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.

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.

Wilu wrote: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.

Mr. Bougo wrote:

Wilu wrote: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.

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.

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".

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.

tZork wrote: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.

Alien wrote: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.

Xeno The Blind wrote: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.

Xeno The Blind wrote:

tZork wrote: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?

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.

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

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.

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..