Team balancing

toukkapoukka wrote:

We already have that information. Scores ingame are vague after all. You lose your scores by changing the team. Scores are also lost from the previous game.

The original point, and what i think tongue supports, is that balancing should remain manual. You can do automatic balancing as fancy as you want and get it work "ok" it will still suck because of 1 - partial, incorrect, outdated, missing data 2 - sometimes, impossibility to balance like 2 on 1 games 3 - discouraging team spirit if you balance every round/every time someone join or leave, because then your team mates will rotate too much.

RiFo suggestied score keeping in the first place, which is a non ambitious feature that *might* encourage players to balance a little more, but leave them do it themselves. This is what I support.

Also please, in case of equal number of players in each team, auto-join should take the loosing one by default http://www.warsow.net/forum/thread/14003/1
(updated 2012-08-07 20:51:02)

BBQsauce wrote:

The original point, and what i think tongue supports, is that balancing should remain manual. You can do automatic balancing as fancy as you want and get it work "ok" it will still suck because of 1 - partial, incorrect, outdated, missing data 2 - sometimes, impossibility to balance like 2 on 1 games 3 - discouraging team spirit if you balance every round/every time someone join or leave, because then your team mates will rotate too much.

RiFo suggestied score keeping in the first place, which is a non ambitious feature that *might* encourage players to balance a little more, but leave them do it themselves. This is what I support.

RiFo wrote:

This probably has been adressed before, but I was wondering if its possible to implement an autobalancing feature? Now we rely on goodwill to even out teams, and this doesn't always work out.

As far as I can read, the question in hand is about automatic balancing feature. And on top of that, not about balancing so that there are equal amounts of players on both teams, but that there is equally good players on each team. Or roughly about.

BBQsauce wrote:

Also please, in case of equal number of players in each team, auto-join should take the loosing one by default http://www.warsow.net/forum/thread/14003/1

Technically its valid to force the same amount of players on each team, but it doesn't take account the difference of players skills as I pointed above is one of the key questions in this thread.

The biggest problem in this is figuring out the algorithm. We could sort by MM player stats, but that's still require a pretty complex algorithm. Sorting by current game stats just gets really messy and inaccurate. Any suggestions? I'm all ears.

I'm willing to try or suggest someone capable and motivated to try variation of Monte carlo-method to balance the team with pre-existing rating values found in the player-structure.

Basically you iterate through few (or more) semi-random solutions and use an estimation function that compares the mean and standard deviation of two teams ratings. You could either just take the best one found in those iterations, or you could assign a 'heat' value for the players in each iterations (these 'heat' values add up with all iterations) based on how balanced current iteration is estimated. In the end you form the final iteration based on these heat values.

Idea behind using stochasting algorithm rather than deterministic, is to preserve some randomness across 'callvote shuffle' so that you wont get stuck with one bad solution but have varying dynamics in that which brings the human factor in to decide which solution is actually best.

But then there's the problem of requiring teams that have been playing for a while, unless you use the stats from the MM system and just assign non-logged in players randomly or based on their current in-game stats.

I'm all with tongue in this thread:

tongue wrote:
TBH, I dont even understand why you would have to make it hard and do some sort of evaluation of how "good/bad" the player base is. As long as there is an even amount of players in Alpha and Beta it should be enough. It will be "uneven" anyhow. I've yet to see one of these autobalance functions that work properly.

IMHO:
As long as players keep their "ohsoimportant" score and the last player(s) to join the team with the most score are transferred to the other team so that there is an even amount of players on both teams (+/-1 player) it ought to be enough.

Seriously, trying to make this more complex would be just a complete waste of time and effort, imo. Just focus on other stuff plz. :P

tongue wrote:

IMHO:
As long as players keep their "ohsoimportant" score and the last player(s) to join the team with the most score are transferred to the other team so that there is an even amount of players on both teams (+/-1 player) it ought to be enough.

pretty much what i was going for.

an added bonus would be that, for example in a 5 vs 5 ca with score 9-2, the player that joins has to join beta (instead of autojoining alpha like always)

not ttotally ontopic but:
then fix fackinck stats-system, i'm quite sure it doesn't register all of my games. ctf cup yesterday for example, x games on wsw-esports.net servers, only the 2 loses in final got locked. trollsystem:D

Make sure that teams have the same ammount of players. Make a button on scoreboard that people can ask to switch with someone from the other team with a simple click. So the players can try to make the game balanced.

RiFo wrote:
Also, keeping score/damage when changing teams would be a nice feature, as it would give some players more incentive to switch.

Thanks for the awesome work so far!

bumping since afaik no dev really commented on the feasability of this feature yet...
autobalance suggestion can be ignored since it will probably be too complex to work out, but this might be doable?
(updated 2012-10-27 16:42:37)

Also please, in case of equal number of players in each team, auto-join should take the loosing one by default http://www.warsow.net/forum/thread/14003/1
(updated 2012-08-07 20:51:02)

also this

learn_more wrote:
+1 for ELO

Yes.

I like this idea, always hard to get other people to switch team when it's a bit to unfair.