TV1 and team balancing

[matt101]

What this teamwork you speak of?

[BisonJerk]

I'm going to reel this back in, cause you guys went off on a separate topic than I was talking about.

I'm not talking about a situation where 1 or more players goes to Spectator to avoid auto balance. I'm talking about a situation where people on one team are disconnecting from the server fully, and then new players are connecting to the server and getting placed onto a losing team before auto balance can kick in.

I saw 4-5 people leave a losing team and get replaced by new joins multiple times in a single map session, while the winning team never got auto balanced. Basically there was a cycle/churn of 4 people the entire map, and it killed the team.

So far the only thing I've heard that would help this is to try to contact a server admin, which can be difficult. Is there anything else that can be done to provide some sort of rebalancing?

[The Spanish Inquisition]

Haven't read this thread but I did see someone mention that team scramble resets the map. I do not believe that is true since they instituted their own voting system.

[Boss Llama]

Other than the auto-balance, not to my knowledge :-/ If people are joining faster than the balancer is taking affect, there's isn't a way to make it then force a balance anyway, and stick the new person on the other team.

Honestly, the fact that new blood is joining the team is not going to cause problems. The fact that somebody just joined a server has no bearing on their skill, their ability to help their team, or whether or not they'll be an asset. I understand the churn you're talking about, and it isn't thrilling, but it is usually a sign of a team that's not communicating, picking smart classes, or working together, rather than a sign that the other team is unbalanced. We can't punish a team for using good tactics just because the other team doesn't. Sadly, there are a lot of people out there who'd rather rage quit than open their mouth to help, or heaven forbid, play what their team needs. Those are the folks messing up the game for all of us.

Haven't read this thread but I did see someone mention that team scramble resets the map. I do not believe that is true since they instituted their own voting system.

The admin scramble command that we can use still does reset the timer. :-/ Public voting isn't something that I anticipate being allowed (nor should it be allowed) on Ville servers, though I agree it would be nice to avoid timer resets.

[One_Medic_Army]

Speed up auto-balance perhaps?
There have been times when I've seen a 2+ person imbalance for quite a while before auto-balance kicked in and swapped someone.
Then again, if auto-balance worked faster that would introduce it's own problems.

[The Spanish Inquisition]

Haven't read this thread but I did see someone mention that team scramble resets the map. I do not believe that is true since they instituted their own voting system.

The admin scramble command that we can use still does reset the timer. :-/ Public voting isn't something that I anticipate being allowed (nor should it be allowed) on Ville servers, though I agree it would be nice to avoid timer resets.

The scramble command is not plugin specific. It is the same command that is used in the in-game tf2 voting. The plugins simply defer to the tf2 scramble command.

[Cpt._Keyes]

Speed up auto-balance perhaps?
There have been times when I've seen a 2+ person imbalance for quite a while before auto-balance kicked in and swapped someone.
Then again, if auto-balance worked faster that would introduce it's own problems.

ive noticed either intentional or accidental but the auto balance will just sit there confused with drool running out if someone has just joined the server or is sitting in spec and wont auto balance anyone

[trilobite]

I agree about the frustrations of stacked teams. Frequently, I become uncomfortable if I am on a team that rolls the opposition over and over. No fun. I often switch, not necessarily because I think I can help, but because I like the challenge. I learned this little technique from watching highly skilled players on the server do this. Sometimes they bounce back and forth. I have great admiration and respect for them as they are acting in the best interests of the game -- not so focused on the killing.I have also observed some very skilled and highly ranked players who appear to frequently migrate to the "winning" team. This can lead to a permanent imbalance in which regular players gravitate toward each other and produce a superior team that cannot be stopped. This is a problem that makes it harder for me to practice my craft because I end up getting killed more frequently. I hate this but... I refuse to switch.

On another note, I have been on a team you could easily call "stacked." Three quarters of the team made up of very skilled and highly ranked players. The other team populated mostly with names I did not recognize. But surprisingly, we were systematically defeated over and over. Why? We we having fun playing our class and practicing with different weapon techniques, and we weren't focusing on "WINNING." The other team developed a good balance of classes, and apparently had excellent communication.

In another instance, while I was on RED, BLU was just not having any success getting close to the first cap on stage two of Dustbowl. After a time, someone on our team suggested we just pull out and give it to them... and everybody with a mic agreed. Engies pulled up stakes and we retreated to defend the second point. After a good fight, we let BLU cap the second point too. That is, we bailed out and ran to our spawn. That moved the game to the third stage at which time we bore down.

