I’m sick of playing with unbalanced teams !
Can’t we do something for that please ??!
For example you have
team number 1 with the levels : 15, 13, 15, 10 , 27, 42, 33
against team number 2 with the levels : 7, 6, 11, 8, 10, 4, 7
Don’t you see any problem ?
This happen very often with any kind of game mod !
it’s very annoying and put me off the desire to come back and play Dirty Bomb.
Levels really don’t determine how good someone is, i’ve seen level 20-30’s run around and they don’t even know what they are doing half the time. Overall, there is no problem with this from my perspective.
I am seriously getting tired of this 
Just remove the levels from public view and tons of the complaints will vanish.
Today I played with a level 14 who was nearly on my level in terms of skill, game intelligence and aim. I also played with three people who are in their 40’s and they weren’t even in the same zip code as me.
Maybe try competitive mode if you care about balanced teams and playing to win? It’s for people who want competitively balanced teams for a competitive match, and you’re more likely to have teammates who care about winning.
If you play public, you’re subjected to anyone of any skill level joining or leaving the game at any time, which skews the balance. Also more likely to encounter people who don’t care about winning. Just comes with the territory of playing public servers in pretty much ever online multiplayer FPS game I’ve every played. Public is basically a free-for-all except some people are on your “team” so far as they can’t kill you and you can’t kill them.
I actually must disagree that levels don’t matter. While the difference start gumming out as levels increases, anyone under level 10 usually is still learning mercs and maps and doesn’t even know yet about running faster with knife, nor that a second repairing person doesn’t help nor what a long jump is.
The complaint might be made now talking about level discrepancies, but remove them from pubs, and you’ll have the same threads started about how games are unbalanced, and instead of blaming levels, people will check steam profiles (losing time that they could spend on playing) to confirm that one team has longer time players as opposed to the other.
Bottom line, team unbalance is a thing, be it through skill discrepancy alone. No need to blame levels or anything else, but they’re a good indicator to why there is an unbalance.
[quote=“Lumi;92667”]I actually must disagree that levels don’t matter. While the difference start gumming out as levels increases, anyone under level 10 usually is still learning mercs and maps and doesn’t even know yet about running faster with knife, nor that a second repairing person doesn’t help nor what a long jump is.
The complaint might be made now talking about level discrepancies, but remove them from pubs, and you’ll have the same threads started about how games are unbalanced, and instead of blaming levels, people will check steam profiles (losing time that they could spend on playing) to confirm that one team has longer time players as opposed to the other.
Bottom line, team unbalance is a thing, be it through skill discrepancy alone. No need to blame levels or anything else, but they’re a good indicator to why there is an unbalance.[/quote]
Games get unbalanced because key people leave/join after teams are sorted. Also, the sorting doesn’t factor in what mercs people are using. I played a Stopwatch match earlier on Chapel and none of us had an engineer in our group. Levels is just an easy excuse for people to use and blame.
A person who is level 10 has over 50 hours in the game and probably more. Most people aren’t going to get significantly better. Dirty Bomb is the only game that has levels like this and I’ve never seen so much complaining about games being unbalanced and it almost always has people talking about player levels…and the sorting system doesn’t use level AT ALL.
It’s just an easy excuse for people who are angry to latch onto and use. It’s a source of constant discontent among people and negativity overall. I played quite a few matches today and in almost every single one of them I had multiple people trying to antagonize me over it (few seem to realize levels didn’t reset from late closed beta) and then a few others blamed their loss on me being level 49. This doesn’t bother me personally but other people, some who don’t even talk, will see it as a negative point overall and that does bother me.
Even if the game balances between games based on an ELO, I had it so much times 2 best people from the previous game (mostly high-levels) got in he same team after a “balance”.
Sometimes it balances well, sometimes it doesn’t.
Even if people say “Levels aren’t an indicator of skill”, most of the time higher levels ARE better than lower.
In 200 hrs I only saw 1 player on lvl 20+ who wasn’t the best in the room.
