Matchmaking / balance

[testman]

Anyone ever played Savage 2?

Also FPS/RTS hybrid with players controling one unit and teams taking care of their resources and stuff like that.

It has something quite interesting:

Game somehow determines how good player you are and puts that in a decimal number.

I do not know what the criteria is, but it is quite accurate.

The higher the number, the better player you are.

Why is that implemented? So that players can compare their ePenis? No.

It is used for matchmaking. Game tries to make teams as equal as possible.

It tries to make so that sum of those numbers is close to equal.

And this sum is shown on scoreboard. So you can know, from the start if your teammates are complete retards or are they good players.

And usually, if sums are not near to equal at all, vote to shuffle teams is called.

This is great mechanic that makes matchers way more fun IMHO.

Since Renegade X already uses global leaderboard, system like this could be implemented.

[StealthEye]

BlackIntel developed a team remix algorithm with the same intention for Renegade, but it swaps people based on the previous game's scores on game end. It does not use a global score or ranks, and does not propose swaps mid game. We also ported it to Renegade X and published in the private phase III beta forum. In our experience it works pretty well. I don't think Renegade X adopted it (yet?) though.

[RoundShades]

Nah, so far the playerbase is sort of small. So, it should influence default starting teams, but if a player opts to join a server it should join that server and if a player opts to play with a teammate it should do so.

Super Monday Night Combat lost a lot of playerbase because it installed "Moba Matchmaking" being sort of a moba. So, players can't join games, just click search for match. Matchmaker won't even attempt to build a game if players are too far apart in numbers, and matchmaker wouldn't allow more than 2-3 people to join as a team. Became hard to find a game and impossible to play with more than 3 people at a time. That turned away more people than it kept.

Then again, that was a moba, it was so hard it turned away new players, and it was so restrictive in skilled stacked teams that it turned away experienced players. You can still find matches but it lost a lot of shine.

I would support matchmaking if it auto-selected a server with the most human players and least bot players, and I would support server balancing to take joining players to a server and decide a good team for them based on their steam rank, but I would not support forcing them involuntarily to a server or team with no option to navigate to the one you want.

[Truxa]

Somehow I have not seen this topic soon enough, but here is my experience on the topic.

Some time ago I joined the TmX server when it's empty and also joining the TmX TS server for small talks etc. The idea was to join the TmX server to get it filled up. Meanwhile we just played, goofed around and have some fun finding out some tactical routes and locations for the future full-game matches.

After some time, the server gradually filled a bit, 4v4 matches of 6v6 matches were quite good. What I noticed was the following.

Lets take a look at the top 4 players. Player 1 leading the board with 3k points, player 2 with 2k, player 3 with 1.5k and player 4 with 1k. Players 3 and 4 being on team 2 while players 1 and 2 were on team 1 (winning, hence the greater score)

The following match (provided no one crashed, which no one did) player 1 and 2 were on opposing teams. What I tried to find out was if the amount of points made a difference. Lets say players 2, 3 and 4 had a combined total points equal to player 1 which resulted in them joining 1 team vs player 1 in the other team (provided there are enough other players to get equal amounts e.g. 4v4 of 6v6)

I had the impression that the game already has some balancing system in place but it takes records from the previous game points list.

Imo this skews the actual balance in 20v20 games as continuously shooting at the buildings with an arty while being repaired by an engineer/tech does not require much skills but does produce loads of points.

On a note, as soon as people join the new game, you are free to switch teams provided it doesnt result in a difference of more than 1. E.g. GDI has 8 and Nod has 9, GDI player cannot switch to Nod but a Nod player can switch to GDI.

This often happens when one of the teams have the TmX of EKT clan players in them, naturally having a better teamplay integrity, winning the game. Next round they are scattered between teams trying to join 1 team again makes it hard when 2 or more people try it at the same time.

It helps to join the weaker team (GDI on most maps without base defense) as there are bound to be players trying to join the stronger team for a certain map. Teamwork tactics (rushes to different goals) will in that case outweigh the faction advantage (stealth infiltrations, SBH-C4 or nukes).

Anyway, on the topic, I have the feels that the game already has a balancing system, based on the players score previous round.

[testman]

I just played few games and I was either part of really good team or really bad team. Either we sucessfuly engie rushed at start and blew up half of their base because their mines were not even placed yet or I just watched my team suck a thumb when enemy chinhook flew right into our base and slaughtered everyone and then blew up few buildings.

That was 10+ games in a row.

That kind of balance fail was not very enjoyable for me.

I really hope that I am not the only one seeing this problem and that something will be done about that.