[SUGGESTION] Evening teams out a little...

Yo dudes,

How about banning the blue and red buttons and only allowing 'auto-join'? Also, using Xonstat, certain servers should be able to put players on certain teams to even things out using elo.

Only allowing the auto join option would only work with an elo matchmaking system, otherwise the matchups would be random. That being said, I think an elo matchmaking system would be cool.

The player number is not *always* important - it's the skill.

To use Elo seems nice at first, but how to do it in a good way?
The players don't load the new map at the same speed so there will be a delay until the game starts.
Also what about new players connecting? Could be bad luck and you end up with:
Player-400-Elo connects and joins,
Player-100-Elo connects and joins the other team,
Player-400-Elo connects and joins the team like the first 400-Elo guy.


In my opinion this 'problem' can't be fixed, it's already there like forever.
I believe there are always ways to trick a system if you want to unbalance it, because you can not lose (or some other reasons).
Thus you have to rely on the fairness of everyone and if it does not work, then there are usually admins on popular servers who can fix it by "movetoteam_x" or kick/ban.

As for DCC you can find the admins in IRC: #dccdelight (ARCNet) or highlight me, halogene, Sless, RoKenn, CuBe0wl (C.Brutail), sxen, kuniuthefrogg, Grunt (and others who I can't remember right now ) in #xonotic (QuakeNet).

there's no 'ctf elo' , so even that wont help.

best way to deal with bad balance is trying to even things out when possible. if enough ppl do it, it becomes "the thing to do".

Not allowing team select is no solution (possibly a way to disable it for ppl who are known to always select the winner side, but that's another debate)

Using Elo for this is interesting, but not sure... we do have CTF elo, but we have to find out how the Elos actually "add up" in a CTF game.

If we strictly go by the Elo model, then two players of Elo X are as good as one player with Elo X+120. Based on this, we could simply make it ONLY decide which team gets a new player when the counts are even. It still should help a lot, but never harm, then. But we should first analyze our games in the database for whether this idea actually makes sense.

To calculate a "team Elo" from the "player Elos", the model is:

team_elo = log10(sum(10^(player_elo[i]/400), i, 1, n)) * 400

The big issue here however is that Elo really doesn't work that well for CTF, as different valid tactics in CTF result in different personal scores.

Sorry to complain, but I really feel that something needs to be done about team balance. Almost all of the matches I've played recently have been unbalanced.

Imo, the 4 main solutions (that will only apply to the main popular servers) are:

• Allowing warm-ups on all matches (where teams can be sorted and people can shuffle around)
  
• Only allowing the 'auto-join' button when the warm-up sessions have finished and the real match has started (the elo rating of a person that joins later on will determine which team they will be on)
  
• Increasing the start-up times (something like 10-15 seconds would be a good target)
  
• Releasing an up-to-date map pack that players can download (ensuring players won't have to wait forever to download a new map in game, similar thing going on in Red Eclipse)
  

Sorry to complain, but I really feel that something needs to be done about team balance. Almost all of the matches I've played recently have been unbalanced.

Imo, the 5 main solutions (that will only apply to the main popular servers) are:

• Allowing warm-ups on all matches (so teams can be sorted and people can shuffle around)
  
• Increasing the start-up times (something like 10-15 seconds would be a good target)
  
• Releasing an up-to-date map pack that players can download (ensuring players won't have to wait forever to download a new map in game)
  
• Only allowing the 'auto-join' button (preferably this should only occur when the warm-up sessions have finished and the real match has started)
  
• Making teams more even using elo points (tricky but possible)
  

Balancing is up to the players and server administration.

Doku should be putting the xHOCTF server up at some point in the near future. If you don't know what HOCTF is, it's a popular Nexuiz server that strictly enforces team balance. That is not to say things don't get unbalanced sometimes, but not nearly as bad as what I've seen in Xonotic matches.

I prefer if players can switch on their own accord, if they think game is still imbalanced even though team sizes are equal. Sure enough, often you get equal team sizes, yet one of them is capping repeatedly and other one can't do anything about it.

Doku should be putting the xHOCTF server up at some point in the near future.

Brilliant! I'd love to play on this server.

I prefer if players can switch on their own accord, if they think game is still imbalanced even though team sizes are equal. Sure enough, often you get equal team sizes, yet one of them is capping repeatedly and other one can't do anything about it.

I wrote in my earlier post that we should allow warm-ups on all matches (so teams can be sorted and people can shuffle around) and then make 'auto-join' the only option after that. This should, hopefully, make teams better balanced. But it's all done in the warm-up session instead of in the real game.

Here's an interesting idea...

Autobalance in CTF has NEVER worked right in Nexuiz. Most people don't seem to care. Make them care by showing them the right way, but that is only possible if manual team selection is.

I wrote in my earlier post that we should allow warm-ups on all matches (so teams can be sorted and people can shuffle around) and then make 'auto-join' the only option after that. This should, hopefully, make teams better balanced. But it's all done in the warm-up session instead of in the real game.

How can it handle someone joining during the game?

Only issue I have with balancing now is that I don't know how it impacts ELO rankings. Imagine someone capping 9 times out of 10, resulting in 9:0, then switching to keep map going. He manages to cap a few more times, but his previous team finally manages one lucky cap and wins the game. How would it impact that player's ELO? It's a lost game, but player's contribution to winning clearly was enormous.

How can it handle someone joining during the game?

By only allowing that new person to 'auto-join' and nothing else... Just out of curiosity, would the code allow this?

If it's written that way, sure, why not. But how is 'auto-join', which is based solely on player count, the only good option?

And what do you do if a few players from one team leave the game or join the spectators?

Any updates on this? I still think a lot of games are unbalanced/start too early/should have forced warm-ups...

waning ... hoctf has a tendency to auto team switch you while you are carrying the flag ... of your score is low ...

Can you rephrase that for me Hutty?

Hutty has experienced being forced to switch teams by the HOCTF server while he was a flag carrier, he had a low score.

(I think the "of" is an "if"?)

Oh, that's cool. We should have an online meeting with all server owners to discuss things like this.