I’m almost level 7 and my Bronze Arty carried to beat a team with a few 30+ level people with Gold/Cobalt loadouts on it just today.
I think the issue here is that you’re not very good and you want something to blame it on besides yourself, although admittedly there are rare times where it’s a stack.
That’s just an easy excuse for people to be angry about as opposed to analyzing why you lost. If I lose I don’t immediately stare at the level differences. I notice that they had a couple of medics that knew what to do, fire support that knew what to do and one or two guys that had solid aim. Or they had multiple engineers willing to throw themselves into the meat grinder. Where my team was half Vassili that round, no medics and no engineers.
If you have 50+ hours in a game you’re as good as you’re going to get. We could have this conversation a year from now and those same people who aren’t doing well against level 30’s while they are level 10 will still be failing against those level 110’s while they are level 90.
No, that wont fix anything. A level 100 player can still be utterly useless, all it does is show he has played the game for a stupid amount of time.
An intelligent algorithm that can assess each player’s abilities and sort them into skill brackets is the only way to ensure matches are balanced.
I don’t think removing/ hiding levels would do anything because people would still keep hiding around the corner, medics running past downed teammates and engineers running past the EV, not trying to plant/ defuse C4.
More hack-u-sations will come flying when levels are gone.
Maybe replace levels with a 20char self title like: LevelsDontMatter.
[left]Thanks a lot for your answers !
Even so, I still wonder how to make team balanced !
I refer to one answer : “Even if people say “Levels aren’t an indicator of skill”, most of the time higher levels ARE better than lower. In 200 hrs I only saw 1 player on lvl 20+ who wasn’t the best in the room”.
That’s perfectly true.
I play Dirty bomb as a coop game.
I spent 2500 hours on L4D2. For those who know this game, this is the perfect example of a coop game. The more you spend time on a game playing, the more you LEARN cause you improve in anycases : weapons dommages, how to switch weapon and when, where to go, stick with the team sometimes and when you can go alone, how to play with you special merc, how to use walls and tricks, how to play with footstep noises, …
You cannot say levels are an excuse. This is not true. It matters !
Sometimes you win against a 20+ true BUT
You can see that when you have two levels 14
playing against a level 33 and a level 6 for example.
Each time I see a team balanced like this, the team with the same high level win BECAUSE they are playing together in the same way. Because 2 high levels are better than one veteran and a beginner.
So I would propose different levels for servers :
0-5
5-10
10-20
20-30
…
[/left]
[quote=“Amerika;92688”]That’s just an easy excuse for people to be angry about as opposed to analyzing why you lost. If I lose I don’t immediately stare at the level differences. I notice that they had a couple of medics that knew what to do, fire support that knew what to do and one or two guys that had solid aim. Or they had multiple engineers willing to throw themselves into the meat grinder. Where my team was half Vassili that round, no medics and no engineers.
If you have 50+ hours in a game you’re as good as you’re going to get. We could have this conversation a year from now and those same people who aren’t doing well against level 30’s while they are level 10 will still be failing against those level 110’s while they are level 90.[/quote]
But the point is that higher level players do tend to read the game better and actually care about providing a service that the team is lacking. If you’re missing a medic or an engineer and have 4 players under level 7 playing some rotation merc, chances are they are trying the new mercs out and don’t give a shit about playing for their team.
As I said before, from level 12 on out differences in level start to matter less and less. But under that threshold, players are still in a learning process and they do fail to live up to the average needed player standard of any team.
Finally, I must disagree on the 50+ hours limit you set where people stop improving. There is no time limit, one improves all the time, there is always something to be learned. And muscle memory alone develops over hundreds of hours. Again, the higher your play time the more you need to play to actually improve. It’s exponential really, but that doesn’t mean that people that suck with 50h will keep sucking. There are just different learning curves out there, mainly based on people’s ages.
Levels mean experience so in general higher levels have a better understanding and possibly better loadouts.
Regardless, having these level-stacked teams made by the server is utterly incomprehensible.
