I'll just restate... Pickled's idea of lvl3 whoring every round would disrupt game play for the entire server, and that is unacceptable. Nothing more, nothing less. I'm looking for a better version of mp_autoteambalance that makes more logical decisions than the basic number balancer, yet does NOT get in anyone's way. We may not want this now, but when Steamworks comes along, it's going to help retain players. Agreed.
To me it looks like this system is only going to ruin playing, you either stack a team with your clan mates (which isn't impossible) and get a rating that will eventually make you lose because of the unbalance you're creating, so you're basically going to get games dictated by some rating system, pretty ridiculous if the possibly would even exist in the system. I'm not saying that it's going to happen, but if the numbers allow it to happen, than you're no longer balancing a game, but unbalancing a game, which is ridiculous. Then you have the possibility to ruin your own fun by having to lose a couple of games on purpose, just to lower your rating, which is another great crime this plugin could lead to, dictating your game. Great flaw there. Then you have the obvious stat whoring, why not stat whore, I mean if you manage to unbalance a team in numbers by being lame, the game allows you to be lame and probably manage to win as well, especially vs noobs. Then you're basically dictating the game of others through the rating system, another great flaw. I don't see why anyone would waste their time on this, it doesn't matter how the numbers are going to end up in a week or 5, or over a year, the idea is hopelessly flawed, a balancer dictating the game.
Which is why the system should've been kept secret. No one would know the difference, and even if they did, they'd only be screwing themselves if they tried to lower their rank. And a balancer dictating the game? Is that a joke or something dizzy? I said about 5 times that I wanted it to be LAX for now (think a smarter version of the number balancer), and perhaps tightened before the SW release (to keep the massive number of newbs in check). Regardless, all of this is months down the road, and there's no telling what if anything we'll have at that point. Second guessing the future isn't going to help anyone, especially when you aren't offering any alternatives.
If the balancer does something, don't you think people would find out? Or atleast report it as a bug. I'm also not sure what you're trying to say with the whole LAX thing, but I was replying to spawn's suggested system and the ratings he's keeping track of, besides, it either does something, or it doesn't. Even if it was just a smarter number balancer and nothing more, I'd stay away from that server if I could, not being able to pick a side you like gets annoying real quick. Whats going to be the next step Recon? Players who are not having fun will have all their chat messages end with emoticons? It isn't about second guessing, the system is flawed to begin with, and whats this about finding an alternative, human judgement is the only alternative, there is no ingame stat to track that will give you an accurate skill level, unless you're going to code an extremely complex balancer that, which seems like a waste of time since the idea of a balancer dictating player numbers is flawed. It doesn't stop stacking, it doesn't take into account the team could have a mixture of noobs and vets, so technically, you're not just putting 2 or 3 vets up against hordes of noobs, you're putting the whole team up against hordes. The balancer can't look into the future so it cannot balance teams in advance. Which means that it will always depend on in what order people want to join a team, and so it will never fix stacking. It will just be some half assed flawed system that will semi work with huge quantiy of players of which most are noobs and are going to have an average rating all around. Which reminds me of a great programmer quote and if you look at the flow of the latter paragraph, you might know which one I'm aiming at.
I mean that players WILL be able to choose a team. Auto assigning people will just piss them off. No. Anyone who gets accidentally banned gets their name changed to RocketPropelledGangster I see it as a smarter number balancer, not some magical solution to stacking (which can, and probably will still occur).
