6 years ago

Team balance, easy fix

I have been saying this for a while now. I think the game has excellent weapon balance, vehicles are ok (tanks and AA a bit OP) but the main issue is still TEAM balance.

We all know what I'm talking about. When one team just kicks the a$$ of the other team so bad, that they never even had a chance.

This single factor leads to the most frustration the game causes and for this reason is should be addressed.

There is a right way to do it, and there is a wrong way to do it.

The wrong way is to introduce skill-based matchmaking, having little variety how skillful players are, leading to encounters which feel the same and increasingly difficult if someone is improving. That's not very rewarding.

The right way to do it is to balance the game out on a TEAM level, not on an individual level. This way if you are an average player, you will find easy kills, average kills and players who are much better than you and you would not want to attack them on your own.

The easiest way to balance out teams is to have both sides roughly the same rank score if you add everyone's rank on the same side. This is not a perfect solution but it is WAAAAAY better than what we have now. Now if you look at the screen and you see like 3 lvl100+ guys on your team and 15 lvl100+ guys on the other team, you know you are screwd. You are so much screwed you would dare to bet your monthly income on it that your team gonna suck. (You souldn't, just saying).

Additionally, to protect new players and give them the chance to learn the basics of the game, introduce servers for players strictly between level 1-20 so they don't get abused by much experienced players.

This fix is super simple and you don't need to overthink or over-engineer it. It would just not be much or any better.

This fix should take about 10 minutes to implement for a capable programmer.
Good luck!

65 Replies

GUTENTAAAAG
6 years ago
Here is another example:
Round is starting out with me being the only lvl100+ player on my team vs 4 lvl100+ players + 2 lvl200 players....
The round hasn't even started but you already know the outcome... it's gonna be BAD!
This is the middle of the match look at the K/D ratio is both teams:
And here is the ending:
I sure gave 'em hell but man did we EVER had a chance when there is such a big difference between the overall team rank.

FIX IT DICE, IT'S NOT SOMETHING DIFFICULT TO SOLVE
Real_Noobalishu
6 years ago
@Michaelp800 I wouldn't say this is 100% the games fault. As the game tries to auto-balance, people will leave during the loading screen, at the beginning or right at the end of the last match and this will throw the numbers off. There's also people who decide to switch sides at the beginning which will skew the numbers too
GUTENTAAAAG
6 years ago
The matching system is one of the biggest issues since release. Not only it forgets to add people to one side and you end up games like 8 vs 14 but rank selection is completely random which leads to very unbalanced matches.
GUTENTAAAAG
6 years ago
FFS please fix this already......... today I got into 5 matches in a row with no chance of doing anything meaningful it was so awfully unblanaced.

F_I_X I_T!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
TTZ_Dipsy
Hero+
6 years ago
Freeman mentioned on Twitter (probably a few weeks ago now, so it might be a little buried), that the team stealth snuck a few servers into the mix with a current form of team balance -- mixed results and they'll need to make further tweaks, but from what I hear things sounded promising. I'm not entirely sure if regular players could find/play them but it's nice to know it's still being worked on.
This new balancer will moat likely be what is used in the next title (same with Community Games) so * fingers crossed*
GUTENTAAAAG
6 years ago
@TTZ_Dipsy Good news, let's hope it's true.
Meanwhile another match where apparently rank "didn't matter"
We barely lost any tickets... wtff
GUTENTAAAAG
6 years ago
Here is an explanation why high-ranked players matter more than you would think:
Let's suppose we have a team with 3 players at level 150 and everyone else is below. These 3 people can easily kill anyone below level 100 so they keep piling up big kill streaks.
Now let's assume the enemy team is lucky enough to have a level 300 player to join them. He will not only have big kill streaks but due to his finess and experience will counter the level 150 players on a regular basis and defend their own players from dieing. It's like having and Ace in your deck of cards.
This is why the strongest players determine the OUTCOME of the match most of the time.
Is this always true? Of course not. But very often I find my worst opponents to be the best players in the enemy team and if it wasn't for them, some of my killstreaks would count a lot more victims.
So an advanced matching system would have to balance the top 20% of players with bigger weights. (On a 32 vs 32 map you would have to accurately match the top 6 / 6 players as they ultimately who set the balance in the game)
Real_Noobalishu
6 years ago
@GUTENTAAAAG lets say for instance you're the on the dominating team and 3 or 4 games in a row with say 5 of your mates you're destroying and winning every game. Then 1 or 2 people join, land on the enemy team and simply thrash everyone including your squad over and over again.

Now say you and your team were all going negative, would you consider it fair to have those 2 players automatically switched over when you're team had the majority of high end players?

This is where automatic team balance will have problems, the 5 of you might have an average K/D of say 5 and the 2 players on the enemy team might have a joint average K/D of 3.5 the computer should statistically see you as having the higher numbers and better average but that might not be what's happening in game.

So how would you compensate for that?
GUTENTAAAAG
6 years ago
@Real_Noobalishus if you had a proper balancing system in the first place you could not have a squad of 5 high ranked players matched against complete noobs.
Well, I never proposed comparing K/D of players or squads just only rank. If your are high ranked, you have played the game more and have more idea how to contribute to your team even if your K/D is not super high. Also you could be a low ranked tank wh0re with high K/D and have no clue about infantry play. As I said matching by rank is not super accurate but the goal is not to make every game a draw but to have better teambalance than we have now. This would be the first step, the rest will be fine tuning.
Here is a good example what I was talking about in the previous post:
As you can see the highest ranking players piling up most kills and one team having more of the high ranked players results in a COMPLETE imbalance of the teams.
This is far too common not to notice. Unless you are testing in a closed studio with the same people / relatively similar skill level.
Btw this was the first server I joined today and just by looking at the scoreboard you could tell: it's not worth playing this match because the outcome is already sealed.
GUTENTAAAAG
6 years ago
Since teambalance is mostly dependent on the rank of the best players in a team here is how I would apply the rule:
Add rank of top 6 players in a team and match it as accurately as possible to the opposing team's same number.
Do the same for the next 6 players with a bit more room for mismatch.
The bottom 20 players can be selected randomly.
With this method teams would be balanced and diverse at the same time.