Problem: Stackers

[Shinzon]

The point of this is not to allow clans mates to play on the same team; the point is to balance the player skill so one cannot just APC rush and overwhelm the other team; there is already a buddy system in place, so you can already choose with whom you want to play with to an extent...

[BumGravy]

What is this buddy system of which you speak? Couldnt see anythin on the wiki...

[Reef]

As far as I know there is no wiki page about the plugin yet.

Type buddy_set in console on any server with the plugin to see the instructions (currently BDS and [mush] servers).
Yes, I know there is no menu and You have to rewrite userid from status command to buddy_set. Someone can write a separate plugin that will display a menu and issue the buddy_set command. I hate coding menus in sourcemod, console command is sufficient for me.

[Sodaen]

I believe what would be the best would be to create a script that would take the Steam ID and for every game that is played they are given a certain number (from now on referred to as stack points) based upon the number of kills and the game score they have.

For example, if a player kills 20 people in their first game and has 45 points, they would have a stack point of (20*2+45) 85. Script records that this is their first game and divides their stack points by 1 (because only one game has been played and this will increase by one for every new game that is played). The next game the same player kills 15 people and receives 35 points making (15*2+35) 65 stack points. Now the script adds 85 and 65 together (these were the scores from the only 2 recorded games) and divides it by 2 (as there were 2 games) making his stack score 75.

We could do this with every single player and each of the players could be automatically assigned to teams in a way that is most effective for making the stack scores as close as possible for each team. This would be a somewhat simple script to develop and it's a smart idea. It's also very unlikely to fail if wrote correctly.

Oh I'm sorry, disregard this, if you guys are already developing a script then don't worry about this suggestion.

[Reef]

What You have suggested is a simplified version of what I implemented. Mine is much more complex. Thanks for feedback, anyway.

[Reef]

New version of the plugin has been installed on the BDS server and has been sent to [mush]Lion.

getSkill() has been reworked to fix the bug that caused Your skill to be lower and lower the longer You play on the server.

It would be good to know if the plugin does overrate the good players, what I mean is if 3 good players enter NF and some players enter BE, is the plugin estimating the difference of skill well. If it would be too high, one pro player could be faced against 10 noobs. If it would be too low, two pro players would be faced against only 3 emp_recriuts. I have set it to a value that I think can be right but I couldn't reliably test it.
Basically it's a "how much the skill values" modifier.

If You make a report, please paste the output of the "statsall" console command with a comment, thanks.

[-Mayama-]

I dont think it must be absolutly even, one team needs a bit more skill so its not
a stall forever...

[Brutos]

I was testing the new plugin today. It's still a bit bugged, but i think the games were better balanced and felt better.

I'm really looking forward to see it on KM.

[Reef]

Two bugs were detected and fixed today:

• statsall command gave improper results sometimes (summary was bugged)
• default skill value for new players was computed in the old way, which gave improper results (old was near 7 - the new one is near 1.67)

One bug was detected but not corrected yet:

• If You join a team and someone leaves the other one and You want to switch to rebalance, You can be blocked by "You cannot leave Your team yet"

We also had a bug that made the statsall command go a bit crazy. I must stop cacheing GetTeam() results in arrays, it doesn't speed anything up and it looks like there is a problem with it, and I must set mp_autoteambalance to 0 on plugin load (it can be an issue).

All the games were very hard for both sides. The default-skill problem twisted the first two maps and we must remember that the plugin needs 2-3 maps to learn how the player plays.
Someone told me that it could improove the plugin behavior if we would recalculate the skill of a player a few minutes after his first join and I think it's a good idea, so I'll implement it too.

[Reef]

All fixes completed, ready for testing.