I honestly don't even know what you're going on about... but you are so far off I'm having trouble even starting. Simply put, you make no sense. At all. I seriously cannot take a bit of logic from any of your two posts above... You're saying somehow this doesn't let you pick your side? I don't know what you mean, because you're dead wrong. Here's the difference between this and mp_autoteambalance. With mp_autoteambalance, if it's 14v15 you can't pick your team. With this, if it's 14v15 but the game is relatively close based on ratings, you can pick your team, and if the 14 are stacking, you may be forced to join the team of 15, balancing the game more, not encouraging the stack. The only time you can't pick your team is if the rating system determines that you are not only joining the team with a higher rating, but that the team has enough of a lead ratings-wise that letting another player on that side would be unfair. Since the ratings are shifting realtime, that means later in the game players cannot join the winning team at the same rate players join the losing team. This creates more balance, not less. If tuned properly, the only time you couldn't choose your team is if you'd be stacking by doing so. I mean honestly, were you hopelessly high when you posted? "it doesn't take into account the team could have a mixture of noobs and vets, so technically, you're not just putting 2 or 3 vets up against hordes of noobs, you're putting the whole team up against hordes." Seriously? Are you kidding me? What possible example do you have of this, because again, dead wrong and totally misinformed. It DOES take into account the rating of every player on the team, I mean your statement is so far away from anything resembling an argument made of facts, it borders on trolling. No wonder people hate it, they make up shit about it and believe their own lies. I expected more from you Dizzy... if you're going to piss all over something, I would have thought you would have talked to me in TS or send a message first asking "Hey, am I 100% way fucking wrong about everything I think on this subject" so I could save you the trouble here.
Actually I checked the stuff you posted. You're here saying the team of 14 is stacked you need to join the team of 15, then you proceed to say that this creates balance not imbalance, 14 vs 16, whether or not it was balanced on skill, is hard to defend as being "balanced." So there you go, you couldn't join lets say BE, even if it was 14 BE vs 15 NF. That's partly what I was saying. It does take the rating of every player into account, but if 2 or 3 with above average rating go on one team, where the stacking of a couple high rating players isn't impossible as you've shown, then that group is going up against more enemy players, while the first person that joined, that happened to have a rating of 100 isn't the blame of this number unbalance. That's what I was saying. Whether or not his own rating lowered the total of that team is irrelevant, I'm talking about whether it's possible. You can try to say it takes everything into account in a 100 ways, but after watching the things you linked, I couldn't work out if you were saying that it was a bad system or a good one. at first I actually thought you were going to prove what a bad system it is. Because your numbers will never be an accurate measurement of skill, I doubt the balancer will be justified to do a number imbalance. And the things I've said above still stand. It can also promote foul play for the sake of changing one's rating. Edit: Could you also explain what is going on with the insanely high ratings of a few players here: http://www.soundspawn.com/bsid/cluster_ratings.php For the sake of this balancer I hope it's far from complete, because it shows me as having a 611 rating at this point for instance, while last night I had a rating of 170. (lets disregard the fact that firebreather counts for 10 average players, or even 20 less than average players, which there are a lot of still, is he suppposed to ruin one game until his score averages out?) And this is how I discuss, FalconX has told me a dozen times not to involve in discussions like this and I apologize if you were surprised by it, I simply don't like the system how it is proposed, as an alternative it still makes little sense to use it as most new players that are unaware of the system will only be more surprised about what's going on with the team unbalance (or lets call it balance for the sake of arguing) and their reaction might be a lot less pleasent than what I'm saying.
You're stating "if skilled players join one team, the other team can have extra players" as if that is unfair. I think that's absolutely fair, in fact that's the only fair way to let the more skilled players on the same team and not have a landslide of a game. I think it's more challenging and fun for the skilled players and I think that the team with less skill has a much better chance of winning because they make up for their lack of skill with excess numbers. If you disagree with me on that point (the concept that skill vs numbers is better than equal numbers and who knows for skill), then we may as well stop talking, because I've thought about that a lot, and you certainly won't be able to convince me otherwise. I never said it takes everything into account... in fact when the subject has come up I have always maintained that it is incredibly simplistic and that things such as comm turrets and engi repairs need exceptions/additional coding to perfect. If you watched the things I linked, you'd notice I finished the long video with a couple minute long explaination as to why I thought it was a good system, so you wouldn't be confused if I thought it was good or bad... You are so sure that 14v16 is a death sentence to the 14... if that was the case, I suggest that the balancer would have forced 15v15. I just don't see any data to support any of your claims. You also haven't suggested anything better while implying that mp_autoteambalance does a just dandy job. As for preventing skilled users from tweaking their scores, Drummer and I spoke briefly about a small panel to periodically review players who's ratings fluctuate too much, and assign them a hard rating. With a community this size it would take maybe 20 minutes and we'd be done. Again I've been sucked into explaining this... and now again I'm going to claim to be done. I want to see it shown to be not fair and not fun, until then save your breath.
