Matches Made Even! We Hope!!

Fellow players here is a conversation Wormbo and I have been having and we now want to get the views of everyone!

SMOKER:
Question?
Is there a way to make the server assign a new player based on node count?? Like if Red has 70% of the nodes the new player is assigned to Blue and vice versa?? I have no idea if there is a way for the server to see that upon new player arrival??

Wormbo:
The server sees everything and has the authority to assign teams. However, there's currently no connection between the two concepts.

BTW: I recommend always starting threads about things like this.

SMOKER:
I agree Sir on the Forum, I was really wondering as you said there is no connection between the two concepts, but can it be done? is there a way to connect both concepts. I do not want to start a Forum discussion on something that cannot be done at all or would be a huge amount of time to create. So I guess the question is, Is this possible to do? and is it easy to do or is it so complicated it would take hours to code??

Wormbo:
If something takes only hours to code, it counts as "easy". And considering I already created "team progress" logic for Even Match, this request may very well fall in that category.[/QUOTE]

SO YOUR THOUGHTS PLAYERS????

I'll add this mutater within 48 hours (i hope). I'd do it now but the server is full. We'll give it a shot and see what people think

Originally Posted by Pi

I'll add this mutater within 48 hours (i hope). I'd do it now but the server is full. We'll give it a shot and see what people think

Sweet! hope it works

My Thanks Pi!!
Hopefully this will help even the matches and make the server more balanced.

Originally Posted by SMOKER

My Thanks Pi!!
Hopefully this will help even the matches and make the server more balanced.

Still wont matter when I join. I am OP as hell and my teams win 100% of the time, right guys?

mutator installed. settings are as follows:

ignore team preference: True
Announce team change: True 
Connecting players balance teams: True
Randomly start with sides swapped: True
Shuffle teams from previous match: True
Activation delay: 10
Forced rebalance delay: 30
Minimum desired round length (minutes): 10
Small team progress threshold: 0.5
Soft rebalance delay: 10
Switch to winner progress limit: 0.7
Valuable player ranking %: 0.75

Please comment on what is working or what should be tweaked

So how do we activate this? Is this the new "teams" command in general text chat? Does it happen automatically?

The reason I ask: I played a few maps last night and during one of those maps (MasterBath)... my team was being completely spanked. Lost by 2pts somewhat quickly in the first round. Next round was a spanking as well. I would have loved to have balanced the teams after the first round.

Rebalancing only happens on actual mismatch of player counts, or if the first round was really short (10mins according to what Pi posted). I guess you didn't get spanked hard enough.

Anyway, the results from that match should have affected the initial player distribution among teams for the next match. But then again, keep in mind that mutator was designed for a server with a single round per match.
Also it will only shuffle teams right when the match starts (or restarts after a short round), so any late-comers will essentially join teams in the order they arrive.

OK I see what you are saying Wormbo but that isnt exactly what I was thinking when this thread was started, here is a scenario we just played.

Each team had 8 players (real players not bots)
Red owned all the nodes except primaries of Blue
A new player joined and was immediately placed on Red as usual as always has happened on the OMNI server

The new mod or whatever you call it should have sent the new incoming player to Blue since red owned over 60% of map.

This should make games more even and will stop the spectating trolls that jump into the Winning team since you auto into loosing team.

I never claimed it would do that particular thing (I really can't remember whether it should do that), only that it should be easy to do as I did something similar before. "Something similar" being "detect, which team is in the lead in an Onslaught round". In fact, I think the mutator doesn't do much about a difference in team size of only one player.

Consider the following scenario: Red leads 4 to 2 nodes, but also has 1 player more than blue. Should one of them switch to blue to make the game even again? I don't think so for the team sizes you guys usually play at. Okay, if both teams have the same size, a joining player should be assigned to blue, but like I said, the mutator probably doesn't do that yet.
What it does is disabling the team preference (players can pick their favorite team in the settings) either always (that's currently configured) or when rebalancing might be a good thing because of different team sizes. In either case it sets team preference to "none", allowing the game to pick the team. (That's probably worth changing.)

[edit]
I just created a HUD indicator for the "team progress" value used by the balancing logic and I think it doesn't always show something you'd agree with when looking at the map and/or core health. I guess I'll have to revise or rewrite the progress calculation.

And the bugs keep popping up. I noticed that you continue to live when being forcefully moved to a different team. If you're in a vehicle, that won't change teams with you until you exit and enter again. Interesting effect, but quite unintuitive. Next version will explicitly kill players that get team-switched while still alive. (Even Match will try to avoid having to switch live players, but sometimes it's just necessary.)

Also I rewrote the team progress assessment function. The logic seemed to make sense back when I wrote it, but the team progress indicator revealed how far off it often was. Core health sometimes hat too few or too much influence, even if it didn't matter at all. Clearly, outside overtime, your core's health won't matter if the enemy is still several hops away from your core and your team is right at theirs.

[edit]
I did a code compare to see, how far my code already differs from what's running on the Omni server.

