Petition to ban/suspend players who spec/join right after balancer

[duke]

I'm talking about the better players. I have seen this from so many people it's just riddiculous, a new map is voted, balancer is set and they spec (or a new good player joins) 1 sec later screwing up the balance.

And then players like me who literally never does this BS looking for games to be fairly balanced every time have to suffer, because of their incapability to spec 2 seconds earlier and screwing up a 20 minute game for 12 or 14 people praying a new player joins and evens things out.

If nothing is done since this clearly isn't an issue for anyone I'm thinking about specing/joining 1 sec after the balancer has set the teams effing up every game from now on and I'm gonna enjoy a 95% win ratio from now on especially if the teams are smaller. Let's see if it becomes an issue now.

[Piglet]

Yeah. It's flippin annoying.

Even if they're forced to wait 2 minutes it's not going to fix the problem.

Not sure how best to code for "don't be a dick".

[Flenser]

We could allow kick voting again.

[Piglet]

Let's give it a try.

Please don't abuse it.

[duke]

The problem is that most players don't recognize partiuclar actions as balancer abusing. I'd even argue most players just don't give a crap about anything as long as they can do their favorite thing, which is doing nothing constructive just bunny hopping, sitting in a bender with a drink or just staring at s**t, buying cheese for 30 minutes.

[sup]

kick vote doesn't make any difference, unless it's something extremely obvious (and even then you have to ask several times), like that admen guy sabing, people just want to shoot anything that moves, nobody cares if the game is balanced or not, they just want the dopamine of killing someone or winning an easy game

[Right]

One way to "solve" this could be a re-balance if a high valued player drops out in the first 10-20 seconds.


The kick button is nice but it will not solve this.

Is there a setting that if the kick button is used more than X times the player itself get kicked?
That will learn those who abuse it.

[hellfire]

If my memory serves right, did we not have a time when balancer would kick in the middle of the game to force a new balance?  Here is a new idea for piglet to test: Add a button called "balance please". If majority votes for it, do a rebalance? Easy to code and a good test.

[duke]

One way to "solve" this could be a re-balance if a high valued player drops out in the first 10-20 seconds.

This is a great idea. I mean the balancer can be set to recognize if a player specing (or joining) can screw up the game big time.

No game is ever gonna be ideally 50-50, so if someone specs and it's 55-45 or borderline 60-40 then I would say it's fine, however if it suddenly becomes 80-20 then there is really no point in playing when you can pretty much predict the final score of 5-1 or maybe 5-2 for the better team and you won't be wrong most of the time.

F.e. if it's a 10 vs 10 game, there are 8 tier 1 players overall, so balancer sets it at 4-4 and one of them specs right after the game is balanced, then 4 vs 3 is still playable, the problem is if it's f.e. an 8 vs 8 game with 2 good players in both teams and one specs, then it suddenly becomes 2 vs 1 so the odds change significantly.

[sup]

To begin with, the ranking is not capable of defining the best players. Among the top 30, I would say that only 10 are really good (but they shouldn't be in those positions). Points/time played is not a good ranking alternative. Duke, Dark and I, for example, often have low scores, because our focus is just to reach the flag with as much HP as possible. A ranking by caps/time played I believe would work better (teams with better attackers win 90% of the games, because generally good attackers know how to defend when necessary)

another option would be to create a manual ranking of the best players, we all know immediately when a team is stronger just by reading the nicknames. It's only necessary to make sure that there is no imbalance in the number of these players on each team. And usually these players do not mind balancing the games, so they can be rearranged automatically for this purpose (like justice does manually by swapping me, dark or other players). If the system balances all players, noobs will complain, but if it balances only good players, they won't complain (at least that's what I think).

A button with "balance plz" would never work, everyone thinks their team is weaker when it starts losing (even if it is not). Everyone would click the button all the time.

it's really difficult to find a solution, the best would be to rely on the players' common sense, but that will never happen.

[hellfire]

The balance me button then should be allowed only if the rank is top 3 in the team This mostly will always be senior good players and in either way, they mostly lead the team effort. So, maybe open the vote to only 6 people in total.

[Piglet]

another option would be to create a manual ranking of the best players,

Admins have the ability to manually tweak the order - but I've not seen anyone doing it yet.

[Yes]

Maybe a bit late to this conversation but feel like with the spec/join problem we can probably somewhat fix this by having one of those 1 minute warm ups (if it's possible on VCTF). Give the system that minute to allow people to join/spec and kick any AFKs then the balancer can be used on a more accurate number of players.

Balancer wise I think PPH is GENERALLY good but there's some serious outlyers in the rankings; without naming names there's a few players up in the top 25 really don't belong up there. I think part of this is because some of these same players take the good vehicles whenever they're available.

I'm guessing this would take serious effort in the backend code but would it be worth storing wins/losses in the DB then for players with more than 30 games or so use that win/loss rate to determine balance, otherwise use the PPH?

[dk uk]

While we're on the subject of balance - let's not pretend good players are all squeaky clean....
I see good players join very late in a match (e.g score 9-8   - particularly those with a godly name) and throw the balance way out of kilter - usually joining the winning side. The balancer will not react quick enough to re-balance and it very often destroys the end of a pretty even match...

[Piglet]

Balancer wise I think PPH is GENERALLY good but there's some serious outlyers in the rankings; without naming names there's a few players up in the top 25 really don't belong up there. I think part of this is because some of these same players take the good vehicles whenever they're available.

I'm guessing this would take serious effort in the backend code but would it be worth storing wins/losses in the DB then for players with more than 30 games or so use that win/loss rate to determine balance, otherwise use the PPH?

I have an idea that might help. Some of the players with very high PPH who look out of place often play earlier in the day when there are fewer other players - sometimes just against bots when they're the only ones on the server. Maybe having time periods or player counts in the mix might help.

For time periods that could be as simple as "PPH at the hour the game started".

For player count....harder as player count can vary. Is it player count at the start of the map or at the point they leave/game ends? Anything else is hard to determine.