Auto-team balance

[protest boy]

I know something for balancing the teams has been on the 'to do' list for a while. I wanted to start a discussion about how such a feature might work because I find myself more and more having to press TAB to check the teams as new players find Altitude.

There are three situations in my mind when the team balance needs the most consideration:

1) A new game is started
2) A new player joins a game already in progress
3) The game is already in progress and teams have become unbalanced due to players switching teams or leaving the game.

There are also two ways of considering team balance:

A) The cumulative skill of one team vs another. This should be measured by player experience, not level.
B) The number of players on one team against the other

Situation #1 and #2 are the easiest to fix. All servers should auto-balance new games and assign newly joining players to the correct team based upon the number of players on each team and the cumulative experience of each team. Teams should always contain the same number of players plus or minus 1.

It's a bit harder to figure out what should happen with #3. The situation that is most frustrating and I most frequently see occur is that teams become unbalanced in skill AND player count such as the following:

Team A:   TeamB:
Expert    Expert
Newbie    Expert
Newbie    Expert
Newbie
Newbie
Newbie

What usually happens is the newbies are unwilling or don't know how to switch teams and the lone expert on team A cannot switch or the game becomes even more lopsided than it was before.

The ideal mix would be two experts per team and an extra newbie on one. That switch requires the swapping of three players which significantly changes the game dynamics and may not be desirable. Should game progress be taken into account? e.g. three players should be moved as long as no base is damaged more than 75%, otherwise just one newbie is moved to team B.

Personally I would like one server-wide setting that auto-adjusts teams at all times and does not allow players to choose manually. This would be turned on by default on the official servers and left up to the administrators on the other servers. This means that if a player leaves a game in progress, someone would be automatically moved from one team to another to maintain the balance.

It would probably also be a good idea to have a voting mechanism to auto-balance teams mid-game on servers that do still allow player team selection.

[nesnl]

I agree that at this point this should be a huge priority. I have been in too many games that newer players quit because they feel like the teams are unfair. Just seeing a few level 60s on one team, whether they are good or not, is enough to make lower levels complain.

Here are my thoughts on the subject:

When a game starts, don't have the people press "F" to spawn into the game. When the map loads up, just have the server automatically place everyone on a team. Then if someone never spawns into the game, then have them moved to the spectators after like 1 minute or whatever. I realize that this might create situations where teams are made that some people never spawn initially, but in my opinion that situation won't happen very often. However, there are cases when a new map loads and then a bunch of people leave after a few seconds. This could be a problem in that the teams are made and then like 4-5 people leave on one team. So maybe the ideal situation should be to create a longer initial spawn time when the game is first about to begin, something like 20 seconds. Then if people leave, the server would automatically switch people around, and continue to do so as people left, until everyone spawned at the end of 20 seconds.

Another problem is when players join mid game and then select a team to join rather than just auto joining a team. This happens a lot with new players who want to join the winning team. Sometimes I press tab and notice that 4 newer players have all joined the same team making that team have 4 more players than the other team. Often times people say "teams" repeatedly, but most new players either don't understand how to switch teams or don't want to switch teams. The process of constantly checking the scoreboard and then typing in chat, asking a specific player to switch teams becomes annoying and tedious. My idea for this comes from an old CTF Quake mod I used to play. The way it worked was if there was more than a 1 player difference between teams (as in 2 or more players on one team) it wouldn't allow the team with more players to capture or cap the flag. There would also be a warning in the chat window stating that the team imbalance needed to be fixed before that team could score. This could work in Altitude if a team had more than 1 more player than the other team you could restrict that team from picking up bombs, or scoring any base damage from bombs they are already carrying. You could display a warning on that teams screen in the location that the current "Connection Problem" warning pops up. Something to the effect of "Blue team cannot pickup any bombs or damage the base until teams are balanced!"

Also, it seems easy enough to prevent players from joining a team that already has a 1 player advantage. If a player joins a game and then tries to manually join a team that has a 1 player advantage it should just say "The Blue team has too many players" or something to that effect. That way the only time that teams would become imbalanced to the point of having a 2 or more player advantage would be when people left the game or joined the spectators.

Although I think that protest boy has good points, I am not sure that I agree that teams should autobalance throughout the game. This would create situations in which players would constantly be switched as people joined and left the game. I think that most games stay pretty consistent in terms of constitution of players as compared to when the game begins. If the initial steps in balancing the teams are implemented when the game begins, and then the proper mechanisms are put in place to prevent teams from getting numbers imbalanced when the game is in progress, I think that that will be enough.

[lamster]

I agree that team balance is an important issue and will be working on it soon. The above posts are very good; if anyone has anything to add based on their experiences with other games (what you love/hate about TF2 autobalance, team balance mods that work well, etc) please post here so I can take it into consideration as I work on team-balance solutions.

The next patch will include a death popup (where tips normally go) that says "Press T to balance teams" if you die while teams are lopsided. This will help new players learn how to change teams and provide a useful reminder for fair-minded players who are happy to balance teams when an opportunity presents itself. It is, of course, not a complete solution, but it should grease the gears, allowing expert players to manually switch sides (creating a temporary imbalance that will hopefully be fixed by a new player dying -> pressing T when nagged) and otherwise strongly encourage numeric parity with minimal effort.

[chief]

Normally this isn't so much a problem as someone is generally willing to swap if you mention "teams" in the chat. One way of sorting this out would be to alter the spawn times depending on the player count so the team with less players would spawn quicker to even it out. I don't know if this would be appropriate for altitude but it works for other games.

