Because you'd be on the losing team, and wouldn't be doing as well. How do you quit a game you don't play? You could apply that to banning, and it would be completely invalid, just as it is here. Hopefully someone (/me looks for arky) will have the good sense to lock this thread. The rest of the discussion should take place behind closed doors, because the community is obviously too immature to handle testing an alpha plugin that has no effect on them.
Oh you mean like the second map which was blah where my team was basicly steamrolled, that doesnt change the fact i still kicked serious ass. all i need is a engi for ocational healing and a ammo crate + a meatshield vs rushes... bigger quantitys = more kills. So yea, balancer means fk all. unless you are implying that my score rised past 774 and then dropped due to blah, yet then the fluctation would be even more insane lol
Interesting. Like I said, we need to see how the ratings balance out over the next week or so, and adjust the system accordingly.
Dizzyone plays about 10x more than you Recon. Check his steam profile, he's been playing quite a lot.
I'll ignore recon's reply saying "it won't effect us," it will effect us eventually, and with people already trying to exploit the system, it already has. There is too much wrong with this system that you have to expect heavy resistance. The first and faremost reason why this plugin fails is that you assume that it can assess what skill is, but it can't. Why you would need alpha testing and hours of tweaking to figure this out is beyond me. This plugin says that being on the winning team and killing guys as a roflmen is skill. Infact this plugin thinks you have skill if you're on the winning team. Being a commander and dropping level3 turrets is considered skill. Yet being able to dodge mines is not considered as skill, being able to survive 50 roflmen just to get the last reving engi and kill him with a sticky is considered the same as throwing a grenade into a huge crowd on district and getting a lucky kill. And this is just the start, this plugin manages to unbalance teams and allow people to grief the game through it, and above that it'll need the same thing a server has always needed: admins. It cannot measure skill, the end. If lets say you have a 15 vs 15 game, and at the start one person leaves the game, it'll be 14 vs 15, not a big deal. If lets say you have this balancer and a guy on your team with 600 rating (not too ridiculous, seeing it's easy to count for 3 average player) and the other team manages to have a couple with only 100 rating, a 10 vs 15 could occur, and if then that one 600 rating leaves the game, you're left with 9 vs 15. Enjoy your stacked game, proudly sponsored by the BALANCER. The only way I see this plugin work is that the ranks, as soundspawwn mentioned are very close to each other, so around 150~250, where it's effects are almost non existant. But then you're looking at the most overcomplicated-exploitable-non accurate-and ultimately requiring admins to work-team balancer in the history of team balancers. Apart from all of this, as soundspawwn explained, the way you receive points from killing is similar to how ranked ladders work in tournaments, the points you win or lose are based on the difference in ranks, but the funny part about this is: People still exploit this in ranked ladders, even in 1v1 this system is exploitable and far from truly balanced, the only difference between it is, as pickled pointed out, that you won't be playing with skilled and noobs in the same game, as well as that you setup a match before hand, so the players themselves can decide if a 1v1 or 3v2 is unbalanced or not, the balancer won't do that. Noob farming, alt account farming etc
Lets look at the difference between a "dumb" number balancer and the "smart" skill balancer. The following 2 situations are considered as balanced by the skill balancer(taken from spawwn's presentation): and These are viable situation as spawwn himself pointed out. The first is the same as a number balancer, a highly stacked NF team, high ratings vs low ratings, not balanced whatsoever. Second is supposedly balanced by rating, but it doesn't take a lot of intelligence to figure out that NF at this point is highly disadvantaged, besides, lets say mashav is a highly skilled scout and dubee is a highly skilled gren, they couldn't use these classes because they wouldn't have any engineers. Alright, next lets check the difference between the balancers: The skill balancer: - Does it allow number stacking? Yes. - Doest it allow skill stacking? Yes. - Can it assess accurately what skill is? No. Skill doesn't change if you lose or win a round, this balancer bases your skill on winning or losing, dying and killing, among things. - What if the ratings were exploited, would the balancer allow for insane imbalance? Yes it would. if true skilled players would have a rating of 100, they would be able to have more true skilled players