idea ??

[rufsketch1]

Belittling replies aren't really necessary, are they? Simply because you don't see the utility of something doesn't make it meaningless or useless. The truth is you have no idea why I care about such things nor will you ever. Perhaps I have good reasons, perhaps I'm just batshit paranoid (which in turn might have a reasonable basis).

I don't think it was belittling (especially not compared to some of the comments you make from time to time).

You seem concerned about a threat stemming from this.
I don't see any reason for concern, even in theory, from someone who participates in IRC and on forums. I don't see the difference. Thus, it appears like paranoia to me. You don't seem interested in explaining any further, so we're at an impasse.

My concern is that you could be holding back development of a much-wanted feature while giving very little explanation. I don't want to know your personal life, but it would be useful to know something more to support the concern. I don't see how it could be any more dangerous than using other internet services, like a web forum, IRC or email.

Btw, apart from the anonymity aspect, global stats just leads to more prick-waving as people get more focused on trying to be better than everyone else.

Competitive gameplay doesn't spawn "prick-waving" any more than forums spawn heated arguments. It is really dependent upon the community. Many people value competition for adding excitement to a game. Some might use stats as a method for tracking improvement.

wouldn't a system like this require that users need passwords?

[esteel]

I kinda hate to spoil all the hard work you put into this topic, but what good will it be if people can still choose what team to play on? What use is it to ASK people to switch if all they do is continue to bash the other team? People are just selfish idiots at times and trying to autobalance things will just make them choose the teams themselfs and continue screwing around..
Or maybe to put it gentler, how do you expect all your work to really help improve public matches? A lot of players just play one or two matches, thats hardly time enough to gather data about them and for having a sort of database, a lot of players play with fakenames for what ever reason. And i think those players tend to be good players. As soon as they choose a new name the system will have to collect data about them again for two games or so. And even if one would get a working system for this, what about the players that leave in mid-game, rebalance the players each times? Well maybe it would not be more annoying to be rebalanced then it is to point out teams are unbalanced and being ignored.
Basicly i'm still thinking that there are too many unknows to get such a system working really well and that people themself should do the work, but during the last weeks i slowing was convinced that a lot of people are just mean and will abuse any system. You should be sure that its worth to put work into this before you continue..

[Spaceman]

On some servers the only team balancing is simply a message informing the bigger team. The method the server uses seems to be very basic - a simple head count.

On other servers, some form of enforced auto balancing takes place. The server actually makes somebody change teams, again the method seems to be a basic head count. The server tries to balance the teams by moving a player from the oversized team.

Do we want our team based games to end with all the teams having similar scores or do we want the players to decide for themselves (free market vs state control)?

I personally want the server to tell both teams when they appear to be seriously out of balance. When I'm in the weaker team I want to see a message telling me that we are currently below par.

As esteel has said (and have others) to balance the teams at the start of the game the server needs to be able to positively identify the players. The server could identify the players from the previous game that stay connected with their IP. However, the server cannot identify a player who connects after the game has started.

If a players disconnects and subsequently reconnects, even with both the same IP and player name there is no guarantee that it is the same person.

Although if some kind of secret token based authentication was used (a line in the players config or even a cookie), then it would be possible for each server to identify a player. Each server would have its own stats for all the participating players. The server would then know the players token and the server admins could easily use it.

Maybe we need a third way. Reduce the bigger teams potential points, award them less points per flag capture, keys collected. Or give them less health, reduce their speed. Simply penalise the stronger team.

[[-z-]]

Basicly i'm still thinking that there are too many unknows to get such a system working really well and that people themself should do the work, but during the last weeks i slowing was convinced that a lot of people are just mean and will abuse any system. You should be sure that its worth to put work into this before you continue..

This is why I chose to divide by time im my equation. It gives us an average. I'm not saying it's a perfect solution but it's better than what we currently have. In theory my code is a much simpler solution than a global user system. A little math, get a number to assert a compound 'value' on a player, group based on individual values.