Features to come:

• Ignore bots for calculating team balance. When enabled, bots will not be included in the team size for balancing checks. This includes the "valuable player" consideration.
• Explicitly force connecting players to join the smaller team. Basically I tweaked, how the options "connecting players balance teams" and "always ignore team preference" work together. If players are supposed to balance teams, the ignore team preference option controls whether balancing should always be applied or just when it is needed.
• Forced switching of live players involved their death now, as you'd expect.
• Team progress calculation was completely rewritten. It is now based on a combination of core health, scaled by how far the enemy is from the core, and total owned nodes and node health, scaled by how far you are from the core, and takes into account whether any core is vulnerable or whether it's overtime.
• A team progress indicator, mainly to verify the above team progress calculation. If you see this far off from what you thing it should be, please post a screenshot.
• A player is now also considered a key player that shouldn't be switched if he is driving a vehicle with a passenger.

Download will follow later today and feedback is very welcome.

Being code from Wormbo and immediate interest to the community, I'll add the changes as soon as they're posted (and I'm online).

Heh, thanks, I guess.

Two more changes from what I already mentioned:

• There was a bug that cause a force-switched player to be switched back immediately for "joining the winning team".
• Balancing now only kicks in if a certain configurable minimum number of players are present. (Testing alone was quite interesting in that regard. I built a node, nothing happened. I had an accident or teleported to another node, suddenly the balancing would announce it'd be doing something soon.)

Here's the download:
Even Match v2 alpha 7

Let's enable some cross-posting synergies...

TL;DR - Planned/proposed changes for next version:

• Fix forced balancing not respecting "valuable players".
• Include linux server emitter crash workaround.
• Maybe allow manual balancing using a trigger chat text or console command (aka. "teams"). However, it remains to be seen if that's actually necessary or even possible.
• Remove or disable the progress indicator on the HUD. That thing is only supposed to be a tool to check if the mutator has the correct opinion about the current game state.

updated to latest release. The only difference between ours and CENOSS's instance is bConnectingPlayersBalanceTeams=False/True (We have True set). what does that setting do?

Originally Posted by Wormbo

Rebalancing only happens on actual mismatch of player counts, or if the first round was really short (10mins according to what Pi posted). I guess you didn't get spanked hard enough.

1st round try really hard: spend whole time as primary wack-a-mole and do it long enough to appear to the script as 'balanced'. 2nd round, give up because the teams were obv. unbalanced.

I think some sort of % of nodes held calculation might help? Still not sure how to quantify being pinned down. Maybe the number of sequential primary node locks by the opposing in a short period of time? Don't know if that is possible. It's definitely a challenge for Masterbath, which has very few nodes but many primary locks that happen during the game. In a good game, the number of primary locks by the opposing team is balanced or at least 4:1?, maybe 5:1? (I've seen rallies before.)

Well at least I know to throw in the towel before 10mins is up. Non-stop primary wack-a-mole? --> give up in 9.5 minutes.

I'm just pointing out that a MTMU-Randomizer match lasted a little over 5-6 minutes last night from start to finish. No re-shuffling or re-balancing of any sort occurred between rounds.

I'm just pointing out that a MTMU-Randomizer match last night lasted a little over 5-6 minutes from start to finish. No re-shuffling or re-balancing of any sort occurred between rounds.

Originally Posted by Pi

updated to latest release. The only difference between ours and CENOSS's instance is bConnectingPlayersBalanceTeams=False/True (We have True set). what does that setting do?

When a new player connects and this option is set, the player is supposed to be assigned a team by Even Match, not by the game's own logic.


The mutator does not consider game state over time, but only current game state to tell, which team is currently doing better. It does so mostly to make sure a smaller, but better, team doesn't get stacked even more. The other function is complete shuffling at the start of a match (you might want to set a match start delay that allows most players to join in time) and after really short rounds. That one takes points per hour values from each player's last match (or that short round) into account to mix teams for a minimum difference between the PPH sums of the teams.

Wormbo and Pi,

Well I played a few matches here is what I observed:

1. Download goes to 324 percent whats up with that??

2. Was on a match 6 on 6 with 3 real players per team when all the blue live players left it said it would re-balance and it did not?? we did loose the prior match but even teams command still left all 3 live players on the same team against 6 bots

3. It's a little odd to be switched teams in map when you are a upper scorer but not bad.

4. Played Dria by myself with a load of bots and after building nodes all but 3 were left to Blue and was switched to Blue team and had to retake the map.

5. Is there any accountability for idlers? What I mean by that is lets say both sides have 16 people and 2 on the red are idle for the first few minutes of game after the balance is done, if they start playing it would overturn the ratio would it not??


I do have to say that Wormbo took my flight of fancy idea of just trying to make sure new players logging in would go to the loosing side always and as Tim Taylor says "MORE POWERED IT" I hope this really helps on the game play for fairness but we will have to Beta Test it in live mode to be sure. As Wormbo has stated please give good feedback for him so he can tweak it since he does not play really anymore, our constructive criticism is helpful to fully flush out the bugs.

And as always Thanks You Pi and Wormbo for all you do behind the scenes!!