Force random teams on some pub servers?
KaptajnKLO
Join Date: 2012-06-25 Member: 153658Members
Join Date: 2012-06-25 Member: 153658Members
<div class="IPBDescription">To avoid teamstacking</div>I am beginning to dread every time I see more than a couple of great players enter a server, cause they will frequently go on the same team in my experience. I only rarely play on other servers than the european ones, so I can't speak for NA servers. It is no fun being on a team that just gets obliterated and I just refuse to purposely go on the team with all the good players and not get any challenge what so ever. Also I am experiencing more and more players who just sit in the rr room until they can get on the "good" team which is f***king annoying.
So to any EU server owners I would be eternally grateful if you would consider having forced randoms on atleast one of your servers, cause that would then be my go-to server.
So to any EU server owners I would be eternally grateful if you would consider having forced randoms on atleast one of your servers, cause that would then be my go-to server.
Comments
On a personal note, I can't even understand why don't people strive more for fair games. Fair games are the GG's, they are the "close ones", they are the bread and butter of a great experience. They are challenge. Why do you *need* to win in a videogame. But maybe I'm just an old tard.
You would have to be able to disable the "join alien" and "join marine" portals in the ready room and only have the "Join random" portal available to avoid it.
Seriously tho, this has allready been implemented pre 1.0, on HBZ the admin can run random all commands, community asked for this, and we got it :D
i do find that often the people who complain about this problem on a server, are the same people who i dread to play with because they will loose me the game :D
Was playing with one guy last night that kept crying teams, i went on his side, only 1 alien responded to resource tower under attack messages, we loose our rts, then, the guy who was crying teams tells me we loose because im a noob comm!!!
Next time ill be sure to put down a couple of whips on every rt instead of gettin upgrades :)
You would have to be able to disable the "join alien" and "join marine" portals in the ready room and only have the "Join random" portal available to avoid it.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I like your proposal and I would love to see a server that did that.
<!--quoteo(post=1951583:date=Jul 15 2012, 01:11 AM:name=Hunter.S.T.)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Hunter.S.T. @ Jul 15 2012, 01:11 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1951583"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->sometimes even random teams can get ya, was on a server where we all randomed, and it still stuck all of transcend on one team lol
Seriously tho, this has allready been implemented pre 1.0, on HBZ the admin can run random all commands, community asked for this, and we got it :D
i do find that often the people who complain about this problem on a server, are the same people who i dread to play with because they will loose me the game :D
Was playing with one guy last night that kept crying teams, i went on his side, only 1 alien responded to resource tower under attack messages, we loose our rts, then, the guy who was crying teams tells me we loose because im a noob comm!!!
Next time ill be sure to put down a couple of whips on every rt instead of gettin upgrades :)<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
If a random is "OP" then it's just the throw of the dice and I would have no problems with that. It's when it happens 5 games in a row and you know these people are doing it on purpose, that's when it irks me.
And I know that HBZ can force random through a command, but that requires that there are atleast one HBZ player on the server and they aren't always on. That's why I would rather have a server where is it always random.
And I have played 200 hours of this game and even though I'm not up to par with the fine folks at e.g. duplex and exertus I am still doing pretty damn fine when I play, so I am not one of those people you are talking about. I simply don't like teamstacking
If one team has more players than the other, there could be more incentive for them to switch over to the smaller team, like being able to keep their score and res points.
Someone has yet to write a good working autobalancing script.
Reasons
1) AFK people can really screw a team over, especially if the randomall is applied before people have time to disconnect after a game
2) Sometimes as a player I really do not want to play Team <whichever>. I would get frustrated if I kept being put on that team.
I would prefer a voting system where people could vote on a team scramble which would either scramble the game and restart or scramble it next round
i.e. when the next round starts, server forces random, people who want to participate vote that they'll be playing the next round, only those who vote are put into the game. people who don't vote can still join after game start, but can only join the random start
Some conscientious players use the scoreboard specifically to avoid stacking teams. This would not be a good idea.
Well I don't care if some ppl get pissed off because they can't play the 10th round as marines forcing all the others to wait 4min till the teams are full.
Some players wan't to play together, I can understand this, but letting all the others wait several min till the teams are even after the round started is not a good aspect.
We had several very very nice rounds with random teams.
Sometimes I even switch them manually to the other team because there are also other players that would like to also play on the other side but can't because of stacking, f.e. the players that join the same team again and again as soon as the round ended (via the F1/2 keys). .
We wan't fair games and give everybody a chance to play also on the other side.
stacking is a blight, and it makes those tense/ balanced games harder to come by (its completely natural, but it still sucks).
to address the issue of new joiners, filling in for rage quitter from a losing team having 0 res, and the losing team dropping faster.
How about when a player rage quits, the next joiner starts with their otherwise lost res?
on the subject of random all, I think a grace period (of perhaps 5 - 10 seconds), might go some way to appease those who do not want random all.
I've said it before, to actually fix unbalanced teams ("stacking") you'd need some kind of truskill/elo rating system. All of these solutions sound like silly and extreme ideas that won't actually fix the problem..
so you are right when you say 'random all' fixes nothing.
what we should be talking about is 'balance all'.
my ideal:
kill/ death ratio, kills per min, longest gap between deaths, that kind of thing.
pick one, or combine a few, allocate and update a 'skill stat' over the course of a players time on a server (or based on previous game, or over their entire game history), then starting with the 'best player' down, put them on opposite teams.
