Team balance

[Clueless Newbie]

An element of Nexuiz that really needs work is team balance. What little there is now is worse than none at all. I have no idea how many times I've been on a team that is being solidly thumped by the other team, and then being told by the server that one of our players have to join the winning team.

I think the team balance could be improved like this:

1. The server keeps track of the player scores between games — not online sessions, games (or maybe this should be done by the client?). When a new level is loaded, the players are distributed by their scores from the previous game. That way the teams get and equal share of the best players, the mediocre players, and the poor players.

2. The server keeps track not only of the scores of the teams and the players, but also of the rate at which the team scores are changing. That way, the server will know if the losing team is gaining on the winner or not. This can be done simply by comparing the current score with the score at the last time a player joined or left the game. The point of this is to make it easier to adjust the teams so that the scores will be as equal as possible when the game ends.

3. New joiners are automatically placed in the team that is having the most trouble. Note that even if a team is in the lead, it will get pounded if the other team is gaining at a ludicrous rate (see #2).

Team balance is something that really needs work. Seriously.

[Wilu]

I think that disallowing player to join the team witch is winning by more than 25 points and if this condition isn't fulfilled than disallowing to join the team which has more players should do the job.

[Mr. Bougo]

I think that disallowing player to join the team witch is winning by more than 25 points and if this condition isn't fulfilled than disallowing to join the team witch has more players should do the job.

I'd say 50 points...

Remember that one capture is 20 points.

[Sepelio]

I think that disallowing player to join the team witch is winning by more than 25 points and if this condition isn't fulfilled than disallowing to join the team witch has more players should do the job.

I'd say 50 points...

Remember that one capture is 20 points.

I'd agree with this. One player can infact turn a match around completely pending on the level of the other players present.

Unless everyone is using a Crylink, but thats another rant for another thread.

[Alien]

This has faults. Imagine situation when two players have played and one was better than other. Score for example was 200 30. Now if six players join, they will be forced to join losing team, cause to make score equal will require some time. 7 vs 1 --> bad.

Skill based auto-balance should be the best solution.

[Xeno]

deja vu

We need to pool all the team balance threads together. I made some big post somewhere about using scores from the previous game to balance the next one and also about using point differences to determine how many more players one team could have before the server began nagging about balance (e.g. one extra player for every 50 points behind).

The biggest problem is that most people don't care, and that spreads. Changing to the losing team enough times to try to balance the game only to have some fairly skilled regular show up and take your place on the winning team while neutralizing you eventually makes you think "fuck that, some idiot will just negate it anyway".

[tZork]

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.

[Xeno]

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.

[Clueless Newbie]

This has faults. Imagine situation when two players have played and one was better than other. Score for example was 200 30. Now if six players join, they will be forced to join losing team, cause to make score equal will require some time. 7 vs 1 --> bad.

Yes, that would be bad. But in that case, the 7-player team would be catching up to the single player so fast that all subsequent joiners would end up on the leading team until things even out.

Skill based auto-balance should be the best solution.

That's why I want the server (or client) to remember the player scores from the previous game.

[Clueless Newbie]

deja vu

Glad to hear that. Team balance is a huge problem with Nexuiz. In fact, I think this is the one thing I'd like the devs to fix with before they do anything else.