on a team vs average 200 ratings of true average players. - Does it require admins to correct? Yes. Admins require to be there at the right time on the right server to correct the balancer, or else games will be ruined. Admins are also required for the game itself. Which would most likely be different admins that dont have access to ratings. - Does it allow players to join the team they like, even if that team is number stacked? In some cases it does, which could be considered a good thing. - Does it allow team switching in mid game, regarless of numbers? Yes. - Can a human player decide which side is stacked? No, the balancer has the last say on it. The dumb number balancer: - Does it allow number stacking? No. - Doest it allow skill stacking? Yes. - Can it assess accurately what skill is? No. - What if the ratings were exploited, would the balancer allow for insane imbalance? No. It will always be balanced by the numbers. - Does it require admins to correct? No, but admins are required for the game itself, - Does it allow players to join the team they like, even if that team is number stacked? No. - Does it allow team switching in mid game, regarless of numbers? No. - Can a human player decide which side is stacked? If the numbers are even, unless theres a difference of 1, a player can, so that would be a yes. It doesn't fix stacking, it doesn't assess skill. All this balancer does is give you positive perks, being able to join a stacked team and being able to join the team you like if you're the last to join. It also has numerous negative sides to it which people would love to ignore. It's a nice little pet project and sounds pretty interesting, but the name of it should be changed to something like "Alternative smart unbalancer for obsessed server owners"
That might be fixable if the skill balancer just got a hard limit on player difference between the teams. Even if one team is badly stacked but has just a few players it should still assign new players to it until it reaches the minimum threshold of 30-40% less players. That might fix it.
Wouldn't it then fit the description of a half assed overcomplicated and ultimately flawed balancing system?
This is fucked up anyway, we are supposed to fix that game not the spawning system. But If it works as a workaround until we can implement a real stats system to gather real hard data with which we can analyze where the problem are and fix those problems instead of just guessing, this solution might be better then nothing.
The balancer, even if it's only by score or kills, is a great way of discerning good players from bad. Even though individual skills and elements get hyped by any system, overall you get a good rough picture. Good players end up in the top 3 for a reason. That people are trying to get the highest score is a weird phenomena. There is no gain at all to having a high score. Actually it's a bad thing. I'd suggest that skill ratings should be invisible to players. If they don't get attention for having a good score that they can never know then people will stop trying, because then the only impact of doing well, which people do naturally to play the game, will be to make future games a bit harder for you. No e-peens. Oh, and although this was 5 pages ago i want to just address a couple of things: Well, during the summer I probably put in about 40 hours, not a huge amount because I was more a TF2 guy. Actually, I installed the mod over the winter vacation just gone and put in 10 - 20 hours. I even rejoined BSID, did some training on district with members a couple of times. I said I was only there for the clan matches and then wasn't put on the roster for the only match in the period. Not that I blame them, I never bothered to put on vent and listen to inane babble instead of music, so that's my fail really. I'm probably kicked out now too- I certainly deserve to be. But basically, I have played a bit recently. But i definitely am familiar with recent versions of empires. I may have started in 2006 but I pretty much spent up to 2008 playing nothing but empires until I found TF2. edit: LOL... ‡|JPL|‡ Dubee STEAM_0:0:1031547 Link 132
The sad truth is that this isn't the case, your kill is based on the enemy you're fighting, your score is based on things that raise your score and winning is based on team effort (or individuals on your team). Dying is completely accepted and doesn't lower your overall skill. Kills might count in CS, but they don't count in Empires, lots of good empires players go engineer. So in theory you're already completely off thinking this gives a positive rough picture, it's a rough picture of random allocations, you should see it as a stock market share, not as a rank. Some people might like to believe that getting a high score is negative, theres nothing more fun than fuck with a system and definitely if it means you'll be unbalancing pub games. Then you've got the already mentioned perks to having a lower amount of players on