A Bit of Better Balancing

[JP]

You made me proud Jp

I can rest in peace now.

Also, this;

Or just Points/Timeplayed cuz the points are already programmed considering the important aspects of the game

Assuming the points are already distributed properly during the most recent game, why bother doing additional historical hoopla on top of that.
I'm not even sure if time played should be a factor, given that good players are able to score many points in a short amount of time. So they should be treated like the top dog they are in the next game.
This also takes in account players having a bad day.

[Killer_XTREME!!!]

([Captures*2] + [Flagkills*2] + frags) / timeplayed
Excluding players with less than 40 captures

Or just Points/Timeplayed cuz the points are already programmed considering the important aspects of the game

This is the list: (points/timeplayed)
Wirus.Win9x.DòóM (PL)
JP (NL)
notthc (HU)
stefanie (FR)
moi (FR)
zath (FR)
Sup (BR)
{V][M}Quadro (BE)
duke (PL)
Kuha (FI)
MrHuhuhu (UK)
Mjolnir (US)
Paul (RU)
HYDRO (IR)
BaZzY (NL)
ThunderCrash (RS)
Antonius (AT)
El_Gato (AR)
tigger (UK)
Little_Johnny (IN)
ParadoX (BG)
Rounin_Napoli (IT)
NONAME_StreetRat
memo (ES)
RonnieColeman (PT)
David (AT)
Kyhado (US)
ScHiSmFeAr (US)
KillaKilla (DE)
-=BL@=- (PT)
ELECTRO (UK)
Mr.Magoo (CL)
MILEYCYRUS{.}{.} (SE)
gerbil (RO)
Flenser (US)
BarnBurner (IL)
corsica_nazione (FR)
Mike (SE)
HELL_FIRE_BACK (FR)
imonfire (UK)
DM4E/DRG (RU)
WïÜè (RO)
James.T.Kirk (AT)
cronix (HR)
wito (PL)
SaintHappening (US)

You sure sup I am not on the list xD You made me proud :p

[Gil-galad]

From the lack of comments on my propositions, I get that no one is interested in the ideas I sketched. Don't get me wrong, I'm still glad that something is done on the balancer front.

Still, not taking into account flag returns seems really strange. You know you can't score if your flag isn't on its post, gents.
Also, i do not think there was a real thought on points value - and certainly no discussion about it.

[The_Cowboy]

From the lack of comments on my propositions, I get that no one is interested in the ideas I sketched.

Still, not taking into account flag returns seems really strange. You know you can't score if your flag isn't on its post, gents.

Working on that!
Feel free to create relevant issues here https://github.com/ravimohan1991/Equalizer/issues

[The_Cowboy]

I will be having/continuing private dialogs with Piglet at relevant times and will be working on what I would like to believe the right collective consensus on how to proceed forwards.

[Gil-galad]

One venue that I didn't explore is the time stamps.

The most obvious case I can think off is to measure the duration of a flag carrier role, to acknowledge the difficulty that can be simply just holding it when the enemy has your team's flag.

I suspect that some other durations could also be used to further improve all the ideas around distances that I tried to present.

Like the duration spent on the journey to the enemy's flag : some, like Darkside or TheEnder, can be VERY fast (running, no vehicle). Perhaps that could be a solution to measure and value these skills... or for that case, flag touches and flag captures counts would be enough...?

I'm not comprehensive at all here, it's just to show the possibilities.

More generally, I 'd really want to find objective values where it's possible instead of having a guess picking an approximate subjective value. I want to have a robust balance mechanism, not something that would prove to be too circumstantial and thus less efficient. Players will adapt their gameplay if the game changes, and we wish the balancer to stay the most pertinent and efficient that is possible nonetheless.

that' how i got thinking in terms of distances and flags.

[Gil-galad]

ON the ELO mechanism that was discussed :

For averages calculation and variations at the end of the match, the accumulated total for every category by a player could be weighted against the value achieved by other players, to avoid the noise of the variation of the game-play rhythm that is due to the nature more or less spammy  and speedy of the maps.

I think it's the same thing. I'm very much in favour of such mechanism.

it is in line with this :

The value of a kill, or a damage, can be broken into various parameters.

 - how close you are from your target. the further, bigger the value => Aim factor
 - the quality of the target you off or damage. The better player, the more value has the kill or the damage => Target dangerosity factor.
 - how close the target is from his flag post, his dropped flag, your dropped flag, your flag on its post. The closer, the higher the value of the the damage => Implication factor. (1)
 - Is the target shooting your FC? Or killing your best player?  In essence, what is the value of the targets YOUR target is shooting (or aiming, as trying to shoot at)=> Support factor.
[edit] Since writing this, I've  thought of one more general factor : the distance from spawn. see below.
[...]

NOTE. I wrote distance as distance of the path. I wrote "spawn" as a place, but i should have used, if all agree to the idea, the pole of inaccessibility of the polygon designed by the team spawn points and the team flag post. If there's only one spawn point, then the point to be used is the middle of the segment of an imaginary line that would connect spawn point to flag post. by the shortest path (a straight line). See previous post for the pole of inaccessibility if you're not understanding what it is. I wasn't explicit for sentence simplicity's sake.

I was trying to address this concern :

It's a tricky one. You're thinking in terms of flags all the time - however if you watch me in Bloodbath, my aim is to prevent players getting anywhere near the flag. I'm shooting the hordes of players attacking and trying to prevent them even getting there.

How are you going to measure the value of me killing 100 players before they reach the flag, compared to the sniper being nothing more than a nuisance shooting 100 people milling around the spawn points?

How are you going to measure the value of Moi shooting me and preventing me from defending?

[sup]

I think the simple solution is usually the right one...

