Team stacking is everywhere...

I've seen lots of threads about this, and now that I've been dealing with it for the past few days, it's time for me to make my own.

There are two types of stacks.

• The Number Stack
• The Skill Stack

Depending on the experience levels of the teams, sometimes number stacking doesn't really matter. If I have my entire clan on my team and the other team is just random players, even if it's 10 vs 15, we (my clan) can probably pull it out.

The skill stack is the worst and the most seen. Skill stacking involves two or more experienced players picking the same team when the server isn't filled with experienced players. The end result, the team of experenced players hands the asses of the other team to them.

When I used to play CS:S, every good server employed HLStatsX to balence teams, which worked pretty good (it had it's faults when people could override it by spamming the team join button and clicking the team they want to join).

Most of the ATBs for Empires simply suck. Since Empires isn't "round based play", like CS:S, moving players in the middle of a map really sucks, as they have invested a lot of time to make their team win.

The only type of balancing that I've seen work in Empires is manual balancing. Manual balancing is done by admins, manually. This generally involves lots of threats of kicks and bans to get people to cooperate, and generally makes the admins unpopular. If there are plenty of admins, and they have no interest in actually playing the game (as balancing the teams takes up so much time), it works. The major problem with this method is that 99% of the time, admins are not present in any of the servers I play in.

This then leaves it up to the individual players, who already know, 5 seconds into the game who is going to win, just by judging the teams. No one wants to switch over to the losing team and spend the next 30 minutes getting their ass handed to them on a silver platter.

After constantly losing map after map, I can see why people would stack so they could finally have some fun.

There has got to be some kind of solution to this.

 

I don't really know...I do know that people whining about team stacking is one of the reasons I don't play Empires much anymore. For a long time about 40% of the games I spectated, I had to spectate because the team with open slots had better people.

I just thought i'd let you guys know that even thought team stacking might suck for you, it sucks even worse for those of us who want to be fair - because we still get to play those teamstacked games, on the losing side.

 

Team stacking exists in almost every multiplayer game. Attempts to fix it just result in more problems, eg. KM server's autobalancer which always puts you on NF for some reason.

 

Skill stacking is not a problem because, if skill stacking is a problem than you
say with other words better players are a problem.

I skill stack, wanna know why?
Because its really ****in anoying to play on the not skill stacked team.
Why?
No its not because you will lose, the problem is that it really pisses me and
many other players of that you have:

1) a team that consists 33% of scouts that really believe they are usefull
2) no one BUILDS ANYTHING
3) if the map has more than one chokepoint every player defends one chokepoint
4) people cry for stupid (for the current situation) researches and believe the commander is stupid if he doesnt research that.
5) no one follows orders
6) the chance that the commander knows what he does is under 10% and if he dont know what he does he still believes he is good
7) its always the commanders fault
8) no one buys vehicles or retarded vecs like apc without armor but 100 weapons on it
9) no one drops ammo or heals you
10) no one places mines
11) engineers place/build turrets and ignore their surrounding
12) no one reads chat, listens to mic
and so forth...

thats why i stack not because theres a good chance that my team will lose

 

Skill stack, oh sad. Go play on the BDS server or whatever the hell it is called.
It has that balancer plugin.

Also to your clans 10 on 15 skill, o rly?

 

I once saw a game on slaughtered where is was 10 clanners vs 20 pubbers. The clanners still won.

 

BDS and [mush]MACHINE servers had autobalancer installed on them. BDS has a new version 0.5 that is a current RC. I have sent the new version to Lion (mush admin), but when I wanted to confirm that it has been installed, this was what happened:

So I guess the Empires community is not ready for autobalancers, they prefer to leave the game rather than to play a balanced one.
As for now, BDS server has the autobalancer installed as the only one.
KM officials contacted me recently about the plugin. I told them that the 0.5 version has to be tested on BDS or mush before it will go to KM, they agreed.
I am really, really pissed.

 

I do not agree with teamstacks, but skill stacks... Well, as Mayama said, a portion of the Empires community is mindblowingly dumb. I at least expect players to heal each other and use some basic tactics like nadespamming a turretfarm or something. But they don't. Even basic knowledge that can be found in the manual (http://www.empiresmod.com/help/tips_and_tricks.htm) is completely absent.

