State your case: Autobalance in Public Matches? Yes or No?

(Naonna) #1

To be clear, as click-bait-y the title is, I’m genuinely curious of peoples’ opinions on it.

The question isn’t about skill level within games, but is instead focused on the issue of people leaving games early.

The best examples are when people end up in 4v6 games or 2v4 games. Yes. It happens. At this point, why not force the most recent player to join the server to swap teams? As frustrating as auto balance is in TF2, it’s hard to argue that it doesn’t force a bit of balance if all the players involved are somewhat competent.

People will just leave a game if it’s unhealthy and skewed to a single side. Auto balance would help curb team stomps which occur after more than 2 people leave one team. While I’m aware this won’t prevent 4v5’s or 3v4’s, the team with fewer members at least has a small scrap of hope to win rather than facing down a 5 man team with 3 players.

Thoughts?

(gg2ez) #2

If the game is 1:3, yes, put that extra person on the smaller team, and then it becomes a nice, round 2:2.

(Apofenas) #3

SD should implement proper auto balance system.
First thing to do is to ask players if they want to change team for the sake of game balance and reward it with 50-100 credits at the game end.
Second thing is to make shuffle vote work. For that, after vote passes, the map must restart, but keep gained xp. Also give each team equal vote %, so it’s 50/50 overall, so 8 player team has 6.125% per player, but 4 player team - 12.25% per player and 55 required to pass.
Also prevent same person to launch this vote again after game was balanced.

(Jostabeere) #4

I already made some threads about this in the past. This should be a thing, yes.

(XavienX) #5

First: Shuffle should ALWAYS be automatic, if it already exists in-game why not just have it always running.
Second: Autobalance whenever teams are completely inbalanced with the number of players. I’m still playing old games like CoD WoW and all it’s servers still run autobalance automatically by itself.

(B_Montiel) #6

Remove shuffle vote and add a sensible autobalance system. That’s what I’d go for.

Usual story when I play with friends on a server : teams get unbalanced (number wise), I notice it and ask for a switch, to prevent me from doing it myself and avoid potential team stack with my mates. No one care, the game turns into crap due to the obvious imbalance, I switch, I get rick rolled by idiots who then start to launch shuffle votes because suddenly things got harder.

(fubar) #7

No.

The current public format should be removed from the game in first place. The entire game is balanced around 5vs5 play, maps as well as mercs and spawntimes. 6vs6/7vs7/8vs8 is an impossibility to balance and no merc limitations, much more so with mid-game joins/leaves.
Instead opt in for a casual match making system that solely matches people on 5vs5 and punishes leavers, much alike LoL/Dota/CSGO/OW/etc does. Just scrap the current system and stop wasting resources on it, do what they meant to do years ago already.

(Amerika) #8

[quote=“fubar;153290”]No.

The current public format should be removed from the game in first place. The entire game is balanced around 5vs5 play, maps as well as mercs and spawntimes. 6vs6/7vs7/8vs8 is an impossibility to balance and no merc limitations, much more so with mid-game joins/leaves.
Instead opt in for a casual match making system that solely matches people on 5vs5 and punishes leavers, much alike LoL/Dota/CSGO/OW/etc does. Just scrap the current system and stop wasting resources on it, do what they meant to do years ago already. [/quote]

It was about this time last year during the closed beta where all you had access to was unranked and then later ranked 5v5. I had a blast playing these. The public servers were rarely turned on.

I would have been perfectly fine with this if the game had launched with 5v5 unranked (solo and teams) and 5v5 ranked (solo and teams) and you simply treated unranked as casual/pubbing. If they had done that plus give us access to server rentals I think this game, competitively, would have been a lot better off.

(HoakinBlackforge) #9

[quote=“fubar;153290”]No.

The current public format should be removed from the game in first place. The entire game is balanced around 5vs5 play, maps as well as mercs and spawntimes. 6vs6/7vs7/8vs8 is an impossibility to balance and no merc limitations, much more so with mid-game joins/leaves.
Instead opt in for a casual match making system that solely matches people on 5vs5 and punishes leavers, much alike LoL/Dota/CSGO/OW/etc does. Just scrap the current system and stop wasting resources on it, do what they meant to do years ago already. [/quote]

Then that would make things worse.

Not only many players would be forced to play competitive, because they cant anymore play in the casual style of rules, and will obviously leave the game.

What SD needs to do is make both casual and competitive more distinguised. Apart from many, many other improvements (like making players take more important roles)

(Borganism) #10

Personally, I think the whole team balance algorithm needs a complete overhaul. Games that end up 6 v 3 are generally caused by a bad team balance and people leaving, and then some asshat players vote no to the shuffle vote, so an auto is needed in that circumstance.

*** My understanding of the shuffle is … ***
The shuffle algorithm works by taking your xp gain over time for the last 10 matches. There used to be a command to see your numbers, but I dont know if its been blocked now. Since medics now gain crazy XP, and EV escort missions get crazy XP it can warp your stats and make the game think you are ‘better’ than you are. (ie, someone with a 1000 xp/min from aura will get slaughtered in combat by a 1000xp/min fragger)

Just by the random nature of things its more likely that the people that get high combat xp/min get put on the same team, and go against people that get high support xp/min. which leads to a stomp.