[tZork]

Jikes seems i steeped on some sore toes providing some input here.

deaths are not necessarily a bad thing wrt to team value. for example, a player prepared to sacrifice himself to take the brunt of the counter attack while hes team got the other ones flag are a valuable team member.

lol wut? You're still dying, it doesn't matter if it's for the good of the team, that's a whole 'nother level of statistics that my equation is not concerned with. Regardless of the fact that Nexuiz can't predict whether you died to help your team or not. Dying is not a good thing, I don't believe you should get points even if you did die ~for your team~. You still died, and lost all your weapons and your location.

Im not suggesting a reward. im suggesting its not much of a negative. And, like Psychcf pointed out death has its own bad built in.

flag return scores are not that important, anyone can (and should!) return the flag. carrier kills however needs to be factored in.

Well now, your ideology and public server realities are two distinct pictures. You'd like to assume everyone knows to retrieve the flag but spec on galts for a while and you'll see just how oblivious some players can be.

Right, evaluating players worth has nothing do with what you call ideology *giggles*. what ever the current public scene is like would not a balancing system be for the purpose of making that scene better? i dont (pardon the language) give a flying fuck what ppl do on galts, {x} or in your bedroom. if someone plays like a turd he should be evaluated as one.

kills are not always good. take a map like hydronex. killing off to much will mean the enemy base is crawling with 150 hp players armed with, at least, a rather nasty shotgun. making the attackers job near impossible. and then of course if you spend time killing instead of trying to cap or defend, or fulfill whatever job the middleman needs to be doing. your not helping your team.

In this example, the deaths are also high... so if we go back to my point about deaths being a bad thing, you'll see how this balances out.

killing power has little to do with k/d ratio, this part is bogus imo. k/t are more like it.

it's all over time... kills minus deaths times a multipler OVER TIME.

You may agree or disagree with my point of view, but as stated before i see no distinct team negative in getting fragged. with this in mind the kill power factor is simply kills over time, after all the player still killed this many players over this much time. it don't matter if he dies 2 or 200 times doing it.

weapon / item hogging are a BIG - in team play. someone grabbing a gun they allready have _while teammates are close_ or gobbeling up more then 200/100 hp/ar need to have their team-worth-score cut drastically regardless of other factors. im sure theres other things like this that needs to be thought of, this was just of the top of my head when i read this.

Again some sort of ideology here. I'm speaking about public servers. Public servers.

Okay! lets design a system that keeps everything the way it is, since we all love the current state so much.

what really would bring some valuable info to this equation is if the player a) announces hes role and b) tried to fulfill it. hard to make happen tho.

While I'd love a team fortress mode, that's hardly a solution to balancing.

Right! (?)

in all i think its good to try to develop a generic score formula. but in the end its hard to evaluate a players worth by statistics.

Really because there are quite a few out there that do a pretty good job.

Good for them.

perhaps a karma system could help. eg let players say i dis/like this player. to be effective that would need reliable between game tracking tho.

What could possibly go wrong?!?

If the majority of ppl would abuse or ignore such a system then theres no point at all in trying to balance anything. im talking about a factor in the balancer, not a replacement.

I feel like you're trying to hold my formula up against unrealistic hopes and dreams. I'm tired of this "it won't work" attitude. Experiments are how we build knowledge about our science.

Get some coffee and read my post again. i never once said anything remotely in the lines your suggesting. I added my ideas on how to make it better, before it gets implemented and cemented.

so, lets first have a look the the problem we need to solve. We have two teams, these need to be better balanced. To do this we need to define what a good teams is. A good teams in ctf needs players doing different thing, some defending, some attacking and perhaps a few middle men. knowing this its easy to see that a single "value" for each player provides to little information to form two balanced teams. we may end up with one team full of attackers and one full of defenders and the game would never know.

Heres a simplified version of what im currently working on for a team balancer:
defensive score = (fc kills + flag returns + kills close to flag) / (time played / time limit)
middleman score = (kills + (kills close to own fc * 5)) / (time played / time limit)
offensive score = ((captures / capture limit) - ((failed captures / cap limit) * 0.5)) / (time played / time limit)

Now, at the start of next game (or at a forced re balance) we could normalize these scores to the best one in each category. we then select the highest one for each player and zero the rest.
we can then select the two best attackers, flip a coin for who goes to what team. we do the same for defenders and middle. then do it over again with the remaining "free" players until the list is empty. Keep in mind that above score evaluation is simplified and likely flawed. what im thinking right now is a system that responds so events like kills, caps, deaths and so on and build a progressive score instead.

