Team balancing

[Cinquero]

How does that work? On the CTF Herforst Elite server, for example, it seems to not work at all. At least, one has often very unbalanced teams.

Maybe Nexuiz should keep a record of player performance for each specific map? (of course, that would require to set player passwords)

[divVerent]

How does that work? On the CTF Herforst Elite server, for example, it seems to not work at all. At least, one has often very unbalanced teams.

It is up to the server admin to use team balancing or not.

If team balancing is on, no "select team" dialog pops up.

The cvars to control this are the ones whose name begins with g_balance_teams.

Maybe Nexuiz should keep a record of player performance for each specific map? (of course, that would require to set player passwords)

And it would require a global stats server - and it would be quite simple

[Cinquero]

And it would require a global stats server - and it would be quite simple

It wouldn't necessarily require a global stats server. I would rather argument against it because Nexuiz being an open-source product, practically everyone could mess around with the stats submission. A per-server and map record would be quite sufficient. Additionally, Nexuiz is just too configurable, so I doubt a global stats server would make much sense.

I'd favor a solution that pulls the individual server's results und publishes them on the Nexuiz site -- both on a per server and on a global (merging of trustsed server's results) basis.

I remember the good old UT2003/4 days. The central stats server was always lagging behind there for months... so I guess it wouldn't be as easy to maintain such a beast.

[esteel]

The team balancing just makes sure the teams are equally sized.. I think trying to get a 'player-rating' to get really balanced teams is very very hard. But thats a reason why think its a good idea to disable the balancing as its then easier to balance it 'by hand'.

[Cinquero]

The team balancing just makes sure the teams are equally sized.. I think trying to get a 'player-rating' to get really balanced teams is very very hard. But thats a reason why think its a good idea to disable the balancing as its then easier to balance it 'by hand'.

Why would it be hard? Calculate a player score per game and map. The score could range from 0.0 to 1.0 -- representing the player's frag count as a fraction of the max player frag count in a game. The average of these scores should give an at least somewhat usable indicator.

One could improve the calculation by taking the best players into account: if in the new game are players that have had a score of 1.0 in games for which other players have played and got scores, too, one could increase the weighting of scores earned in such "common" games. One could even go on and calculate correlations and anti-correlations between players )).

I could implement the last part if we had some sort of scores collector implemented.

[tChr]

How many times do I have to say this.. There is a built-in scorelogger. Read Docs/scorelog.txt (or something)

[KadaverJack]

Why would it be hard? Calculate a player score per game and map. The score could range from 0.0 to 1.0 -- representing the player's frag count as a fraction of the max player frag count in a game. The average of these scores should give an at least somewhat usable indicator.

It's so hard, because that problem is NP complete.

[Cinquero]

It's so hard, because that problem is NP complete.

*g*
I did not specify the "problem" formally, so it would be a bit hard to prove that it is NP-complete. Hehe
Why do you think that it is necessary to solve that in an exact manner?
It is already sufficient if the best players would be alternatingly distributed between the teams.

[divVerent]

Well... a simple heuristics that WOULD work well enough would be "each player enters the team with lower total player score". That isn't the optimum solution, but should work quite well.

However, where to get these scores from? Note that a global stats server would be easy to cheat on... and how to get scores which DO work as sums? That is, any idea on a score system so that two players with score 1000 are as good as one player with score 2000?

[tChr]

its not _that_ important.. just a lil crude balancing of the teams based upon the resutls of the latest 3-4 maps at any time would be plenty enough.