Biologist here, specialized in the subfields of microbiology, molecular biology and immunology. I started my career leaning heavily towards microbiology but after a while I decided I would enjoy molecular biology more. Currently working veterinary diagnostics laboratory where I run qPCR tests first and foremost. Also part time gym-bro.

I returned to UT2004 after skipping like ~10 years. Bit of a lie because in that time period I was sometimes on and off but never actively playing.

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.

I second this!
New maps in ONS would be awesome and these picks look fun!

What probably happened is that:
The server allows voting for any map for some number of rounds, but then
The server only allows voting from (what I think is) the NEW map list for one round

So you can end up voting for the same map twice in a row. You can end up playing the same map 3 or more times if you throw in a vote for “random” on either side of the new/regular votes as well, and get “lucky”.