[rufsketch1]

Basicly i'm still thinking that there are too many unknows to get such a system working really well and that people themself should do the work, but during the last weeks i slowing was convinced that a lot of people are just mean and will abuse any system. You should be sure that its worth to put work into this before you continue..

This is why I chose to divide by time im my equation. It gives us an average. I'm not saying it's a perfect solution but it's better than what we currently have. In theory my code is a much simpler solution than a global user system. A little math, get a number to assert a compound 'value' on a player, group based on individual values.

I suppose your solution would be ideal in certain scenarios, such as when players only stick around for two games.

but consider that a good player joining for 50 seconds, might simply not have had the chance to score any points. it would be unbalanced.

perhaps we could have all players who haven't played past a certain threshold be assigned to groups randomly. again, not a perfect solution, but better than assigning a leet player you thought was nub to an already leet team.

[rufsketch1]

On some servers the only team balancing is simply a message informing the bigger team. The method the server uses seems to be very basic - a simple head count.

On other servers, some form of enforced auto balancing takes place. The server actually makes somebody change teams, again the method seems to be a basic head count. The server tries to balance the teams by moving a player from the oversized team.

Do we want our team based games to end with all the teams having similar scores or do we want the players to decide for themselves (free market vs state control)?

I personally want the server to tell both teams when they appear to be seriously out of balance. When I'm in the weaker team I want to see a message telling me that we are currently below par.

As esteel has said (and have others) to balance the teams at the start of the game the server needs to be able to positively identify the players. The server could identify the players from the previous game that stay connected with their IP. However, the server cannot identify a player who connects after the game has started.

If a players disconnects and subsequently reconnects, even with both the same IP and player name there is no guarantee that it is the same person.

Although if some kind of secret token based authentication was used (a line in the players config or even a cookie), then it would be possible for each server to identify a player. Each server would have its own stats for all the participating players. The server would then know the players token and the server admins could easily use it.

Maybe we need a third way. Reduce the bigger teams potential points, award them less points per flag capture, keys collected. Or give them less health, reduce their speed. Simply penalise the stronger team.

no, penalizing strong players is a TERRIBLE way to keep balance. it makes the game not fun. the config file idea would be good, except for the fact that a locally stored file, is one that can be locally edited.

[[-z-]]

Heres a simplified version of what im currently working on for a team balancer:
defensive score = (fc kills + flag returns + kills close to flag) / (time played / time limit)
middleman score = (kills + (kills close to own fc * 5)) / (time played / time limit)
offensive score = ((captures / capture limit) - ((failed captures / cap limit) * 0.5)) / (time played / time limit)

This is like an over simplified version of what I did. You just made it require new information about events and dividing it up amongst these unknown (to the game) areas of play. Mine only requires math.

The only thing I agree with is your denominator.

I like where you're going with it but I think it's unrealistic unless you're coding all that extra information. Though if that's the case, I'd argue you use your efforts towards a stronger base.

[tZork]

Heres a simplified version of what im currently working on for a team balancer:
defensive score = (fc kills + flag returns + kills close to flag) / (time played / time limit)
middleman score = (kills + (kills close to own fc * 5)) / (time played / time limit)
offensive score = ((captures / capture limit) - ((failed captures / cap limit) * 0.5)) / (time played / time limit)

This is like an over simplified version of what I did.

What? How is these two even similar? Like i said i posted a simplified version here so that it would be easy to understand. The point of my system is not the precise formula use to derive each score, its that its split into evaluating the three primary roles of a ctf team. Your system does not pay any attention to this.

You just made it require new information about events and dividing it up amongst these unknown (to the game) areas of play. Mine only requires math.

The only thing I agree with is your denominator.

I like where you're going with it but I think it's unrealistic unless you're coding all that extra information. Though if that's the case, I'd argue you use your efforts towards a stronger base.

coding this is a pice of cake. im still working out some kinks in my actual formula once thats done ill code it and let ppl try.

[[-z-]]

Simply put, I'm not going to waste my breath.

I have stated my formula, given examples and reasons. The way you and I see CTF is just different and you are going to code it however you want it. So until I learn to code it myself or someone's willing to back me up, I guess we'll just end up playing it your way.