[SUGGESTION] CTF Balancing on public servers with team play improvements

The balancing in Nexuiz for example, doesn't work (for example) if there is one extremely superior player who doesn't care if he kills all the gameplay for the other players.

One possible solution to balance teams without moving players around between the teams, could be to change the rules of a CTF game somewhat. And what I'm anticipating is that we could implement rules that would *ENFORCE TEAM PLAY*, something that would discourage superior players from entering games with more "regular" players.

One idea would be to limit the maximum amount of captures every player can do. For example: max_captures=2*(captures_required/n_team_members)

Of course, we would have to authenticate players somehow in order to prevent them from simply reconnecting to the server when they have reached their limits. Please comment and vote whether you like the basic idea. (It's another question how or if that could be done at all)

A sane (i.e. not eatseakittens style) way of moving players is much better than a cap cap.

max_captures=2*(captures_required/n_team_members)

Hmm, I wouldn't really like being limited in my caps, because it means that team members would have to swap roles periodically. Also the rule would not work on open ended cap limit servers :S

I feel that a better way of balancing would be to transfer players across teams so that the sum of the team member's caps on both teams is equal (this would mean one team of 5 could have 10 caps, and the other 5, but the average number of caps for each person would be 3). Just my thoughts, obviously this could get annoying and a lot of people might disable it (perhaps have a "Please volunteer to move in the next 30s or a team member will be automatically moved" might help )

Bad idea.
It would destroy gameplay and especially clanmatches.

Agreeing with the above criticism...
Hopefully we can make unbalanced matches shorter with leadlimit, but that's not exactly usable yet in terms of per-gametype configuration, there's some trickery we'll have to figure out
Also, FWIW, merlijn worked a bit on automatic balance through rcon2irc based on per-player match statistics, and it seems it's still kind of bad with other autobalance methods, but we all agree that the builtin autobalance is worthless in ctf.

clanmatches

Well, just like cheats, you wouldn't have it enabled for clan matches

but we all agree that the builtin autobalance is worthless in ctf.

Hmm, I wouldn't entirely agree with that. It may have a place on popular pubctf servers, to really force better players to join the losing team. I also think that the "Join best team" thing shouldn't join the team with the least players, but rather the team that is losing (perhaps if a team was losing by 50%+, the join best team thing could join the losers, and otherwise join the team with the least people).

maybe we need a "speach-command"-list!
something like in CSS!
you press a key (maybe c) and a little option menu opens with commands which the teammates can hear when pressed!

you know tha CSS ones: Sector cleared, The Bomb's at B, I'm in Position, Go! go! go! ...
you see... only tactical commands!

Maybe that would improve the teamplay... but it could also be annoying :S

Wrong thread.

Hmm, I wouldn't entirely agree with that. It may have a place on popular pubctf servers, to really force better players to join the losing team. I also think that the "Join best team" thing shouldn't join the team with the least players, but rather the team that is losing (perhaps if a team was losing by 50%+, the join best team thing could join the losers, and otherwise join the team with the least people).

You don't play public CTF matches, do you?
Most of the time, unbalanced teams are not caused by unbalanced player counts, but by unbalanced skills. Sometimes, the strongest team even is the smallest of the two, and autobalance only servers to make it stronger. I'm sure players in general can tell that a game's unbalanced better than autobalance.
Then there's the winning team joiners and other disrupting players, but it's best to deal with them in a way that also doesn't ruin 80% of the potentially balanced games.

I remember ONE public CTF server where balance was not an issue: the Over The Lazy Dog CTF server (formerly RBI CTF). It had no autobalance, and had kick votes enabled (not sure it's relevant, but some might find this worth mentioning). It might have been the player base, I have no idea... But it really was the best server, and all of a sudden everybody stopped playing on it

We could use a votescramble command :p

Every measure you take will probably be counter productive. The one brought up in the first post for example could potentially damage the weaker team more than the stronger team. If the weak team has one good player who is doing all the capping to keep them in the race, after his 2-cap limit, the team would be done for.

I'm not a big fan of auto-balance. I think a system that would ENABLE responsible players to balance out a game but DISABLE winning team joiners would largely fix the problem. The problem is... how would one do this :p

Some example pseudocode:

Code:

if count(winning_team) > count(losing_team):
allow_switch_from(winning_team)
deny_switch_to(losing_team)

if count(winning_team) > count(losing_team) AND score(winning_team) > score(losing_team) + fraglimit/2:
switch_highest_scorer(winning_team, losing_team)

But this should be coded in such a way as to allow more than two teams, and should not be limited to ctf.

I suggest you talk to merlijn about balance, he's been working on it and probably has things to say about it.

Hopefully we can make unbalanced matches shorter with leadlimit, but that's not exactly usable yet in terms of per-gametype configuration, there's some trickery we'll have to figure out

Capture limit: 10 , but if a team leads by 6 caps they win automatically. I think I played on such a server some time.

The thing with autobalance is that it balances only the amount of players but not their skill and I think that can't be fixed, players need to fix that by themself. A 5vs7 can be balanced too, or 4vs6 etc.

Capture limit: 10 , but if a team leads by 6 caps they win automatically. I think I played on such a server some time.

Yes, the cvar is called "leadlimit", I know it exists
And yes, players are able enough to balance games by themselves, I completely agree.

Oh I did not know Thats quite good!