points/time played is the best imo. Also, we've had this discussion before over at this thread. It was pretty much talking about soundspawn's ranking/autobalance system (the youtube video is down, but its all on the long version download if you want to get an idea of what he was doing). I still think a skill-based ranking system is a good idea, but a lot of other people didn't.
That ^ Fixes for stacking have been discussed more times than I care to count, and ALL of them have failed. People like stacking, and we have let it go, because there is no feasible solution. The question becomes, why do people like it? No one likes playing on a failteam (e.g. team of idiots). Remove or improve the failteam, and stacking will become less of an issue. That's what I hope the tutorials will accomplish.
Much better than nothing. And his system was ready to go rather than just random speculation on the forums.
There is a big difference with this system. People can still stack if they like but they will have fewer people at their team. The values 25 hours = 2, 100 hours = 3 are not fixed. At the beginning we should maybe start with hours = 1,25, 50 hours = 1.5. And I would say again that the only thing we need is the hours played. Points are not as good because commanders don't get many points while the most points are earned on maps like district which have not much in common with Empires gameplay. Maybe I should apply as developer to finally make this happen.
meh... I thought they just gave developer titles out. seems that way ehh? lol developers stay 2-3 months then leave and are replaced by new ones.
Neither time nor points really show a players skill. There are bad players with lots of hours, and good players with only few hours playtime. Every player has a different learning curve. If you'd force that onto the servers as dev, it would just make you another bad dev and it would be another wasted implemention. Play time is not a good indicator of "skill"
Well then, let us all subject ourselves to biometrics so EU Main and Viper can judge whatever team we would be joining. Submit your blood, spit, urine and stool sample into the DVD tray of your PC and let the server decide what team you can join.
Defining a player's skill is not the problem, seeing as the ESG accomplished that rather quickly. What SIP is not addressing, nor are the majority of people in favor of his system, is what to do with the numbers. Everyone who has discussed that has been against using them to balance teams, because we have tried it before, and it does NOT work.
Admins do their job? LMAO! Thats not likely, I mean im sure it can happen but, kids policing other kids doesn't really work. If the Admins are having fun stacking why would they stop it? hell I noted the stacking yesterday and <name redacted they know who they are> was asking me what I was basing it on. Ohh I duno... all the jpl and bsid and exe were on one side and new players on the other guess its just a "gut feeling" as <name redacted> pointed out. it went that way 5 rounds.
We tried that. It didn't work. For Empires, yes. @Everyone who thinks there is a technical solution to this problem: No system predicated on controlling the skilled players is feasible within the current community. Please stop deluding yourself otherwise.
admins seem ineffective in stopping stack.. unless its # of players. anyways, i blame the players and not the system for stack. but its often hard to tell which players are pro or not, unless your FN or mash. clan tags make it easier to determine, but not all clan members are good. just random people =\.. to be honest =3.. i try to join the team that FN is on just cause hes a competent commander too.. and i try to avoid joining hobbes team lol.
I assure you, we were very effective; however, the situation degraded into something comparable to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Unlike NATO, we know when we've lost a war, and what to do when such a rarity occurs. And logic emerges... That is something that you gain from experience. Most skilled players can call a match before it starts, solely based on that information.
well recon, i almost never see server messages like "admin forced XXX to join XXX team" or something of that nature. well the only hope of winning against a stack is if the stacked team's commander fuked up and the other team's commander is competent enough... it may offset the stack. but then again the stacked team has more people who can com, so its unlikely that can occur. since this is discussed so many times and nothing happen, why not just drop it? obviously not one solution is the key to solving this problem. other games have plenty of stack, its natural.
Honestly, people should be able to play with the people they want to play with. That is what makes a game fun. There should not be a system to prevent people from joining a certain team besides one the calculates the amount of players on a team. Although skill-stacking is a problem it is only so because of a small community, and enforcing rules against it will just make people not want to play. The only way this problem will be solved is by more players playing the game, and more players to diluting the "skill".
We've discussed a lot about skill-balancing plugins, but have never actually used any. While spawn did collect skill stats, he never implemented the balancing portion of the plugin. Also, I think spawn's system would have worked pretty well. It gave each player a point value and summed up the point values of all the players on each team. You could then only join the team with the lower total point value. What to do with the skill measure was easy. Making sure that the measure accurately reflected player skill was the hard part. If a map has a glaring exploit, the correct solution is to fix the exploit, not have an admin constantly policing the server to ensure no one is using that exploit. Admins are only there as a last resort to prevent stacking, sploiting, and griefing for things that haven't been fixed yet or can't be fixed. Also, without some objective criteria, its likely that admin team switching is not going to fix the stacking. Admins don't have some superior knowledge of the skill level of each player so that they can effectively switch players to balance team skill. At best, all they can do is split up clan/squad members.
stacking is a problem since empires is public and has ruined many many games. vets/clanners will never stop stacking. they are like this: they just want easy pwnage ... we should force them to fight worthy enemies. if they dont like it they should gtfo and play against an easy AI. ofc we need an option to turn the system off for scrims etc. lol this wont work. many admins like to stack too