Look this game:



Nardaq, Sadly, lol and Kyhado at same team
Just by looking at this I know it's not balanced and the red team's points/time played ratio is much higher than that of the blue team
(this game was 5x1 for the red team quickly)

[Gil-galad]

Since the beginning of this thread, I was introduced to an Assault balancer designed by really good players that intimately know ut2K4⁽¹⁾, from that pick-up assault server that perhaps some of you will know.


HERE for a link to their site. THERE for the ranking.
 
The algorithm has been active for nearly a year now, I've been told. I did not play on that server recently, and I can't try it now. This server is the only active assault community that I know of.

On the the algorithm they use, that is based on the win rate percentage and an Elo ranking system :

Winning the game: +6
Every additional objective the team completed compared to the opposing team: +2
The resulting points will then be multiplied by the losing team's win chance.
As such, teams that are rated significantly higher than the opposing team won't earn many points from winning against lower rated teams, but will lose more points than usual when they lose against the lower rated team.
also New players will not be ranked immediately. They stay unranked for their first 10 games.

The points given for additional objectives are given to keep people engaged in the match until the end, even if one team has already lost.

This is a glorious day. I dreamt of an assault balancer for years. Now, if I could just get a working battle station...

You can hit Pablito on Discord if you want more on this balancer. Do read on their FAQ the content behind the line how are players rated/ranked?


(1)hwnd, rafi and zord

[The_Cowboy]

I like it Gil! We just need to translate that assault metric to (v)CTF terminology. Simple stuff really!

[Gil-galad]

 To translate the metric to vctf on this server, there's some important differences to consider :
 

Games will be played in 3vs3 and 4vs4 teams which makes the whole thing a lot more competitive than most public servers [...] The games will optimally not have any mid-game leavers or trolls. Everyone is supposed to play their best game

So, we have matches well over those player counts, and players that join and leave mid game. Piglet mentioned this earlier as a point to  watch out since a balancer that would work for their server could well not work because of these differences.

What I'd try is to further fine tune this logic, by multiplying the ranking/rating points that this system would give you
- in full (by 1) if you played all the match
- in part only if you've only played a part of it. Like : if the game lasts 30 minutes, and you played only 10 minutes, the ranking/rating points you would receive (winning or loosing) should be multiplied by 10/30 (actually, only the +6 part of the points should be multiplied, since the rest would depend on specific actions done while partaking the match  EDIT : not true if every player from the winning receive the same ranking points, like the algorithm used in Assault).

Like this, we could also very well take team switching into account, elaborating a bit more on the above, on top of weighting correctly the value of a partial match. We also have the rejoins to consider : the  time played in a match should not be lost even if a player leaves and rejoins the server, or goes in spectator mode.


Just a small idea, and not sufficient of course to solve all this translation thing, but it's a step.

[Gil-galad]

The way I ended up trying to translate their value :

If a win=6,
then one flag capture is worth 6/5, since we need 5 flag captures.
Let's cut that in half since you need to control the 2 flags in order to capture a flag, as an objective (?) way to value a full distance flag run or a full distance flag return, and we obtain 6/5/2=0,6 rating/ranking points for those actions : a full distance flag run with capture or a full distance run and flag return.
But since you have to travel often double the distance to capture a flag than to retrieve it, it would be more adequate to give to a flag capture relatively more points than the points given to a flag return. My estimate would be then be 6/5/3=0,4 for a full flag return, and 0,8 for a full flag capture, because of distances of travel.
 
The most correct way to find a value adapted for a given map map would be to weight the full maximum distance of a flag capture against the same for a flag return, and use the ratio to find the correct divisors to further break the 6/5 that were devised earlier, for the full distance flag capture and the full distance flag retrieval value in ranking/rating points. I proposed a way to measure those distances, - that can probably certainly be improved.

This idea has the following limitation in its conception :
It assumes all the value of the victory is in the flags management, while defending or supporting are in many cases amongst the key elements of what end up enabling the flag captures or the flag retrievals that lead to victory. So there's certainly room for improvement there.
We could probably lower the values again, if we could quantify the other roles/actions that are responsible for a victory.
Why would it be lower? Because the more roles you acknowledge and value, the more distributed the victory's value will be. Perhaps it's obvious that is the chosen logic here, but it's also better plainly written.
One obvious case that pops to mind is the manta/raptor taxying, scorp /bender taxi, ... : if driven or flown by someone, the full value one player on foot would receive would be divided by the number of occupants of the vehicle... or divided between just the driver and the flag carrier, so by 2. Or something better you'll come up with to distribute truthfully the value of the action.

[Gil-galad]

One other option, much simpler :

The rating points awarded to players are calculated as follows:

Points=6+2×(WinnerObjectiveCount−LoserObjectiveCount)

We could write it

Points=6+2x(WinnerfFlagCaptureCount−LoserFlagCaptureCount)

[Piglet]

You could if you wanted to ignore everything but the number of caps each team got.

That ignores

The number of captures this player got (rather than some good teammate they played with)
The number of times they grabbed the flag
The number of times they helped the flag carrier
The number of times they returned the flag
The number of times they killed the enemy carrying the flag
The points they got
The frags they did
The times they were driving the flag carrier (this isn't currently tracked)
etc...

[Gil-galad]

I know. I've got plenty of counts that I'm not considering, but...

Has it been tried?

And has it been tried with the time count correction like I pointed out earlier, to at least avoid some of the noise of the midgame joins/quits/spectates/rejoins/switches?

I'm really curious.

If it's very simple, perhaps it could be tried and trained a bit on some recorded match results. If the algorithm really sort out players efficiently, it should at least be efficient to rank the regular players, no?