My solution for this is to count all three XP gain / minute as different values and re-work the shuffle algorithm to take this into account. That’s something for the Dev’s tho and it may be too hard to implement at this stage. It would drastically change the match balancing though and make pub games a lot fairer. Maybe an idea to pass onto the Devs

@RazielWarmonic is this how it works, and is there any way to improve it?

(Black) #11

Autobalance is irrelevant if the balancing system inefficient.
The balance in this game sucks…Badly.

There have just been way to many cases in which im in a lobby where the “balance” happens and the teams are clearly stacked.

There hasn’t been a official release of the algorithm so I’m kind of skeptical about it.

Just fix the balance system and there will be no need for an auto balance.

(bontsa) #12

[quote=“Borganism;153393”]
My solution for this is to count all three XP gain / minute as different values and re-work the shuffle algorithm to take this into account. [/quote]

Holy ryebread with coffee on the side if this obviousity isn’t a thing already, it should definitely be! People should, if just possible, always be distributed so that theres almost equal amounts of combat-, support-, and gamemode oriented players on each side. If its only the Total exp that gets taken into account by algorithm, no bloody wonder things feel wonky at times.

@RazielWarmonic , @stayfreshshoe can ya ping someone who knows of the subject or shed a light on us about it yourself?

As for the subject, ye autobalance in situations where one of the teams is missing 2 players. Giving option to and reward for anyone who is voluntarily willing to switch first. Should be the player, not the last one joined, but someone who after balancing makes teams stay as even as possible ELO-wise.

(BananaSlug) #13

YES THAT SHOULD BE ADDED A LONG TIME AGO

(Naonna) #14

Just to restate: we’re not talking about SKILL imbalance: only the bare minimum of keeping both teams close-to-equal in player count.

(Gi.Am) #15

Have always been a supporter for an aggressive autobalance system to even out the numbers.

Not so much a fan of shuffeling players around midgame to bandaid some perceived skill difference. The maps are fairly dynamic and a player that played well in one stage might falther in another (for example defending or repairing the EV in chapel vs. defending delivering the EMP). Not to forget some people are quite inconsistent anyways.

unranked/ranked Matchmaking as a default is what I think most people nowadays expect and most complains about quickjoin are that it doesn’t have a ranked like matchmaking system. The server browser is a bit of an relic to apease the oldschool crowd. And don’t get me wrong I’m part of that and would surely miss the ability to hone my skill by clashing with people clearly above my league (or stomping some far belwo me tho there are few :blush: ).

(Mura) #16

I won’t deny it, I’m guilty of leaving games. I’m not gonna waste my time with a team full of snipers or people that are completely lost. I can deal with team mates having bad aim or having a bad day whatever. But I’m not gonna stay in a game when no one else is doing something proactive. It’s just a waste of time.

(torsoreaper) #17

Just finished a game of underground where i don’t know if someone joined the other team as we lost someone else or what but we were down 2 people in stage 1 of underground so we get rolled. Now we have to defend stage 2 for like 10 minutes. Pretty crappy. I think if it’s within the first 5 minutes of the game and the teams get unbalanced, swap someone or shuffle and restart.

Then again, not having f*cked up teams coming out of lobby would keep people from leaving. That would help too.

(Naonna) #18

The tried and tested and reluctantly accepted TF2 method of balance only re-sorts players in the case of player-number imbalance: not resetting the progress of a match or even map section.

(Apofenas) #19

TF2 shuffle is crap. It works and works well. But it’s crap.

The shuffle system should be based on players’ will to play balanced game in a first place.

TF2 system just picks unlucky player who died and pushes him to the lost team in last minute no matter what.

It won’t change a lot except keep number of players even. Extremely easy to abuse it by going to observer and w8 till it switches somebody else. Or to boycott it and play plant-reclaim ammo station instead. Or just leave.

DB system doesn’t need that. It shouldnt force people to switch team, but reward them for that.

There also is a vote to shuffle in TF2. It’s not a lot different from DB, except that it restarts the game on shuffle. And that’s one of the main reasons manual shuffle works there, and doesn’t work here.

(Apofenas) #20

TF2 shuffle is crap. It works and works well. But it’s crap.

The shuffle system should be based on players’ will to play balanced game in a first place.

TF2 system just picks unlucky player who died and pushes him to the lost team in last minute no matter what.

It won’t change a lot except keep number of players even. Extremely easy to abuse it by going to observer and w8 till it switches somebody else. Or to boycott it and play plant-reclaim ammo station instead. Or just leave.

DB system doesn’t need that. It shouldnt force people to switch team, but reward them for that.

There also is a vote to shuffle in TF2. It’s not a lot different from DB, except that it restarts the game on shuffle. And that’s one of the main reasons manual shuffle works there, and doesn’t work here.