dynamically adjust rate of resource production to compensate for teams skill imbalance
greenhorse
Join Date: 2014-11-11 Member: 199605Members
Join Date: 2014-11-11 Member: 199605Members
(Don't know if this has been considered/discussed before or not ...)
I have an idea which could help to keep games more fun in situations when
a higher skill player tips the balance by joining or leaving a game after a shuffle.
The idea is to dynamically change rate of resource production by team RT-s
depending on the relative skill level of teams at any moment during the game.
When teams skills are the same - the rate of production stays the same. If (after players
join/leave the game) skill levels become unbalanced - rate of resource production
changes. RT-s of the lower skilled team start producing resources at a higher rate
compared to RT-s of the higher skilled team. If more players join and skill balance is
restored - the rate of resource production equalizes as well. And so on.
What do you guys think ?
I have an idea which could help to keep games more fun in situations when
a higher skill player tips the balance by joining or leaving a game after a shuffle.
The idea is to dynamically change rate of resource production by team RT-s
depending on the relative skill level of teams at any moment during the game.
When teams skills are the same - the rate of production stays the same. If (after players
join/leave the game) skill levels become unbalanced - rate of resource production
changes. RT-s of the lower skilled team start producing resources at a higher rate
compared to RT-s of the higher skilled team. If more players join and skill balance is
restored - the rate of resource production equalizes as well. And so on.
What do you guys think ?
Comments
Some players, which seems to be newer players, prefer longer drawn out games. Some players, which seems to be older players, prefer shorter more concise games. I agree with IeptBarakat in that I would rather have shorter more concise games.
I thought people generally prefer balanced games. I think when a high skill player joins and skews balance by 20-30% he is guaranteed to make the game shorter but he also ruins fun (probably to different degree but) for both sides.
So I was thinking what could done to compensate the other side in such situation.
Which is understandable, longer games usually mean lot of unlocked tech, so new players can try them out for a longer period of time, compared to winning the round as soon as the first exo/onos is spotted
Ive noticed that a lot of times rounds end right as onos and exos are introduced. All that saved res for nothing. Sometimes it is frustrating. I like the idea of balancing as it is frustrating when a game is going and people have to/decide to leave and then your team suffers.
What about a balance system that activates when the player count on the other team reaches 2+ and it switches people from the other team to fill in the gaps?
There really is no good solution. Only compromises. Forcing people to the other team would probably make a lot of people very upset.
Yeah there's nothing worse than having upwards to 40 minutes of work go against you at the last second because you were winning.
Exactly, people prefer balanced games. Your proposal is to imbalance the game mechanics to punish people for being good. When one team is much better than the other, the logical result would be that it dominates the game. Nobody wants to play a game where it doesn't matter how you play and where you have no influence on the outcome. I know I am exaggerating here, but you hopefully get what I mean. A very good example of this is FIFA.
After-shuffle joins often make games unbalanced. So, while we agreed that we prefer to play balanced games, we are forced to play unbalanced ones
where one team is being stomped on and is just waiting for end of the round and the next shuffle.
What about this idea then: if a player wants to join mid round and his skill level is such that he will tilt team skill balances by more than N points (or M percent) - there should be a vote. So he won't be able to join mid round if one of the teams doesn't want him to.
A minimum player requirement depending on the server + quick play + RR shuffle. The minimum players to start a game would let late joiners get into the game and not be a huge impact because there are already enough people so it wont matter as much. This combined with Quickplay lets people join servers quickly so rooms fill up and the minimum requirement me met sooner. RR autoshuffle takes care of later joiners. Say 1 person joins and a team needs a player, they will get added to that team. If teams are even, which ever team they get added to to even out the Hivescore is which team they get placed. This will work the same way with 2+ people waiting in the RR.
Shuffle may already be working like this but I havnt really payed attention to it.
If I'm not able to see the average hiveskill in the serverbrowser I end up stomping a rookiegame basically because I don't have the time to check every server for which I need to wait at least 5 minutes till I can join
Dude I feel ya. The other day I hopped on a server and there were varied HS with some 2k people, a few 1.5k + and the rest lower. Thought it was going to be an okay game. Nope. Curb stomped the other team and the round ended with me 40 kills 5 deaths and no one else even had higher than 9 kills.. whoops. I honestly didnt realize I was going hardcore on them until I checked the scoreboard. I think we could have an average HS on the server browser. It might help higher skilled players from crashing lower. The only downside is it would make seeding a bit harder. But another added benefit would be to have more fun in those games if it doesnt become unbalanced.