your team: More resources for you, more idiots to kill, less idiots on your team, being the pwn, etc. The latter should not be underestimated. By being on the team with lower players, you might not consider it as a con, but for other players this will become a con, as they continuously find that they have to adapt their team choice to who's playing on which side, so yes it is quite a weird phenomena, having your choice limited because of some people's "rating". Which shows exactly why the number balancer will always remain favorable above this, it's fair. This isn't. With this balancer there will only be 2 players every round that have complete free choice, the first to join a team, and the last to join a team. Everyone else will have their choice fucked with because of the skill balancer. To be the first you will need a fast computer and a good internet connection, for the last, you're either lucky or have a lot of patience. Whats the difference between these 2 and the other 62 players on the server? Nothing at all. Overcomplication? Oh hell yes, if you thought it was annoying to join the team you liked with the number balance, watch spawwns presentation and imagine how bad it will be. Luckily for me I have a fast computer, I wouldn't have a lot of trouble being the first to join the team (I usually do), so for me it doesn't matter, but hey, this balancer dislikes slow computers and unlucky bastards, it's the [GODWINS LAW] of balancers. I don't see how you could come up with it being a "rough estimate" of skill if it's already been established that none of those stats account for skill in any way. Look at the source of the problem, "skill stacking". When does skill stacking occur? Skill stacking in most cases occurs when the skill level difference between players is big enough to cause considerable imbalance. So the problem you're fighting depends on the amount of bad and good players there are. This plugin exists because some have no faith in the skill level of either the bad or the good players. Its fighting a symptom, not a cause. Fighting the cause might sound too utopian to ever be fixable, but then again, any system that doesn't even bother addressing it for what it is will always be flawed. You wouldn't "balance" skill in a clan match, the players themselves do that, or they decide to play anyway. This system is simply saying that they do not trust any pubbers to make this decision and that some algorithm should take charge of deciding what balance is. This hopeless point of view against those who will play the game does not only categorize them wrongly, it also limits their freedom. If I would join a new game and find myself to be counted as only a third of what pickled is worth, then having the high rated players ruin my game because they're rated for 3, I would uninstall nazimod and go back to sanity(or whats left of it). Where a number balancer is using common sense, this skill balancer is borderline dictatorial.
So you're saying (assuming equal score) a player who dies 20 times is not worse than one that dies 10 times? Kills DO matter, but less so than other aspects. I'd rather have the hmg roflwhore getting 50 kills a round on my team than the enemy. You do realize this is the current situation? Players ALREADY mess with the current system by stacking a team with veteran players or being useless on purpose. Spawwn's balancer is just much more resilient than the current situation, making it harder to abuse the system. Once again, the same situation occurs right now. What if I want to join BE, but by the time I load its already 17 BE vs 16 NF? This isn't a problem of the balancer but a flaw in mod itself. Its silly to use this as an 'argument' against balancer A over balancer B. I agree. The cause is flawed game mechanics that make it nearly impossible to make a comeback once your start losing, but doesn't allow the winning team to quickly finish you off. However, this plugin is needed because there is a huge difference in skill between the most and least skilled players. Are you saying that someone like HSM or Dubee isn't vastly more skilled than someone like apwall? I'd prefer another solution, but this plugin is available right now and any other fix would be months to years away. The best way IMO is to implement this now and work on fixing the game mechanics that cause the problem. Not allowing noclip and godmode restricts my freedom. Any game other than a pure sandbox restricts freedoms in some way, but this increases the fun of these games rather than reduces them. Also, I don't know anyone who ragequits a game because there are more skilled people playing it. Also, I think clan matches are way different from pub matches that they aren't relevant in a discussion about balancers. They are more about increasing your e-peen by bragging about how you made clan XXX qq 3 games in a row.
O.O How about we wait for spawn to work on the system more before we debate something that we all know has flaws?
