Small possible improvements

[Hicks]

Hi everyone, I am writing to suggest possible small improvements to the game. Many of these would also avoid a lot of controversy during the game. To begin with:

• a key to call up the mmr on the screen. I often wonder what Team-MMRs are and to find out I have to wait for it to appear on the screen. It would be handy to have the opportunity to recall this information.
• to vote a commander would help a lot to have the list of teammates, as it happens for the kick vote. Currently I am forced to write the nick in full and if I miss even one character the vote fails
• one way to balance teams would be to have players leveled in damage caused with single mmr versus the player with the highest mmr up to a maximum of double or triple damage. This way you would have balanced teams without having to upset the game code. (I'm a programmer too and I know what it means to put my hand back to code)

Simple example that could be used as a starting point for something better (in this case I used double damage as an example):

                       |    MMR    |     Damage    |
----------------------------------------
GDI                 |    1300    |                       |
                       |                 |                      |
giocatore A    |    1000    |          x 1        |
giocatore B    |     300    |          x 2        |
                       |                |                       |
----------------------------------------
Nod                |    1400    |                       |
                       |                 |                      |
giocatore C    |     900    |        x 1/.9      |
giocatore D    |     500    |          x 2        |
                       |                |                       |
----------------------------------------

Then the following votes would also be very useful:

1. Shuffle teams
2. No buildings kill before there are <n> players
3. Vote map <map name>
4. No Beacons
5. No commander before there are <n> players

What do you think? Let me know

Edited December 13, 2020 by Hicks

[Cheesemonk]

If I remember correctly from other threads the main problem with implementing team balancing is that they do not currently have account login/information tracking. (please correct me devs if I am wrong about this) The current "team mmr" numbers are almost useless as they are exclusively based on previous games played THIS SESSION. the information is not saved if you close the program and start it up again.

Furthermore, scaling individual player damage based on previous performance would incentivize players to play poorly in games they know are already lost, or play dud games where they do nothing useful, in order to receive a damage boost when they play a real game.

As far as I am concerned, team balancing should be done correctly with a standard ELO rating system being implemented along with player accounts and long-term stat tracking. I am aware this is a lot of work to program, but I am willing to wait for it.

13 hours ago, Hicks said:

to vote a commander would help a lot to have the list of teammates, as it happens for the kick vote. Currently I am forced to write the nick in full and if I miss even one character the vote fails

I agree with this suggestion. some names have strange characters, start with a space, or are otherwise difficult to type. typing a unique part of the name like the !rec function or selecting from a list would be better.

As for the new vote options:

1.) nobody wants to shuffle teams without restarting the map altogether, which is already a vote option.

2.) Personally I think it is dumb to play without killing buildings, even in small player matches. why take away the win condition and purpose of the entire game? Is the point to max out your veterancy, so you can feel like a good player and destroy players who join late? I would rather just vote to restart or change the map once enough new players join if the game is still dragging on.

This being said, I am aware that some players prefer to play this way in low player games. I won't gripe about a vote option being added if it is the will of the other players. I will just always vote no.

3.) maybe? there are few enough maps in the pool, and enough vote options at the start of new matches that I don't think this is strictly necessary, but having additional options wouldn't hurt anything either.

4.) I have discussed banning Beacons in low player matches in other threads previously. As a personal Rule I do not buy beacons in games with less then 24 players. Having a vote option for this would be useful in my opinion.

Edited December 12, 2020 by Cheesemonk

[Fffreak9999]

1 hour ago, Cheesemonk said:

The current "team mmr" numbers are almost useless as they are exclusively based on previous games played THIS SESSION. the information is not saved if you close the program and start it up again.

This is incorrect, this is on a per server basis, and tracks a user between all matches. 

[Cheesemonk]

7 hours ago, Fffreak9999 said:

This is incorrect, this is on a per server basis, and tracks a user between all matches. 

Interesting. Thank you for correcting me. Is the MMR information tracked by steam account info? player name? IP address? or something else?

Also, Is rating based on Win/Loss ratio, or player score?

[Hicks]

Hi Cheesemonk and thanks for responding. I have some doubts about something you wrote, but about something else I agree.