In my experience, I have seen that generally higher levels are better (I say in general before some smarta** comes and give his personal example, and miss the whole point). When there is steamrolling, there is no fun, and frustration (except for people with ego issues or trolls, maybe).
And no, people leaving/joining is not the core of the issue because in the many games I have notice that from the start it is a team-building issue from the server, you can see directly the most experienced and in many case meaning the most deadly players stacked in one team, depressing immediately the whole team and barring some rare cases that spelled the whole match right from the start to be a steamroll boring slugfest.
Do something SD, and first step is at least balance levels on both teams at a start of a match. We can debate about leavers/joiners later, but already the initial team-making is botched !!
[quote=“Lumi;92783”][quote=“Amerika;92688”]That’s just an easy excuse for people to be angry about as opposed to analyzing why you lost. If I lose I don’t immediately stare at the level differences. I notice that they had a couple of medics that knew what to do, fire support that knew what to do and one or two guys that had solid aim. Or they had multiple engineers willing to throw themselves into the meat grinder. Where my team was half Vassili that round, no medics and no engineers.
If you have 50+ hours in a game you’re as good as you’re going to get. We could have this conversation a year from now and those same people who aren’t doing well against level 30’s while they are level 10 will still be failing against those level 110’s while they are level 90.[/quote]
But the point is that higher level players do tend to read the game better and actually care about providing a service that the team is lacking. If you’re missing a medic or an engineer and have 4 players under level 7 playing some rotation merc, chances are they are trying the new mercs out and don’t give a shit about playing for their team.
As I said before, from level 12 on out differences in level start to matter less and less. But under that threshold, players are still in a learning process and they do fail to live up to the average needed player standard of any team.
Finally, I must disagree on the 50+ hours limit you set where people stop improving. There is no time limit, one improves all the time, there is always something to be learned. And muscle memory alone develops over hundreds of hours. Again, the higher your play time the more you need to play to actually improve. It’s exponential really, but that doesn’t mean that people that suck with 50h will keep sucking. There are just different learning curves out there, mainly based on people’s ages. [/quote]
I have many years of competitive experience that disagrees with a lot of what you just said. So we’ll have to agree to disagree on this as there is no way I’m budging. I know good players. They are good early and stay good. I also know less dedicated and less skilled players who play for fun who will still get beat by people who recently started the game but have hundreds of hours in. It’s not all a linear line of skill progression for most people.
Also, you gain a lot of skill through not playing. Watching YT videos, watching streams, asking questions, doing research about weapons or jumps and trying to take that information and improve your gameplay is what makes you better after you’ve hit that point where most players stop getting much better over time. Many people simply do not care that much.
There are a couple of guys who are extremely high level in this game. One of them is considered one of the best DB players on the planet. The other is considered maybe mediocre at best. If time equates to skill as you insist why is there such a huge difference? That mediocre player can barely hang with people in the late teens or early 20’s. He should have a significant advantage. You can apply this same logic to sports. Some people spend half their life playing basketball and put in more hours than people in the NBA. Why aren’t they in the NBA? Why didn’t they play in college? Why did they just sit the bench in highschool or never make the team? At some point people hit their limit in either their talent or their desire. That’s why I really don’t like levels. Also, they just don’t contribute a single thing that is positive and produce a ton of negatives in this game.
See this? This wonderful graph? This is the learning curve. It demonstrates the difference between player skill based on time.
http://i.imgur.com/V7q2G3O.jpg
The problem is, most level 6s-10s are the cyan dot. They are at the lower end of the curve.
Higher level players are the red dot. They are much better at the game than the cyan players.
Even HIGHER players are the purple dot. They could have much more time in the game than the red players, but be only slightly better. This is where it becomes an issue trying to balance teams. You can’t balance on player level alone because skill:time is not linear.
[quote=“complimentaryTee;92775”][left]
So I would propose different levels for servers :
0-5
5-10
10-20
20-30
…
[/left][/quote]
Genius. Break up the tiny player pool into a bunch of even tinier player pools.