We used to have that, actually. Don't know why it was removed.
I could be remembering incorrectly, but I remember that it took up a lot of gui space and the numbers were without meaning to most of the playerbase.
They tried arrows too but those were useless for 50% of the playerbase because they almost only showed double arrows for anyone not in the middle 50%.
Edit: Attempted to make it more clear that both skill numbers and arrows were tried.
@GhoulofGSG9 would you be willing to take time out of your busy schedule to tell us why the numbers were really removed, rather than relying on my possibly incorrect memory.
https://wiki.naturalselection2.com/view/Patches/Build_298
"No longer showing relative server skill, since it was not very useful"
I too would like to see the average skill in the server browser. Until then it's probably easier to check the average skill of the populated servers on the excellent ns2servers.pw.
Hmm. I believe it could be useful but wonder what their reasoning was. Could it be because the average player skill is so low that it makes the AVG skill seem useless? In another thread the numbers do show that most of the current player base is 1k or under in HS.... Just a guess.
50% or more of all unique players NS2 has during any given two week period are rookies. The hive skill numbers are abstract and irrelevant to rookies. They just want to play. This attitude likely applies to the majority of players rookies or not. The hive skill numbers are meaningless or irrelevant to most people who play NS2.
To put it another way, the people who primarily use and benefit from hive skill numbers in the server browser is a small number of the playerbase. Even then the additional information didn't do much good.
What if we had a community developed server mod that shows hive skill in the server browser? Those who want that information can have it. I think I remember seeing this mod already existing.
Regulars will continue to join the servers they already played on if they aren't full and new players would either just use quick play or join whatever is closest or has the most players.
Like the success of matchmaking, the liberty of choosing servers based on player skill is reliant on the strength of the playerbase.
Well, reasoning still very bad, because you get the 3-4k players to distribute evenly among all the servers stomping all players on every server instead of eachother... because most of the time all players have an average hiveskill together of about 1-1,5k as you already told us.
Wasn't the reasoning that playerretention isn't as good because the hiveskilldifference is to big or distributed on the servers?
So those ppl who understand this number actually needs this number... something that suggests go to the server with what is closest to your hiveskillaverage..
or just give a Delta... "Hiveskilldifference to average" / "Hiveskillaverage-Difference"... a tooltipp with an explanation... where it shows green numbers if the serverhiveskill is within "500" of your own hiveskill...
One example how I'd want my Serverbrowser to look like: (this week at 8pm it was like that)
Player: Bimbo
Hiveskill: 1000 (Your own Hiveskill needs to be available in the browser/menu)
Name | Hive Avg Diff | Hiveskill Avg (doesnt need to be shownshow)
TTO | 2000 | 3000
IBIS | 250 | 1250
TA | 750 | 1750
Rookie| -600 | 400
Orange for "higher hiveskill" and Yellow for "lower", Orange for "higher" (diff <= 500), because most players are lowerskilled, so they need to be warned if they join into a higherskilled server
Red for above 1k Difference
If it were something like that and I have the choice to choose between Servers I'll choose the most appropriate Server with the best color, so I don't stomp ppl and it helps higher skilled guys to join the right one
This might help me, but this is a) still annoying since I have to open the site manually and check every Server individually and b) what about all the others with 3k+ hiveskill without this knowledge? Or the rookies who join the one server with really high average hiveskill?
Pretty sure that were the arrows showing if the avg server skill was above or below you. That was pretty useless for me since all server had 2 arrows down. Atm I right click on the server to check which players are in it and have an estimated guess if the skill is high or not. Having the hive number showing up there shouldn't be too bad. Since rookies who use the play now feature won't see this number anyway.
You could also show the hive skill in the serverbrowser directly but I think there should be a checkbox that hides it and it should be enabled by default. People who know what the hivenumber is supposed to be also know how to disable a checkbox.
Having that information was nice. It was a luxury. I don't see why those who want it can't get the same functionality from a client side mod.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=858827330
Here is another one but I am having trouble getting the right link on mobile.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=881432811&searchtext=Server+skill
[idea x gets removed] ->
["it wasn't useful"] ->
[brainstorm proper implementation of idea x with rational use cases provided] ->
["it isn't/wasn't necessary, use these broken clientside mods instead"] ->
[p r o f i t]