Inteligent autobalance system

[WeeGeez]

Here goes,
IMO rounds could prove more fun if the teams were balanced more often.

After the withdrawal of EA servers for vBF2, a PR main login server was introduced, which retains players account info. This is whats used to login, if I'm correct.

My suggestion is introduce a stat for each account. This is not a ranking system suggestion, which would otherwise promote anti-teamwork - how not? because it should be invisible/inaccessible to players. Hopefully this is a few bytes and wont bump server costs too much (which IIRC currently depends on donations).

The stat can be used to shuffle teams at the beginning of rounds (either automatically, but I was thinking more as an admin tool). !shuffle

We would need to agree as a community on what information to base it on though. I have used time played as an example but it could be any other bright idea.
'Time played' divided by 'Time since introduction of change' = number that can be used to balance teams somehow.

I don't think people can exploit this by deliberately creating new accounts just to be on the 'better experienced' team because they would need to do it enmasse for it to have any effect and lop side a server. e.g: 1 vet disguised as a newbie with a new account wont change anything, 30vets deliberately creating accounts all at once, on the same server then yeah maybe it can make it useless but this wont ever happen.

So as an example, regarding the time played or TP stat; say change is introduced in 1.5 and it has been 20hours since patch release and of those 20hours, a player has played 18hours, equation is 18/20 = 0.9 (90%) another player has played for 3hours, 3/20 = 0.15, another is 0.5, another 0.7. Upon joining a team these figures are used to balance teams. hopefully I got the maths right.

When players join server the algorithm decides which team to put them on using this stat by comparing to other players already joined (averaged out) but I'm not sure if this can work like this, its probably easier to make it a tool for admins(?).

If clans want to play together perhaps admins will need to switch, alternatively a mechanism is in place that detects similar prefixes (tags).

I repeat, this is not a suggestion to add ranking system. Its an invisible stat that only servers will use.



Any feedback / suggestions?

[doop-de-doo]

No stats? No iAB.

[WeeGeez]

What do you mean, what am I missing?

[rPoXoTauJIo]

Popular leaders are those who hard to balance as they tend to gather players around themself, reducing entropy among team.

[UTurista]

When players join server the algorithm decides which team to put them on using this stat by comparing to other players already joined (averaged out) but I'm not sure if this can work like this, its probably easier to make it a tool for admins(?).

This is of course a great idea and rather easy to implement, the issue is creating the "algorithm".

Given 2 players how do you consider that one is better than the other? Furthermore this ain't a 1vs1 game so you would need to account with other players influencing the player you're evaluating.

Maps types (desert/forest/urban) and assets(CAS/armor/apcs) also influence the players "skill".

For example a great player can be awesome at desert maps with his Tank but an awful player in urban maps as infantry, even in the same map the player can perform terrible if it's not playing with friends or even if the team can't coordinate together.

Once you figure the algorithm you can have your automatic balance system.

Personally I feel that for PR, the best "algorithm" is just an admin who knows the player-base, no script can replace that (... maybe with machine learning)

[bahiakof]

One idea is a script that works on the TAG of the clan.

If it were possible, the function of this script is to always make clans with many members confront each other, preventing them from being on the same team.

[LiamBai]

One idea is a script that works on the TAG of the clan.

If it were possible, the function of this script is to always make clans with many members confront each other, preventing them from being on the same team.

This was the behaviour of the old !scramble command. It didn't work very well.


In general, this is something that should be done by admins. There is no realistic way to make a script do it while keeping account of players that want to play together.
The problem is then getting admins to do it. My suggestion would be to go to servers that aren't balancing teams and tell them that they need to do a better job. If 50 people tell a server that their balance is woeful, there is some chance that they might listen and teach their admins how to fix it.