9 hours ago, Cheesemonk said:

The current "team mmr" numbers are almost useless as they are exclusively based on previous games played THIS SESSION. the information is not saved if you close the program and start it up again.

To this Fffreak9999 replied. In any case, every time I start a new game session, depending on the server I find the MMR at over 1000. IF the MMR were reset at each new session I should have it at zero and the MMR would no longer make sense to exist.

9 hours ago, Cheesemonk said:

Furthermore, scaling individual player damage based on previous performance would incentivize players to play poorly in games they know are already lost, or play dud games where they do nothing useful, in order to receive a damage boost when they play a real game.

It wouldn't make sense if individual MMRs were dropped for each session, as everyone would start with their individual MMR reset to zero, however, if someone had a high MMR, they wouldn't have all this benefit by playing poorly in a losing game, their MMR would drop very little. and the next session would still have a high MMR.

10 hours ago, Cheesemonk said:

1.) nobody wants to shuffle teams without restarting the map altogether, which is already a vote option.

2.) Personally I think it is dumb to play without killing buildings, even in small player matches. why take away the win condition and purpose of the entire game? Is the point to max out your veterancy, so you can feel like a good player and destroy players who join late? I would rather just vote to restart or change the map once enough new players join if the game is still dragging on.

This being said, I am aware that some players prefer to play this way in low player games. I won't gripe about a vote option being added if it is the will of the other players. I will just always vote no.

3.) maybe? there are few enough maps in the pool, and enough vote options at the start of new matches that I don't think this is strictly necessary, but having additional options wouldn't hurt anything either.

4.) I have discussed banning Beacons in low player matches in other threads previously. As a personal Rule I do not buy beacons in games with less then 24 players. Having a vote option for this would be useful in my opinion.

1) I agree
2) I agree with you on this too but it often happens to me that being part of these games and the biggest difficulty is to warn the players who have just joined, if you forget to tell them before the minimum number decided for is reached to start destroying buildings, we end up with one team playing by the rules and the other not. A vote like this would simply avoid the problem of having to restart the map.
3) I occasionally enter an empty server and look for a particular map (usually "Field" or "Lake Side NvN") in which adding the bots, to wait for other players, they are unable to destroy the buildings and therefore when someone enters the game they do not find their base half destroyed by my bots. To find one of these two maps I am often forced to continually make map change votes wasting so much time that I could use to play.
4) We think the same about this

In any case, I forgot another vote that I would like to propose:

5) No commander before there are <n> players

PS: Sorry for my bad english, i used google translate to write my posts.

[Hicks]

Does anyone else want to have their say?

[N4CR]

I think building killing is very imbalanced at low play counts, because the few good players will just end the game that way. If you are half decent at sneaking it's pretty hard for a few players to stop you.

 

[Buzz]

Can we also have a stop to bot requests over and over again?

Example a nice Tuesday night game has been going on for an hour and a half. Sheptim joins the game and will not stop asking for BOTS. Its very annoying. If one player requests bots and everyone declines can we put a stop to bot requests from that player for at least 10 minutes? 

[Buzz]

Someone should also evaluate dozas gun. Its way to over powered on buildings. 

 

[Hicks]

9 hours ago, Buzz said:

Someone should also evaluate dozas gun. Its way to over powered on buildings.

It is not clear to me what you mean, could you explain yourself better?

[Mystic~]

It's not clear to me what "MMR" is so hard for me to comment on this further.

I'd actually favour a shuffle team vote during a match without restarting the map, as this just breaks the state of play at times, however maybe there would need to be functionality that prevents the highest scoring few players from being moved, say if they destroy a building or get a permanent damage break on a building, they're not then going to want or accept being moved onto the opposite team at that point. 

In small games it's often easier to beacon a building than it is to get inside a building that is mined in a base that is actively being defended. Maybe someone could come up with some other sort of victory condition, but I don't know what. It's frustrating when you can't infiltrate and it's frustrating when you can't call in a super weapon when you need one, but I know a single SBH can often plant, defend and win a game through beacon's in small player games.

Being able to vote for a map by its name would be a really nice ability.

I think for commander votes it's possible to vote by entering a unique string that's part of their name, this is normally how I donate credits using the console and I think it works for person votes too. It's actually really frustrating trying to locate players in the list and enter their ID number when you want to kick a player.

