The "Real" Team Balance

[Mjolnyr]

This is something that comes to my mind after utilizing ShrubBot for a period of time.

Team balance is a critical issue for public servers. However, the balance is rather “equivalent player skill” than “same player number in both teams”. Many veteran players can cope with approximately 2 foes simultaneously, and some elite dominators can perform amazing serial fragging consequently. If these skilled players flock in one team, the other side will suffer for sure, though the team size is almost the same.

Calling shuffleteamsxp votes is not a good solution though,

1. It aborts current match. In most cases, it’s a waste of time, very annoying.
2. Shuffling within a campaign is somehow weird… I dare not to see a foe become my teammates because of a shuffling vote. Furthermore, assembled fireteams are dismissed. The feeling is no good.

Weighted Team Balance might be a remedy to the balance issue. I give “dominators” 2.0 weight, “veterans” 1.5 weight, “commoners” 1.0 weight, “newbies” 0.75 weight, something like that.

This could be implemented via GUID record, like what Shrub has done with his ShrubBot function. How to give corresponding weight to every player, is not a easy task for server administrators. However, I do believe that some enthusiastic admins dare to analysis their logs / stats, if there’s really such a tool to apply.

Another thought is, shuffle teams by Efficiency but not XP. The problem is, stats will be reset by reconnection / referee access / joining another team or spectator. If this problem could be solved in next patch / MOD release, this might be another way to obtain team balance, and this will be easier than GUID record method.

After all… I do believe that the REAL BALANCE existed on a server, on which most players have sufficient team-working sense and engage skill. No matter how the team are shuffled, if there will be absolutely over 1/2 veteran players in each teams, thus the gameplay level will be always satisfying. However, this is an ideal that cannot be expected to happen everyday. So, besides urging players to gain higher skills, a better solution than mere shuffleteamsxp and g_forceteambalance is required.

[funkPig]

Sounds interesting, I have voted no on a shuffle vote before because I knew it really wouldn’t make any difference. Are you suggesting though that the stats that “weight” the player are client side? This would open up some cheat/exploits. If it is held serverside, you are limited to one server and you will be classed as a “newbie” for your first few games (depends on how the server reacts to the changing of character stats)

I personally wouldn’t mind playing a campaign where the teams randomly shuffle btween each map. Or a campain that plays each map twice in a stopwatch fashion.

[SCDS_reyalP]

I agree that shuffle by XP does not work very well. Even a very poor player can get a lot of XP, given enough time, while an experienced player who joined recently will have little. A team of skilled players starting at 0 XP will still whip a team of noobs who are all generals.

IMO, a shuffle should currently only be called when the teams are extremely out of balance.

While you could probably do better than the current shuffle (especially if you kept lifetime stats on the server) any automated system won’t really be fair. It should be fairly easy to make an admin bot which can shuffle by lifetime stats on that server, falling back to XP or something for people who don’t have much time recorded. I know there was a bot for urban terror, which would show you your stats if you typed !stats.

Another problem is that with the people getting kicked to spectator bug in 1.02, you end up with more people switching after each map, and a lot of the time they end up stacking. Then of course there are the people who switch immediatly after a shuffle anyway.

In the end, it is up to the players to show sportsmanship.

[thore]

i’d love to see a “shuffle by skill” vote option to replace the xp-shuffle.
skill thus doesn’t mean anything else than xp per minute which can be
stored in the player profile and reused on connection to a new server.

this way one would be able to shuffle even though the game has not
yet started (and there where no xp gained) to get evenly balanced
teams.

last but not least you should not be able to switch teams for a specified
time after shuffle. those ‘let’s shuffle, i’ll switch back anyway’ mentality
is the last thing a good game needs :banghead:

further i would like to have the xp hidden. keep the promotions and
everything, but hide the xp. maybe this could make people concentrate
more on the objective…