In each of these cases, players made choices that proactively changed the dynamics of the conflict -- I would say mostly for the better.

[matt101]

Auto balance doesn't trigger unless a player on the other team is killed and 5 seconds passed since the message pop up and also the player that dies which can be anyone from the top player to either the lowest can get switched from auto balance which mean that half the times it will only even up the teams (in number) and nothing else.

[crimsonshootingstar]

Unfortunately the auto balance favors getting the weakest players off the rolling team as they die more often.

There is no response to stacked teams that can help except for a choice by a high skill player player on the stacked team to switch over or tone it down and this is pretty uncommon. As far as the communication suggestion goes that's kind of like "let them eat cake" If they had skilled player who could communicate well they would be. I have tried to jump over and pull the weaker team up with teamwork, but usually the only way to make that work is to grab your best power class go one man army and try to convince someone to play medic. Skill is skill and most of the more dominate players around don't communicate they just do the same as I said. Toby doesn't have a microphone as far as I know.

So I will once again call on you the villuns to please make that choice to join the losing team and give them a leg up.

SPCCSSTVRVS

[Katotsu]

Unfortunately the auto balance favors getting the weakest players off the rolling team as they die more often.

Something my brother has decided about the auto balance: it chooses a player when it says 'auto-balancing' and waits until they die to balance anyone. Don't know if he's right.

[Guardian]

I'm pretty sure there's a scramble command that doesn't need a plugin which doesn't reset the counter now. Also it can be set to scramble at the end of a round where teams roll someone twice in a row. I've played on a lot of servers with built in 2 win and scramble command to prevent rolls.

[The Spanish Inquisition]

I'm pretty sure there's a scramble command that doesn't need a plugin which doesn't reset the counter now. Also it can be set to scramble at the end of a round where teams roll someone twice in a row. I've played on a lot of servers with built in 2 win and scramble command to prevent rolls.

Yes, you are correct.

Here is the fix I mentioned regarding team scramble not reseting rounds. Sixth item down.
http://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/June_8,_2011_Patch

Fixed scrambleteams resetting how many rounds have been played

Updated mp_scrambleteams to support a parameter of 2, which prevents resetting the number of rounds that have been played

ALSO
the automated team scrambling system works like so.
http://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Septe ... 2010_Patch

Added new auto-team-scramble system:
Set mp_scrambleteams_auto to 1 (default) to automatically scramble the teams if the criteria is met
Set mp_scrambleteams_auto_windifference to set the number of round wins a team must lead by in order to trigger an auto scramble (default is 2)

So to see teams auto scrambled if one team rolls another twice in a row:

Code: Select all

mp_scrambleteams 2
mp_scrambleteams_auto 1
mp_scrambleteams_auto_windifference 2

[Fano]

I'm pretty sure there's a scramble command that doesn't need a plugin which doesn't reset the counter now. Also it can be set to scramble at the end of a round where teams roll someone twice in a row. I've played on a lot of servers with built in 2 win and scramble command to prevent rolls.

Yes, you are correct.

Here is the fix I mentioned regarding team scramble not reseting rounds. Sixth item down.
http://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/June_8,_2011_Patch

Fixed scrambleteams resetting how many rounds have been played

Updated mp_scrambleteams to support a parameter of 2, which prevents resetting the number of rounds that have been played

ALSO
the automated team scrambling system works like so.
http://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Septe ... 2010_Patch

Added new auto-team-scramble system:
Set mp_scrambleteams_auto to 1 (default) to automatically scramble the teams if the criteria is met
Set mp_scrambleteams_auto_windifference to set the number of round wins a team must lead by in order to trigger an auto scramble (default is 2)

So to see teams auto scrambled if one team rolls another twice in a row:

Code: Select all

mp_scrambleteams 2
mp_scrambleteams_auto 1
mp_scrambleteams_auto_windifference 2

this is cool and it would certainly help but there really is no way to tell if those two wins were hard-fought victories or short steamrolls, I suppose it could be a bit discouraging for it to trigger if the teams were actually balanced and rounds took an average of 9-10 minutes to resolve as opposed to getting rolled in a minute or two.

[One_Medic_Army]

Too bad there's no way to set the autoscramble to only kick in if the round win happened very fast?