[Buzz]

the pinky finger constantly has to hold down shift for run. and hold shift for tank boost. Is it possible to swap it to cap locks or an on / off feature? 
also if you have an MRLS and are shooting a building, all you need is one more round of 6 shots and the building will explode. An enemy tank jumps in front of the building and your target auto locks onto the tank and you can not swap back to the building. i wanted my next 6 shots to hit the building but i was not able to change this due to auto lock swinging missiles to the tank. FML. 

 

[Buzz]

16 hours ago, Hicks said:

It is not clear to me what you mean, could you explain yourself better?

If you play as NOD and have a mendoza trooper. all you need is 3 guys to rush one building and it will fall in seconds. You can not stop 10 mendozas in a rush period. 

Grab one trooper and go to a master terminal and hit the right mouse. observe how much damage the building takes from one shot. 

GDI's equivilant trooper does not cause that much damage. 

 

[Gex_str]

23 minutes ago, Buzz said:

If you play as NOD and have a mendoza trooper. all you need is 3 guys to rush one building and it will fall in seconds. You can not stop 10 mendozas in a rush period. 

laughs in 1 MRLS
Also, GDI equivalent of doza rush by efficiency(not price of troops) is gunner rush. Mobius rush is more of "get def buff and run inside and hope that Nod doesn't know what blocking is".

[Hicks]

3 hours ago, Buzz said:

the pinky finger constantly has to hold down shift for run. and hold shift for tank boost. Is it possible to swap it to cap locks or an on / off feature? 

I agree

3 hours ago, Buzz said:

also if you have an MRLS and are shooting a building, all you need is one more round of 6 shots and the building will explode. An enemy tank jumps in front of the building and your target auto locks onto the tank and you can not swap back to the building. i wanted my next 6 shots to hit the building but i was not able to change this due to auto lock swinging missiles to the tank. FML.

The way exists, try using the right mouse click and see what happens ...

[Hicks]

8 hours ago, Mystic~ said:

It's not clear to me what "MMR" is so hard for me to comment on this further.

Read this:

 

[Hicks]

Sorry if I insist, but I realized from the last few games that at least the votes from 2 to 5 are absolutely necessary. In any case, I also wanted to reiterate that a team balancing system, in addition to being necessary, is also quite simple to implement.

[Handepsilon]

On 12/20/2020 at 5:09 PM, Hicks said:

Sorry if I insist, but I realized from the last few games that at least the votes from 2 to 5 are absolutely necessary. In any case, I also wanted to reiterate that a team balancing system, in addition to being necessary, is also quite simple to implement.

Quote

is also quite simple to implement.

Easy for you to say. How about you try going into the scripts and give me a better alternative?

Sorry for sounding salty, but team balancing was in reality one of the things I had hard time to figure out because there are just so much variables to take note on, and it doesn't help that the functions are quite all over the place.

It also doesn't help that sometimes the game decides to be a troll with it and decides to deliberately unbalance the number of players in a team sometimes

[Hicks]

3 hours ago, Handepsilon said:

It also doesn't help that sometimes the game decides to be a troll with it and decides to deliberately unbalance the number of players in a team sometimes

LOL true

3 hours ago, Handepsilon said:

Easy for you to say. How about you try going into the scripts and give me a better alternative?

True too, I spoke without seeing the code. I guess the language is C, in any case I accept the challenge. I'm not a C programmer, I know C# very well, I work there! You give me the list of variables involved and I propose three solutions:
1) I write a class in C#, this class will have two functions, the first function simply returns the list of players in the teams so that they are as balanced as possible at the start of the game while the second function returns the damage modifier associated with each one every time that changes the team MMR. Once I have written the class in C# I will take care of writing the wrapper to make C# communicate with C or C++ depending on the language in which the game is developed.
2) I try to write the two functions in C which you will then have to correct because as I said I don't work with unmanaged languages.
3) alternatively I write you the two functions in C# without the wrapper, then you write the two functions in C/C++ based on my code.
Personally I prefer solution 3 because it is the fastest and simplest solution.
Obviously it won't be immediate since I still work and write these functions in my spare time.
Finally I ask you if it is possible to make the team-MMR appear under the team score when you press the TAB key and to consider the votes I suggested above.
I apologize if I was unclear, I use google translate to write in the forum

Edited January 12, 2021 by Hicks

[Handepsilon]

It is neither. The game only allows you to program things using UnrealScript. It is sort of like JavaScript. You can of course, call some native C++ functions that's listed in the native classes, but you never really see the inside of it, and it also makes changing certain stuffs impossible.