So it comes down to human judgment to fix the fluctuating, why didn't you just say that having admins on your server was the ultimate fix, I figured it was 1999 again, but thanks for the confirmation. Translation: You're basically going to allow this balancer to ruin games until an admin comes along and fixes it. Flawed system is admitted to be flawed, theres nothing left to discuss. Also it isn't about all the benefits you think this system will give, it's about all the negative sides you think are justified, whether or not a large amount of players think the same way about some funky balancing system not allowing them to join a team is something we'll have to find out. (or allowing them to stack a number imbalance and take the benefit of the extra players)
The high ratings are because the actual skill balancer isn't being used yet. If it was implemented right now, its likely the people with the >500 point scores would lose many consecutive matches until their score dropped close to the average. Also, I think you greatly overestimate the number of matches that are 'balanced' currently on skill. I'd say only 1/5 to 1/10 matches I play are actually competitive (i.e. both teams have roughly equal skill), depending on whether there are people actively trying to stack. Any system (like spawnn's balancer) that increases this would be a big improvement IMO. The best Empire's matches that I have played are the ones where the winning side fluctuates back and forth between the teams. tl;dr version: We should force people to play differently because the status-quo is not working.
I don't disagree with that, I am against forcing it onto the players, current teambalance is as basic as it gets, which doesn't force anything other than common sense. It still doesn't fix stacking, and will never do better balancing than human judgment will, human judgment isn't just the admin in this equation, it's also the human judgment of every player wanting to join, and you're basically saying "We don't care what you think, the balancer has the last word and its smarter than you." But hey, soundspawwn is confident that his flawed system is an improvement, so I'll drop the ball here on bothering as well. Let alone how inherently evil his idea of "fair play" is, note how he mentions that fluctuating players (those that disagree with his system) will get a hardcoded rating. This easily translates into "We believe you're abusing our system, we now say that this is what your skill level is forever, and you don't have a say in it, enjoy dictatormod"
Current system is easily abusable, which is why there are rampant problems with skill stacking. Spawwn's system is not perfect, but it requires much more work to abuse (i.e. you have to play a certain way for multiple games to artificially raise or lower your score), therefore, reducing the number of people who do. The hardcode rating is just for people who are essentially exploiting game mechanics or griefing, no different from hardcode banning repeated griefers.
I'd consider playing badly to lower your score griefing. It would be like those players who spend all game building lulforts out of one-unit walls; griefing.
You would need an admin to know what griefing is and what isn't. You couldn't decide this from ratings or "fluctuations".
Gotta love this... Rightie, so i somehow dropped to 148 rating as stated earlier. I go on elc (acording to what i heard the stats were offline on that server, so i played 100% normal)... i play 1 round of money (the sniper wound x9001 map) which i win, followed by 1 round of emp_blah (orange lulz) which i lose... Then on the next map while in spec i hear stats is infact on and get linked to the stats page... 774 rating! iow i basicly x4'd my rating... from appearing as a complete newbie to a top scorer... in 2 rounds... Yay for huge fluctations :D
*stare* And why would it fluctuate less? are you trying to say that becouse the ammount of walking free kills double i get less average score per death? THINK AGAIN. or do you think that if they are reduced i would not get as high score? I would get more high-rating kills then and can use far more of my team mates as meat shields or focus on supportive tasks such as reviving. SO THINK AGAIN. The balancer doesnt magically make my opponents give less score per death. If its more noobs i get less score per kill yet far more kills, if its more vets i get more score per kill yet fewer ammount of them so it equals out no matter what the enemy side look like. And also, the balancer doesnt make 50% of the vets go to one side and the other 50% to the other, it merely balance based on rating. Meaning that potentially i could have ended up with 30 "how i get ammmoz" on the enemy side... or 8 high rating vets which give fk loads of points per kill (which would be far too busy with my meat-shield team mates running in the open to bother about me) edit: and a note regarding the maps played, on money we won yet had only 30ish tickets when the enemy reached 0. on blah my team was wtf-owned.