I don't know if its a bug or coincidence but I quite often swap teams if its unbalanced only to find out afterwords it imbalances the other team. Does changing teams mid game screw up just pressing F to pick a team? i.e. does it still remember the team I originally was when its deciding which team to assign new players? (Does that make sense).

Seems pressing F to pick teams is a bit funny in general, would be quite nice if it autobalanced based on level. Quite often it ends up very stacked so a team full of vets face a team of newbies. This game seems to be less important to play on the side of friends outside of competitive matchs so sorting teams by lvl seems pretty reasnable.

Sorry for wall of text.

[DiogenesDog]

One thing I haven't seen mentioned that would be a nice default server setting: team size should max at 50% of the server player limit. So if you have a 14 player server, you CAN'T have more than 7 guys on a team. You can still have smaller games with imbalances (5v3 or whatever), but at least you won't get the most common/infuriating problem where it's like 9v5 and everyone refuses to switch.

[Luke]

Almost all above ideas are good, in particular i like:

Originally Posted by nesnl

create a longer initial spawn time when the game is first about to begin, something like 20 seconds. Then if people leave, the server would automatically switch people around, and continue to do so as people left, until everyone spawned at the end of 20 seconds.

and

Originally Posted by nesnl

If a player joins a game and then tries to manually join a team that has a 1 player advantage it should just say "The Blue team has too many players" or something to that effect.

Instead, i think not allowing the team with more players to score is very annoying.. suppose you're above the enemy base and drop the bomb.. than one of your mates leaves.. =/

My opinion: use BOTS.
If someone leaves or join spectators, a bot could just take replace him until a new player joins the game. Besides, bot's AI could easily be adjusted to have optimal balance.

[Blank]

do *not* use TF2's auto-balance system. Nothing sucks more than being the #1 guy on your team, your opponents are about to lose, some lamers leave the game, and you get swapped to the losing team.

The only balancing that should be done is the last guy to have joined the server gets swapped. And it shouldn't kick in unless there's a 3+ person difference. Wait a few seconds and someone might join and fill in a slot so you wouldn't have to break up teams.

Honestly, a lot of the time when people abandon ship cause you're getting destroyed... it's usually better to finish the match faster, and get on with a new one.

That and what dio/nesnl said about team limits.


I'm really against balancing based on "skill", at least when it's past the early-game mark. It sucks for the same reason that switching maps 3/4's of the way through a FFA sucks, but even worse because you've been working against yourself the entire time :[

That and there's no good way to determine skill level in this game. Plenty of max level guys suck horribly, and I'd take certain lower level "newbie" players over them any day (Caped for example). Not to mention some people just like playing with their friends (as in, on the same team... I don't, but some people do -_-).

[TomBRowkaH]

I agree completely with Blank. I hate the idea of switching to the team whose base I've already bombed twice. Although it does allow for a freakishly high base damage stat at the end. We should try some of these ideas out on some servers and see how it goes.

[Blind Pilot]

I've seen so many people get harassed for 'team switching' (and some even voted off for it).

How can one differentiate between 'experts' switching sides for balance, and 'team switchers' who are just looking to win?

As a relative newcomer, I am more afraid of people in the community seeing me as a team switcher than I am of being on the wrong end of a losing battle.

I think the new patch (press T) addresses this somewhat, although I am still wary and haven't tried it.

Is there was a systemwide message that announces "Player X has elected to balance teams"? If there isn't, should there be?

[TomBRowkaH]

Pressing T just moves you to the other side to balance the teams. Don't feel like you have to move if you've been on one side for a long time. Either way its no big deal.

[Luke]

Originally Posted by Blank

there's no good way to determine skill level in this game

Kills/Deaths is a good index for this.

[ryebone]

Originally Posted by Blind Pilot

How can one differentiate between 'experts' switching sides for balance, and 'team switchers' who are just looking to win?

It's not that people really care who switches; it's the fact that some people intentionally make teams imbalanced (7v7, someone switches to make it 6v8). Having even teams in terms of player count is a much higher priority than the actual skill of the players, regardless of which team is winning.

[DiogenesDog]

Agree with Blank that screwing with teams too much midstream can be frustrating. However, balancing them teams by skill BEFORE the match starts would be awesome I think. As for how skill is determined... I'd probably go with some combination of K ratio and total xp. I dunno, the good news is that you don't have to keep it simple/transparent at all since it's all behind the scenes.

[Blank]

Originally Posted by ryebone

It's not that people really care who switches; it's the fact that some people intentionally make teams imbalanced (7v7, someone switches to make it 6v8). Having even teams in terms of player count is a much higher priority than the actual skill of the players, regardless of which team is winning.

Like Dio mentioned earlier (or nesnl or both... or neither, too lazy to scroll back yet not lazy enough to keep typing this message...), team switching should be flat out disabled if teams are even.

Or, there should be an option similiar to the auto-join when selecting servers. Basically you can "queue" a switch team command and if someone on the other team does the same, you two will switch (or if someone leaves, you'll be the first to swap assuming you're the first in the team-switch queue).

You know, I really like that idea.

[jeppew]

how about you can only join the team with the least ammount of players, and if several people leave one team you should fill up some slots with bots, which counts as empty slots for the purpose of joining teams.

balancing automatically midgame is just frustrating, and i doubt you can balance according to skill that easily.

[Vi*]

Originally Posted by Blank

Or, there should be an option similiar to the auto-join when selecting servers. Basically you can "queue" a switch team command and if someone on the other team does the same, you two will switch (or if someone leaves, you'll be the first to swap assuming you're the first in the team-switch queue).

You know, I really like that idea.

Me too Blank, me too.