I, for one, am against a balancing plugin

I really hate it when a clan stacks a team (i'm looking at you BSID, @, and... wait who doesn't stack?). But tell me how many games have you seen that happening? I only see that kind of stack once every 20+ games. And the clan thats stacking usually ends up losing and leave the server butthurt anyways.

A balancing plugin will ruin empires. Lets say the balancing program uses a point logarithm (for every game you won, you go up 5 points, kills get 3 ect.) The teams are evenly balanced when suddenly a JPL/BSID joins team A. Now the teams are STACKED towards team A.

What is the plugin going to do now?

1. If the plugin switches players around:

A. It might just so happens to switch team A's COMMANDER for team B's emp_recruit, thus screwing the match even more

B. It might transfer "x" amount of players to team B until the points are even again. This might be 1 player or 3. EIther of those numbers are unacceptable because that one player might have built the entire team's base by himself and building that up only having to destroy it would piss him off to the max. Giving the team B 3 players in exchange for 1 good one is a bad trade off. 3 tanks > 1 tank (huur huur).

C. It might exchange x amount of players from each team to keep the points balanced. This could be 2 good players for 3 mediocre ones. Again, this is horrible, cause the team you just helped building is against you.

2. If the plugin just make it so that players can't join team A, thats also a bad idea. Because you're ASSUMING that players will join team B. People want to win, and if someone wants to join team B to help them out, they don't need a plugin to tell them to do it.

The freedom to pick any team you want might be the worst system. But it's the best when compared to other means. Plus playing against a stack team will hone your skills SO MUCH more than playing a balanced game.

 

Making comms immune to switches would solve the first issue, the second issue assumes that the fun of the invidividual is just as important as the fun of all the other players on the team, which it isn't, it's much less important because there's many more of them, and it's a stupid balancing system which puts more players on one team.

Assuming that the server has a mix of skills, a truly random balancing script would assing players to both teams at random, and when you have many people of varying skills and you throw into two teams at random, the statistical bias is in favour of both teams having a variety of skills on them. Try it for yourself if you like, get a handful of 1 and 2 penny coins and make heads count as skilled and tails as unskilled, 1 penny as BE and 2 penny as NF, then throw them in the air, you won't often get a large number of heads on BE or tails on NF, or vice versa.

There are of course discrepencies, but the same is true of having no balancing algorithm, unless you can convince people to balance their own teams by skill, or write a program to do it for them, then an algorithm is the best you're going to get, as it enforces what you claim usually happens (random team assignment) to happen all the time.

 

I didn't play on any server with this balancing plugin but it shouldn't switch players and it should ignore ragequitting. More intelligent autoassign is needed and nothing more.

BTW Sonata logarithm and algorithm are different things.

 

Said like a true person who has never seen the plugin, let alone played with it?

Oh, and its also not finished yet, not quite anyways

 

i, for another, shall not give a fuck about the opinion of someone who doesnt know shit about the only real balancing plugin there is atm.

 

And JPL doesn't stack?

 

Lets cut to the chase and just start flaming each other... Or maybe you could read the part where he says.. "wait who doesn't stack?"

I for one don't stack.. I am completely against it and have more fun and get higher scores on losing teams then I do on winning teams..

 

I agree with Sonata, I don't want to be forced to join a certain team. I purposefully avoid servers with auto-balance plugins where possible.

 

I agree, wouldn't be nice to be forced onto a particular team.
It would be a nice feature for auto-assign to perform this kind of
intelligent balancing though

 

sonata your whole post reads like you never read reef's plugin thread... -.-

 

I have read the Reefs plugin thread.
That whole thing is so idealistic it will be impossible to work.
Your skill can change so fast just based on what you do.
Uber base builder must be the best thing ever.
People messing around for lulz must be noobs.
(These are simple examples.)

It's going to be near impossible for it to work effectively.

 

Cyber is right. I recently discovered I'm a great Heavy Machine Gunner (Rifleman with HMG), and I'm averaging top of my team (except when theres a clan stack).

I'm normally dead last before I started using the HMG.

 

Sonata: plugin DOES NOT SWITCH PLAYERS MID-GAME. It only works when You join a team.

If the games become stacked later (one of the reasons may be ragequit) and plugin realizes that, it will ONCE write in the chat to the stronger team a message like "please even the teams".

OH NO NO THE EVIL PLUGIN IS GOING TO SWITH COMMANDERS, RUN FOR YOUR LIFES, SAVE YOURSELVES, THE DOOM IS COMMING, THE UNHOLY FIRE AND THE DEVIL WITH SADDAM!!
You offended my programming skills by assuming I would switch commanders or guys who built the whole base to the other team. I can count points for building, You know? I could even code it so it remembers how much stuff has been build by a player and if the plugin would switch players, it would choose someone who didn't build much (probably a scout, heh).

Good for You. Stay away from KM, Mush and BDS servers then. Oh noes, all European Empires servers have auto balance on. Wait, there is a buddy feature in the plugin so You can play with a friend. Ah, but You dislike plugins, 2bad, bye bye then.

Exacly. It offended me.

It all started like "this kind of plugin can't be done!" and I said "bullsh*t! I can do it". And I did it. Oh, it's done and it works. Some still say it's impossible, even though I have already done it.

The more You play on the server the better plugin knows Your skill.

No it's not. If You see that the plugin still counts very high skill to basebuildiers, tell me and I'll nerf it more. Oh, You didn't attend to test sessions so You actually didn't help developing the plugin so it doesn't fail the way You think it could. If it's wrong, it's now Your fault.

Yes, one of the definitions of low-skilled players is "people that mess around doing nothing for the team". So we are good here.

Yes, if You assume large number of games. I did the maths. This is good if We want to have the average of all games be balenced. However it's possible to get 20*heads or 0*heads, right? or 5 heads, that would be bad too. Even 8 heads would be bad.
Let's get Your assumptions.
We have 40 players, 20 of them are noobs and and 20 of them are pro. We have a BE-NF coin. We throw a coin for every pro player and put one in the team where the coin said and put a noob in the other team.
The probablility that 9,10 or 11 pros will go to one team is 49,65%. That means if We call other situations stacked, they are 50,35% of the games. Fail every two maps.
The probability that 8,9,10,11 or 12 pros will go to one team is 73,68%. That means if we call other situations stacked (and it's hard not to call game stacked when at 12 pros vs 8 pros), they are 26,32% of the games. Fail every 4 maps.

Random assigning fails. Live with it.

 

But all team games default to random assignment, if you have no coordination between players (which you don't on most non-clan matches) then the teams will effectively be randomly assigned, if random assignment always caused unplayable stacking then all multiplayer games with fewer than 32 players would be unplayable, but they aren't.

Minor imbalances are what allow one team to prevail over the other team by skill, the only time it becomes a problem is when one team repeatedly has a massive skill advantage over the other team, which if you think about it is not going to happen with a random assignment. You could make it even less frequent simply by ensuring that the teams mix randomly, putting half the winning team from the last game with half the losing team from last game on each team for the next game.

Yes it will not be a perfect 50-50 balance but that is not required.

 

Will there will always be servers that don't run this plug in right? I don't like it per say, where such draconian measures are taken to "Balance" the teams. As for stacking, I always end up switching teams to even them out, it is more about good sportsmanship, something that modern day online games have all lost.

 

I don't remember sportsmanship ever existing anywhere.

 

That is all I heard.

Also Chris last post brought minor lulz.

 

That is all I heard.

 

Seriously I can't.

It's slightly depressing as I don't usually think about the implications of my cynicism.

 

i think this thread makes obvious who would be behaving like a dumb stacking fuck