Gaming Zone > Unreal Tournament 2004
Some data on balancing
Flenser:
It's my contention that blowout games that are wildly uneven are less fun than close games, where there's some back-and-forth. If you disagree, you can stop reading now. :)
I got some spare time, and spent it writing an app to figure out if team balance is as bad as I thought, in VCTF games. I think I've crunched the numbers correctly, but I've attached the raw data if you'd like to crunch it a different way.
The app hits the miasma.rocks server twice a minute, watching for when the map changes, and records the scores. I let it run for about a week.
There were just under 700 games played. I removed 34 ONS games, and 11 VCTF4 games.
That left 613 games.
45 of them were 0 vs. 0, so I removed those.
That left 568 scoring games of VCTF. These counts are number of games, then red vs. blue scores.
61 0 vs. 5
103 5 vs. 0
2 0 vs. 4
12 4 vs. 0
47 1 vs. 5
52 5 vs. 1
4 1 vs. 4
11 4 vs. 1
That's a total of 292 games, or 51.4% of the VCTF games that were recorded.
To me, half the games played are boringly uneven. We need a team balancer.
One surprising thing that jumps out to me is that being on red is the way to go if you want to be on the winning team in a blowout game. I'm guessing this is due to the "default team" setting somehow. If anyone has a good theory on this, I'm interested in hearing it.
I also collected data for the Freon server, where I understand there is a team balancer of some sort. It gets a lot less action.
Out of 208 scoring games, only 5 games were 10 vs. 1 or 10 vs. 2. There were no 10 vs. 0 games at all.
hagis:
freon also have competition mode set to on,. which lowers the starting health and shield for the leading team for each round (the more uneven the score the less health the leading team gets)
though the balancer does a lot to help
personally I agree,. if you know your team "can't win" it's hard to get that motivated and is less fun
Stealer:
Aye, agree with Hagis. The competition mode makes it harder and harder for a blowout game.
Shows the balancer functions.
Not sure about motivation from my perspective, I always try to join the losing team if I'm jumping in mid match, although I do let the balancer do it's thing. These days I just celebrate hitting something other than a wall :) ??? 8)
Piglet:
The_Cowboy started work on a balancer as a background thing, but I don't kniow how far he got with it.
Freon works by:
1. storing "points per round" to an external database,
2. at the start of each game (or player join) it gets an average value from the external datbase
3. Freon is (normally) 10 rounds of play. At start of round 1, or at the start of a round followng (admin calls for it, or a high value player joins) the balancer tries to ensure that the two teams' average points per round is as close as it can get it.
The problem with this is that you get points in Freon for thawing and fragging. Players can be good at one or the other or both. You can end up with a team of thawers against a team of fraggers, or an imbalance (mid-game) of one excellent player with a group of low-scoring players against a team of medium scorers.
Another problem is that some maps go on a very long time with large numbers of players getting thawed, so points per round can be very high on those maps, raising average points way above what you'd get with fewer players on shorter maps.
If you'd like to have a go at coding a better balancer for vCTF, go for it. Maybe liaise with The_Cowboy and pool resources.
THOR`:
I feel like one of the biggest factors that team balancers can’t really account for, especially in objective based games modes is good teamwork.
Individual points in modes like ONS and VCTF don’t necessarily translate into victories so how do you balance players that take on support roles that may not offer up the most points but can dictate the result of a match?
I honestly really dislike team balancers as they’re never going to be perfect and they seem to cause nothing but complaints.
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