Exactly, if the person died 20 times but got revived every time, while the person that died 10 times respawned, it would be obvious who is more skilled. Some players die 0 times, but whether that was because they were walling their comm in their own base the whole game or doing very well is something the balancer can't track accurately. Somebody might die 20 times, but if that was inside of a squad where he got reved every time within 10 seconds, and actually helped do a successful push, you could consider that skill as well. Someone playing on a district only server with a BE carbine, just camping every single game could easily have an insane rating by kills only, does this make him skilled? You could say it's skill to do it, but it's not comparable with the skill level of truly skilled player. And as I've mentioned before, it matters who you're killing, he might be good at killing every single emp_recruit, but the first time he crosses dubee he might get a mortar in his face and die without firing his gun once, not a measurement of skill unless you're in a tournament. Recon or spawwn might say "but you won't get as much points killing low rated players", it still doesn't matter, he doesn't receive negative points for killing emp_recruits either, the balancer might stop giving him points after he's killed a certain player a couple of times. But what if killing the same player over and over was legitimate and means he actually has skill? Not a matter of skill, no easy way to rate these kind of things, that's what I'm getting at. The balancer doesn't fix this and currently is easier to abuse than a number balancer as it relies on your actions, the number balancer isn't based on your actions, it just evens out teams. Not sure what you're specifically replying to so I couldn't give you a good answer. That's a wrong assessment, the number balancer evens out with every 2 players joining a team, the skill balancer will never even out numbers unless the ratings allow it to. Wasn't saying that, its the nature of the game, you don't categorize players, so you'll always end up with a mixture of noobs and vets. Pub will always be pub play, whether you force balance or not, it's questionable whether the skill could even be balanced out, if it can, let players decide themselves if they'd want to balance out the teams, if they'd rather stack, then theres a reason why they would prefer stacking. You can't just force them, you'll either lose players or make them exploit the system. This isn't fixing anything, it's only over complicating it, thinking you can change the nature of pub play without changing the players is flawed. I can't agree with anyone who says that skill stacking ruins the game more than the shortcomings of the game itself. If the game was good, you would have more players, more servers and you could have vet and noob servers. If you look at NS, there are some servers that are only populated by good players, the reason it happens is simple, newbies have a hard time competing on these servers and will withdraw to noob friendly server. This is how it has always been, with hundreds of games, and theres nothing wrong with it. noclip and godmode are not part of the game, skill balance isn't either. Being able to choose your side is part of the game and you are limiting that freedom. Some things need to be choice, some don't. Players want to play with their friends, if they don't, they'll leave. Players might want jetpacks, but if it's not in the game, they either live with it or leave. They chose to play this game, there are 2 sides that they can choose freely, so let them choose. You can't do a strawmen fallacy on this one because theres a clear line between what freedoms makes sense and which do not. Yes, pubs are more relaxed, which will become history with balancers like this.
I've been tracking my own stats as well as the stats of a few other players and they are fluctuating massively from game to game. I've gone from 660 points to 150 points back up to 500 points in the breadth of 4 games (I was playing normally, for the most part, in all the games). Now, if this ranking system is some sort of measurement of player skill, my score should be pretty static. I've been playing empires for a long time, and my skill level is highly unlikely to fluctuate very much. Wherever I am relative to other players, it should stay pretty much the same, and this should apply to most people who have played for more than a couple months. However, this ranking system is shooting me from one end of the spectrum to the other and back in a couple hours' time. It's doing this with a select few others players I have been keeping track of, and at least in my case, I wasn't specifically trying to change my score in the time period in question. It just happened during normal play. The fact that scores are so volatile is going to make this system highly vulnerable to rank manipulation. For instance, I could join the losing team 2 minutes before they're going to lose, die 5 times, lose the game, have a deflated score, and then stack the crap out of the next round. In addition, the fact that half of the people here don't understand why people like to have high rankings has no bearing on the fact that people like to have high rankings. Your ability to understand the situation is not necessary for it to occur. The fact that it "ruins" my ability to join one team or the other, for instance, is simply not relevant to this discussion. All of the arguments that you are presenting are like trying to argue that the sky shouldn't be blue, or that rocks are actually quite soft. I like the way my name looks at the top of lists, and that's all that's to it. I'm sure there are many others who would agree.
Because the system is going to change drastically (I hope), imo it's kind of a waste of time to debate this version further. That's pathetic... I rank #1 on the score board in 90% of the games I play, but I don't really care, and I NEVER adjust my playing style to remain in that spot.
