Feature: Optional server-side autobalance

[Rewind]

i think there shoud be an option for the admin to turn on auto team balance in case one team sucks but has lots of ppl and one team are pros and have litttle ppl

Thats actually a good point. Sometimes games are unbalanced number wise, but its fine overall. Making it an option for admins would probably work a bit better. Especially for big pub servers.

[Garrett]

This server-side auto-balance feature, in my opinion, should not allow anyone to switch teams if the teams are even.  If the teams are even, you can select to switch teams but you can't switch until someone on the other team wants to switch or if the team you would like to switch to loses a player.  The person who tried to switch to other team 'first' should get 'dibs' on the open spot.

[T3RR0R15T]

I think this is one of the next new features. So only a question: Will this or will the forcejoin command be higher prioritized ?

[Eiii]

I think this should be focused on more-- you don't exactly see (good) aggressive administration from server owners.

[webhead]

if only i had the opportunity to admin a server...

[SuperMAn]

Should make it look at the stats from the previous game and balance the teams based on kills or something.

[teflon]

I say we just auto balance the teams by numbers, and then just mess it up next game.

Basically we would be removing one problem but make another.

We remove the nubs switching to the winning team, but we lose the ability to even the teams by adding people to the losing team.

I think that this would be better because there will always be nubs, but there will not always be a team loaded with super players.

[teflon]

Oh, and just thought of this.

Lots of other games have autobalancing features.  Why don't we just try it for a week and get feedback?

[idias]

Pretty sure this has been around for a while now, we apreciatte your feedback and all but try to do it in more recent posts, hit the "View the most recent posts of the forum" button to do so. Also there's no need to go all post crazy and post on every single topic you see, just the ones that actually matter.

Peace...

[teflon]

Oh, thx
XD

[jitspoe]

I have this up for testing on EV1 pub 1.

paintball2://70.85.9.178:27910

[T3RR0R15T]

Sometimes it a little bit confusing, if i will be switched to the other team mid in the round. I didn't noticed the message and wondered, that my own team can kill me... Can you maybe make a (little bigger) cprint like message for that? But normally the autobalance works good on your server.

It kicks me for flooding, if i try to change the team a few times

Is it possible to lock/sticky a player in a team with the forcejoin command? If i forcejoin a player into a team and the autobalance switches him back in the same second (or after 10 seconds), the command will be useless. Or if i want to help a team with new players, i can't do that atm if they have the same count of players.

[jitspoe]

Moved your post over here.

I don't think I'll do much more than add a delay.  Sticking people to teams and such just makes the logic more complicated and opens the door for more bugs.  Not that it would be hard to do, but that's just something for a later iteration, if it's even necessary.

The auto-switch actually uses the dialog print option... that just hasn't been implemented on the client yet.  When that's done, it would pop up a dialog box that you'd click "OK" on, so you couldn't miss it.

[T3RR0R15T]

The auto-switch actually uses the dialog print option... that just hasn't been implemented on the client yet.  When that's done, it would pop up a dialog box that you'd click "OK" on, so you couldn't miss it.

Would it mean, that i can sent a message directly to a player instead of his team or the server?
Do you plan to implement that with one of the next (after b31) builds or is it only on the long list?

[jitspoe]

Would it mean, that i can sent a message directly to a player instead of his team or the server?
Do you plan to implement that with one of the next (after b31) builds or is it only on the long list?

It's just a way of displaying text.  Instead of going straight to the console, it will pop up a dialog.  I don't know when it will actually be implemented, though.

[jitspoe]

This has been implemented as follows:

When the teams are unbalanced, the game will attempt to select a "best-fit" player to move over to the other team.  This way, if the game is unbalanced, both in player count and skill, it will hopefully be better after the auto-switch.

The algorithm is this:
player score ratio = (5 * caps + 2 * grabs + kills + 1) / (deaths + 1)
team score ratio = (team 1 score + 1) / (team 2 score + 1)

The player with the closest score ratio to the team score ratio is selected for the autobalance.  For example, if the score was 21 to 10, and a player left the team with 10 points, causing the teams to be unbalanced, and you had 2 grabs (4 points), 1 cap (5 points), 12 kills (12 points), and 10 deaths, you'd be a "perfect fit", because your ratio (22/11, or 2:1) would exactly match the team score ratio.  The +1's on everything are just to help balance out the low numbers so a 1/0 is not an infinite score ratio.

With 1.928, time on the map is taken into account as well.  1 is added to the ratio difference for every 5 minutes of play.  So, say in the above example, you've been playing on the map for 10 minutes.  Now, instead of having a ratio difference of 0 (perfect match), your ratio difference is 2.

If somebody else joined in, and was only playing for a minute, and got, say, 1 kill and 1 death (2/2 or 1:1 score ratio), his ratio difference would be 22/11 - 2/2 = 1, plus 0.2 (1/5 minutes) for time, resulting in a total of 1.2, lower than your 2, so he would be auto-switched instead.

Trying to write all this out makes it sound more complicated than the code used to implement it, but I figured I'd share exactly how it works.  I'm not sure if those are the best numbers to use, but at least it tries to find an ideal candidate to switch.

Cvar settings:
g_autobalance 0 - disabled
g_autobalance 1 - autobalance enabled.  Players will be autoswitched when player counts are unbalanced by more than 1.
g_autobalance 2 - autobalance enabled, team switching to a team with the same number or more players disallowed.