Help please! Freon : When to automatically balance the teams?

[Piglet]

Hi Folks.

I'm looking for workable suggestions on when the Freon code should decide to balance teams.

The current code checks the average team PPR at the end of each round, and where the averages differ by more than a configured amount, e.g. 0.7 ppr then it triggers a balance event. The balance event picks the two players whose PPRs bring the average PPR difference closest to zero - or does nothing if it can't get closer than the teams already are.

The current code doesn't really work well in two ways related to player count:

1. At low player counts the average PPRs of the teams swing far more rapidly than large player counts - so at low player count games people are being frequently swapped. It's annoying.

2. At high player counts having a 0.69 ppr difference on average is a big difference in the teams scoring ability and it won't even trigger a change.

3. Now we have "no bots" there are times when the number of players in each team are different - which messes up average PPR-based triggering. For example, where one team has players of 2.5 ppr and 3.5 ppr against another team of 1 player with 6ppr then the team with 2 players has an average of 3ppr, whilst the team of 1 has an average of 6ppr. That difference of 3ppr on average will meet the "I need to balance" trigger. In this case it won't find a better match....I think I need to work through what can happen when there are bigger un-even sized teams. I think there's an issue here.

I know people don't like getting swapped on the last round. I might get round to looking at a fix for that at some point, but for now I'm interested in ascertaining whether there is a better strategy for general triggering of the need to balance.

Any thoughts on how to fix problems 1 & 2?

[Stealer]

Only just noticed this post, no idea what I was doing for the end part of April 

1) Maybe take an average PPR over a couple of rounds before triggering the swap if player count = low amount of players. That might even work for higher player counts, maybe add an "if on last round or penultimate don't swap?

2) My workaround is overwrite the team colours (through the F7 menu), my enemy is always green whatever team I'm on, most of the time I don't notice I've been swapped.

I tend to get swapped a lot, but then I have good rounds and bad rounds. Almost made Zeus RQ yesterday as I forgot I had full adren and was too focused on firefights that I didn't notice the team chats of "RESSSSSSS!!!!!!" I did apologise obviously and still won the map anyway

[holyspam]

/necrothread

Kills + Thaws
-----------------   =   Player rating
    Deaths


OR if you really believe damage is a skill measure


 0.4*Kills + 0.4*Thaws + 0.2*Damage
---------------------------------------------------  =   Player rating
                     Deaths

[[P]etya]

Hello there!

I joined this forum just to add my 'insights' regarding this team balance because it has been my 'bane' ever since I encountered it on CEONSS. By all means I'm no statistician but I think as much good intention this team balancing thing has, it is abusable and it usually moves the 'carries' from one team to another. In many instances such calls mixed with some abusable mechanics such as leaving and rejoining ruin a head to head match up, giving e.g a 3 round point edge to the losing side in a 7 - 6 state.

The team balancer also seems to make bad calls because it recognizes PPR only seemingly and since the current ruleset heavily favor spammy and straight up suicidal gameplay, some people have inflated PPR despite the skills mismatch the achieved score. I'm ponting this out because the way the ammo distributed, it gives e.g shock combo spammers an edge while the limited ammo on the minigun and the link gun removes any potential counter play. It is technically the TAM set up but unlike TAM, in Freon death isn't permanent as long as one person is still standing minus some instances, so I see no reason to fine tune the rules, so that they favor other type of playstyles and weapon choices. I also don't see any reason not to have what TAM used to have that those teams who have the edge has some minor debuffs e.g health and shield capped at e.g 90pts instead of 100pts.

Long story short: as long as the gameplay leans in favor of certain players (it evidently does), the team balancer won't do many good and besides TAM rules already had some mechanics to mitigate extreme gameplay edges.