Team balance

[Clueless Newbie]

However, a winning team is sometimes a well working team, something thats rather fun to be a part of and fairly rare on public servers. always changing "away" as soon as the scores are off by more then a cap or two gets tiresome. really tiresome.

Definitely. Being a part of a team that works really well together is brilliant.
As for switching, I think we're talking about the 120+ point differences that show up most of the time, not the 2-cap breakaway leads.

That's correct. Small leads don't matter because they can change in a second. It's the constant rapegames I dislike. When one team pounds the other into the dust and then keeps on jumping on their heads, that's no fun for anybody worth considering.

Not sure how to deal with forced team changes though. Does one take players with low scores? The ones with top scores? Mid-ranges?

[FudgeyBaxter]

To me, this is the biggest problem with the game.
I want to fix this.... a lot.

I need kind, knowing developer finger to point me in the right direction. What player stats are kept, by whom, and where would be a great start.

thanks.

[tZork]

your best bet is proly to go on irc: #nexuiz.editing @ irc.quakenet.org and ask.

[merlijn]

As some of you may be aware, I have been working on my own implementation of teambalance where I'm basing mostly on the average lifetime of the players. Scores are nice and all, but they don't really tell you everything about the game.

To me the bottom line of a game is having FUN, and getting shot up all the time obviously isn't really all that fun. A team may not be getting the flagcaps in, but have some good battles anyway - even games that end 10:2 can be enjoyable for both parties.

I have more of my ideas written up here: http://dev.alientrap.org/issues/show/612 (along with the script, this version can be a little outdated). I keep the most recent versions up on github: http://github.com/mhofstra/nexuiz-rcon2 ... r/teams.pl

Feel free to comment and suggest ideas about my way of trying to solve the problem (and I know it is imperfect, no solution here is perfect) - and helping to develop it even more would be great.

[lda17h]

Actually i don't mind one team winning. Basically that's what this game is about. What i do really mind though is these games where you enter, are nice and hit the "auto" join mode. No one leaves, but two more people come in and suddenly one team has 3 more players than the other (it was unbalanced by one and both new ones decided to go into the bigger team - way to go).

Sure, there are games where 3 really good players can beat a team of 5 noobs, but this is the exception. Also it's no fun. IMHO, the first thing a team balancing system should accomplish is evening out the team count. And then allow players to offer to _swap_ for another player on the other team.

The first, evening out team count, could be done with a visible countdown on the screen when the player diff is greater than one. E.g. as soon as the balance is off in this way show a message

"The teams are unbalanced. In 30 secs a random player will be swapped to the other team". Then adjust the timer.. If someone changes before that, fine..

The second, being able to swap teams for another player, could be handled in a way that a player of the winning team can signal his willingness to swap. Then a player of the losing team can accept it.. This way the team sizes don't get messed up.

Having at least the team sizes not totally unbalanced will greatly improve the chances of getting a game that's fun. And if then the teams are still totally unbalanced skillwise, people who prefer a good game instead of just noob slaughter can signal their willingness to swap..