbalanced server” there were 6 axis and 3 allies and even though they were spawn camping us with panzer’s which I felt they would get tired of, they said that they were quite happy with the way things were going. Luckily it was only for the last 2 maps and even though we got camped on the first map for almost the entire time on gold rush, the next map was radar and while my team was being camped I single handedly blew both entrances and succsessfully stole both radar parts.
Even though we won radar with just the 3 of us against thier 6 I still hated the entire game. and I would have loved to have autobalance on so our team would not be as camped as we were.
It’s not a problem of g_teamforcebalance. It’s the problem of the average player level. While a server is filled with headless ones, no matter how it is shuffled or how the player are distributed, the game will be always silly. Among the headless ones, several veteran players together could easily dominate the game. This is the most common phenomenon that I see on most servers.
Turning off g_teamforcebalance won’t help anyway. And even worse. You might have heard of the Bat Story in Aesop’s Fable. What will it be, when a flock of bats are on a server with g_teamforcebalance 0 setting?
For those who haven’t seen it:
The moral is to be flexible in the face of danger.
Back on topic:
I like the idea of having more control over how the teams arrange themselves, however perhaps actually giving the sever referees control would work best.
For example, when someone joins a server, the refs would get a message saying something like “[fnord] has joined the server. Which team do you wish to place them in? F1 - Allied / F2 - Axis”
And they’d also be able to move players around as they liked.
Of course, this stops working if the server ref is a BOfH. 