(kill/ death ratio of the previous game would be not too big an investment to make happen)
I do still realise that people want to play with friends though, so perhaps a 'grace period' of 5 to 10 seconds where the current system of joining applies, so that people can try to get on the same team briefly.
and perhaps a more involved allocation system, that tallies the 'skill level' this results in, and tries to balance as best it can with the remaining 'skills' in the ready room to compensate for this.
Sure it sometimes randomly gives a bad team, but more often it makes things interesting.
Yeah an auto-team balance mod would be nice, however often games are about to end and it becomes a slaughter - being forced to swap to the side that has already lost would suck.
If auto-team balance was introduced, they would need to make it possible to come back from 1 hive/cc.
Auto-balance is tricky in a game like NS2, as it involves longer games with real back and forth changes to mapcontrol, expansion, and build up, as well as personal power increases (would res switch over?) and the asymmetry. It's not like say TF2, where getting switched from red to blu doesn't really matter a whole lot in the scheme of things, getting switched to the other side is quite awkward here. And frankly, most of the time when I see teams stacked numerically, it's not causing that team to lose, it's because of it. People don't want to wait 5-10 minutes or more of slowly losing, and bail to another server/quit, leaving those who remain to finish the game. I'd really like to see a surrender vote option, both to allow people to end a game they know they will lose (say because 30% of their team just bailed :P), and so that people have an alternative to simply quiting a game they figure will be a slow grinding loss that they can't avoid.
However if a way to do auto-balance elegantly exists, it would be cool, especially in the early game before things start to snowball, where a team really can come back and players haven't invested much into their team yet.
Also randomizing teams needs to be used very carefully(servers should be marked if they have this enabled) - lets forget about this stacking whine, ppl want to play mutliplayer and that usually is even more fun when they can play with their friends togheter - there was a LOT of hate in games that made it hard to play with friends, and im pretty sure every of those game patched in a solution later. (games that didnt let you change side, made you join random, or shuffled ppl around randomly way to often - especially if there is matchmaking, there needs to be an option to join as a party)
I disagree. I play pubs to play with (including <i>against</i>) friends, this idea that you're only playing<i> with</i> someone if you're <b>literally on their team</b> is killing the game for me right now. Force random all doesn't solve the problem, no, but it means each round each team has a good chance of a lucky pull out of the hat, so over and average of ~4-5 games you're likely to get 2-3 resounding tier-1 wins for <i>different</i> players, with probably one being a close power struggle.
Right now the situation usually goes like this:
Team 1:
pro-######sandwich
smurf
pro-oldplayer
Butsz~superskillz
[ultra]-Rapin'1337
pro-buttfug
other smurf
lucky new
Team 2:
unlucky new 1
unlucky new 2
unlucky new 3
unlucky new 4
{noice}decent unicorn
unlucky new 5
unlucky new 6
[ultra]-RespectableClan
Now, this wouldn't bother me so much if <i>clan stacker super proazz team ultra winrar d-squad</i> didn't completely wreck the game and make it impossible to play a good match by <b>refusing to join the other team outright</b> - being poor sports and sitting in the ready room <b>for the entire game</b> if they can't get on their unbalanced murder team. I've seen half hour games go with teams of 4v7 where the rest of the players were still present but refusing to play and waiting in the lobby to stack the next match.
Forced join please. If someone will not join the team, roll between all players after 20 seconds and randomly force one in.
I've seen this happen 5, 6, 7 times in a row. I've played, left to run errands, come back five hours later, to find the same players have been playing for<i> literally half the day</i> and when Butz~superskillz leaves Ass~Awesomejerk just replaces him. Of course these team will do either side, so it's not immediately obvious to the untrained eye what's going on, but as someone who started playing games at Quake I know what it is and I'm calling people out for it. <b>Don't like it? Deal with it. </b> It's unhealthy for a game community to be this centered on taking a dump all over it's new players. This isn't League Of Legends where you have a never-ending stream of FREE GAME KIDS to beat down; this is a niche game, and if you make it un-fun to play people will just stop playing and go watch Planetside 2 on YouTube. Release will mitigate this problem alot if we get a good number of new servers going, but that doesn't mean it's not something to be remembered moving forward by all the "good players" - the regulars - who <b>need</b> to remember to really help retain people and encourage new player growth.
Team stacking is a real problem, sometimes even just numbers, played a game the other day, it was 6v4 for 5 minutes before I switched.
Anyway if think it's mainly a server admin problem, you just need some server administration tools and a good admin to mitigate this kind of problems. I wouldn't be against kick vote also to get rid of annoying people/stackers.
A random team vote could be a good idea also. When you see that team are stacked you can call for a randomization.
I was playing on HBZ the other day, and the good players did a nice job of splitting themselves. Then, when one team started to win, goobers made the teams 10vs8 on an 18 player server. And, not a single one of the goobers would switch back.
Result, the HBZ member from the other team, switched to even teams. Now teams are uneven because they have more noobs.
NOOBS STACK, its what they do, i see the noobs stack teams unevenly EVERY DAY I PLAY, in fact, i see the noobs create uneven teams, far more than i see the skilled players make uneven teams.
I once confronted one of these noobs, and said, "you have just made teams 10vs8, its only an 18 player server", he said "yeah, well, we were loosing, so i came to your team, ahahahha".
:/ this same noob, complains his arse off every game he looses about good players stacking.
###### RANDOM.
Auto-balance wouldn't be so hot. Not only would you lose all the pres you have, but I don't think anyone likes spending a chunk of time to win a game and then getting sent to the opposite team mid-game.