Gaming Zone > Unreal Tournament 2004
A Bit of Better Balancing
Flenser:
The current team balancer seems to do this, from observation:
When the number of players differs by more than one, move the most recently-joined player from the team that has more players, to the team that has fewer.
That doesn't do a heck of a lot when it's 4-0, and Arbok, DcNR, etc. are all on the winning team, 3 people rage (or otherwise) quit the losing team, and some poor soul who just joined 30 seconds ago gets moved to the losing team.
Here's my proposal, and I have no idea whether it's technically possible, but perhaps it is, or perhaps someone else will have an even better idea.
What if, if the score hits 3-0, the top player on the winning team gets moved to the losing team? If it hits 4-0, then the (new) top player also gets moved.
Or maybe the 2nd-to-top player gets moved? Or maybe the teams get completely randomized.
We seem to have a lot of 5-0 games lately, and they are the least interesting or fun games possible. Either you're on the winning team and it's like you're playing against a bunch of bots set on "visually impaired" or you're on the losing team and you can't even get out of the spawn point before dying or the other team scoring again. I'd love for there to be more 4-3 games or 3-1 games.
Piglet:
What we really need is something like the balancer in Freon, or the code Shambler wrote for ONS in his TitanTeamFix balancer.
Both those things rate every player, then aim to build teams with similar ratings.
The problems for vCTF are:
1. How to assess players for rating
2. How to get enough time, skills, and enthusiasm to write in-game and back-end code to store away and use ratings
1 is very hard
2 is even harder. Free time is short and it's a lot of work.
The_Cowboy:
There is already something similar existing for UT99 https://unrealadmin.org/forums/showthread.php?t=23777 (source: https://github.com/joeytwiddle/code/blob/master/code/unrealscript/AutoTeamBalance/Classes/AutoTeamBalance.uc)
Pros:
1. It has a seemingly decent algorithm for assessing players for ratings.
2. It has been refined over several years based on the feedback from multiple UT99 CTF servers. Assuming the
CTF playerbase has the same magnitude of frustrations (or envies) for unbalanced teams, I don't see why the
algorithm can't/won't work for VCTF crowd.
Cons:
1. What Piglet said (point 2, mostly the time and enthusiasm part).
2. For UT2004 VCTF it might need some patching up. Like identification based on GUID or something similarly robust (instead of just names).
At some point down the line I would love to look into cooking something like this, but no commitments :-\
Gil-galad:
Hello,
If i can help, being a noob at every thing but of ingame equilibrium sense...
things that come to my mind when i think of a team balancer :
- the closer the guy is from scoring before being killed by an enemy, more the points that should be awarded for the kill, IF the flag is indeed returned. Think of it like an assist on a manta run.
- the closer your flag is from the enemy's flag post base, the more points you should receive for returning it.
- for flag runs : in an ideal manner, if you capture the flag running all the way or just the last centimeter should NOT be rewarded equally, IMO.
- shooting at an enemy that is shooting your team flag carrier should be rewarded more that regular shots, because it's support.
In general, I think the right perspective is to acknowledge and measure what denotes overall match awareness, reactivity and commitment towards VCTF goals (the Things That Need to Be Done, like IMO touching, capturing, killing the flag carrier, returning, and, to an extent, support your team's runner).
I probably forget a lot of ideas i got about this old, old subject. If i remember something that i think that could be of use, I'll post again.
The_Cowboy:
Some time ago I was working on SmartCTF(https://miasma.rocks/index.php?topic=1357.0) which tracks almost all the features that Gil-galad mentions. A snap shot of the features https://imgur.com/BnBo7gk.
--- Quote from: Gil-galad[The REAL one] on May 14, 2021, 14:50 --- - the closer the guy is from scoring before being killed by an enemy, more the points that should be awarded for the kill, IF the flag is indeed returned. Think of it like an assist on a manta run.
--- End quote ---
Can be implemented in that framework with just a couple of lines of code.
--- Quote from: Gil-galad[The REAL one] on May 14, 2021, 14:50 --- - the closer your flag is from the enemy's flag post base, the more points you should receive for returning it.
--- End quote ---
Implemented.
--- Quote from: Gil-galad[The REAL one] on May 14, 2021, 14:50 --- - shooting at an enemy that is shooting your team flag carrier should be rewarded more that regular shots, because it's support.
--- End quote ---
Implemented. They also get extra adrenaline!
--- Quote from: Gil-galad[The REAL one] on May 14, 2021, 14:50 --- - for flag runs : in an ideal manner, if you capture the flag running all the way or just the last centimeter should NOT be rewarded equally, IMO.
--- End quote ---
Implemented.
--- Quote from: Gil-galad[The REAL one] on May 14, 2021, 14:50 ---In general, I think the right perspective is to acknowledge and measure what denotes overall match awareness, reactivity and commitment towards VCTF goals (the Things That Need to Be Done, like IMO touching, capturing, killing the flag carrier, returning, and, to an extent, support your team's runner).
--- End quote ---
That is precisely the motivation for building something like SmartCTF.
Infact Piglet did suggest using these features to balance the teams
--- Quote from: Piglet on June 10, 2020, 23:35 ---The readme is great.
What I'd really like to see is something that we can use to ensure the teams are reasonably well balanced at the start of each match (separate from the scoreboard logic so that they can be used separately or together.
What you have in there is a lot of information about the players and how they're playing. All that is interesting, but could be made useful by storing that away and using it to balance teams at map start - separating cappers from each other, separating defenders from each other and splitting the other players into roughly even groups to the teams.
That would require saving the information to a server and recalling the bits needed as players join.
--- End quote ---
All I will say is that it needs a "better mind" to connect the remaining dots and bring this issue to a just resolution (https://youtu.be/0f2jpwn6M-E?t=80).
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