Also, to be fairly honest, I wasn't the one who made it so the MMR shows up publicly. Someone else made it that way, and I don't even know if it's actually wise to show it that blatantly.

As for votes :

1. Shuffling vote should really be a thing. I guess we just didn't have the time/motivation to do it.

2. Well, as much as it is annoying that there would be some tryhard killing buildings in a very low pop server, because timer as an alternative winning condition is pretty much hated by majority of players, it is honestly hard to justify taking away the only mean to win the game.

3. Well Changemap vote does the exact same thing already....

4. Yeah, I added the no-beacon player limit before, but some people in the internal complained about it because it made low pop games a stalemate, so now it's mostly set to 0. I think the same would occur if I were to propose no-beacon vote

I have not much comment on 'No Commander' vote. Tbh it probably would step less feet if we are to auto-assign commander if the other team has one, purely based on score.

[Hicks]

12 minutes ago, Handepsilon said:

It is neither. The game only allows you to program things using UnrealScript. It is sort of like JavaScript. You can of course, call some native C++ functions that's listed in the native classes, but you never really see the inside of it.

In this case I don't know how I could be of help

15 minutes ago, Handepsilon said:

Also, to be fairly honest, I wasn't the one who made it so the MMR shows up publicly. Someone else made it that way, and I don't even know if it's actually wise to show it that blatantly.

Why not? If it is presented publicly it is public information, we might as well make it accessible at any time.

On 12/11/2020 at 5:55 PM, Hicks said:

Then the following votes would also be very useful:

1. Shuffle teams
2. No buildings kill before there are <n> players
3. Vote map <map name>
4. No Beacons
5. No commander before there are <n> players

Given that the votes 2, 4 and 5 can be reworked at any time, I show you my point of view:
1) Now, after thinking about it, I tell you that I don't know how useful it is since there is already a map restart vote ... restarting the map also includes team shuffle, right?
2) This mode is often played in low pop games but often someone breaks the given rule and you are forced to restart the map. This vote provides that when you have reached a minimum of n players per team, you start playing seriously. Perhaps when this limit is reached, a warning may also appear on the screen informing players.
3) The voting map is the classic vote of FPS games, it is very useful when you want to play a map that does not appear in the list of possible maps.
4) Playing with the beacon in low pop games ruins the game itself because there is a high probability of not having time to disable it. It ruins the game even when everyone is not using it and the rookie enters and starts using the beacon everywhere.
5) Winning low pop games with commander powers is very easy especially when the other team is made up of rookies. Also in this case when a minimum of n players per team has been reached, it is possible to vote for the commander. Perhaps when this limit is reached, a warning may also appear on the screen informing players.

In any case, I am of the opinion that having the possibility of a few more votes does not ruin the game but rather improves it because the players decide anyway and nothing is imposed by the developers. Think about it

 

[Handepsilon]

Quote

Why not? If it is presented publicly it is public information, we might as well make it accessible at any time.

Mostly because I did not account to it being presented publicly in the first place when I designed the system. Kinda felt like it's going to source of complaints/morality drop and might give some dishonest players some thoughts of getting around the system.

And I guess I'll let the other devs who's more regular than me decide on the votes.

[Hicks]

Ok, I hope to see the new votes in the game soon

[Hicks]

Sorry if inherent, but the situation is becoming unbearable! I was hoping that with the latest update I would see activated at least the vote regarding the beacons and instead of relaxing in front of my favorite game I get stressed every time in a low pop game I see people who win games by placing 4 or 5 nukes/ions! Please do something, it is mainly the fact that there is no fun chasing the continuous nuke/ion in 5v5 or 6v6 games, in this way the games and their fun are continually ruined. Please do something!