Now, I don't expect everyone to read through the manual, but even basic tactics such as "a turret! let's see if my grenades damage it!" are often nowhere to be found.

 

Oh noz. We are horrible people.

 

This seems like the ideal solution. Would it be possible to code a plugin that does this?

 

I admit to losing interest in Empires recently mainly due to skill stacking making games totally one sided. Ive ended up downloading other mods and playing them as Empires isnt fun any more , especially "Escort" with its 100 heavies rolling out the vf...
The only solution I can think of is to make the join screen BLIND , as in you cant see whos on what team at start so have to auto and then just play with what yu got. Yes people can switch but it might help a little .
Until people realise that There behaviour can spoil the fun factor by ending games in 2 minutes then most Empires games will make players move on.........

 

But sometimes you really WANT to be NF/BE, no matter who's in there. Like when you feel for some real tank rape early game = NF or late = BE or Rifleman maniac = NF..

 

Unfortunately only the people that have been playing empires for a long time (1.04 or older) know what the fuck they should do, all the others just think they do or are complete idiots

 

Today slaughter: Whole team in valley no one in old main (enemy had a rax
there). no one defended bridge.

Today crossroad: some idiots with mics told the team that we need engineers
and riflemans at start... no one was able to TAKE A FKIN MORTAR AND SHELL
THEM from the 2 towers...

playin on the unstacked side IS NO FUN AT ALL...



And those people WONT LEARN the just FKIN WONT LEARN

 

Here is my thoughts on the matter. I have a very double sided opinion. Personally, I think the term skill stacking is often a joke. The winner of a game is supposed to be determined by which team has greater skill. That said, I also think a tournament where the Allstars play the 40 whiners, isn't much of a game.

I thinks the schoolyard team picking solution WOULD created comparable teams, but it wouldn't work properly for pub play.

I feel that ACTUAL good players will opt. for the challenge most of the time. Although, I often agree with mayama: it is frustrating when your teamate are all invilad know-it-alls.

I DO blaim the people and not the system. The system is setup to allow for effortless equity. The people are the ones who screw it up. If all skilled players attempted to challenge themselves, the teams would always have aproximately equivelant skill, but the exact opposite happens.

This isn't always the case though. Everyone knows that vehicle_training is BE sided, and I have noticed alot more NF wins do to increased skill on that team. Same for escort.

 

Theres no point yelling at your team for being shit, try and help them instead is the only way to improve things. get them in your squad and tell them where to go, why not to play scout etc. and it wont help all the time, but theres always noobs willing to learn, and it will help matters a lot more than just screaming at your team and spamming text.

I would have been a lot more useful when I started playing empires if someone had given me a bit of direction, some of you guys might have forgottten but for a noob theres a hell of a lot of stuff to learn, and when your new you just want to have fun. Its easy to laugh at the guys screaming at you for wasting res as you fly out the VF ina jeep and flip it straight away.

 

I did not find a link everywhere! Send me the plugin and i can test it on my server too!
Autasign and teamlock would be enough for the moment. On mani u can change the settings to auto-assign "only" and it works good, but not on EM (see the topic mani...)

 

Meh, it usually takes 2-3 player + talkative commander on the unstacked teams to balance it enough to prevent immeadiate (!, they will often lose nevertheless) rape.

Mayama has already listed it but I'd like to iron out some of the points:

- commanders get blamed by noisy people for the loss, they get yelled at by mediocre to shitty players for their research decisions. Thus you don't get a good commander on one of the teams.
- If you get a good commander he still needs enough good core players, and still they will be very hard pressed against stacks and probably won't have fun... its really hard work to fill all the roles for your team of noisy stupid people.

I sometimes think about using mic + going commander on the failing team right from the start (its pretty easy to discern the losing team 20 sec into the game) But then I remember pictures of engineers building a wall while the commander is getting killed right besides him.

The picture burned into my retina and ´since then I find myself giving up on most games or stack the team to drive over the engineer over and over and over again until he leaves or learns. This is the only way to teach those people anything at all. Smart people that actually listen will learn themselves fast enough, and/or can join or make a clan to counter stacks if they are good enough (which atleast SOMETIMES happens)

Oh, and to pretend to be constructive:
Balancers won't help. Either the organized players counter stack (an are not raped by a balancer) or stacked games with spec stack will always happen.