FIX THE GOD DAMN BALANCER

[Banny]

Okay so i was on red playing bathroomsultimate 5v4. I picked the instagib rifle from mid and then Kluber joined the server ( he should be blue but he landed in red ) and then I died by the server saying you have been moved to blue team. Wtf is this. Same happens when you are nuking and u just lose your nukes. Please fix this @Higor

[Scourge]

I propose the following changes to the balancer and scoring scheme for siege:

- When balancing players with special items in inventory or built on the field, let the player spawn with the same inventory on the other team, destroy the player's built items on the old team, and refund that player the RU equal to the cost of those items. If the other team's RU capacity is not high enough to accommodate this, let the player keep the excess RU above max, but do not allow it to increase beyond that.

- Have building patterns affect a player's score. Examples: SC's and containers should yield points for healing buildings, SPs a small amount for spotting an enemy player, then more for damaging it, teleporters yield based on distance from enemy core and amount of damage to enemy buildings dealt within 30 seconds of tele use, or on number of normal nukes built within a short range of the teleporter. Opposite: Buildings taking damage should reduce points. These points should be in a player's building points record, and should be reflected in the best builder score on F3.

- If player A upgrades player B 2k RU, give player A 20 points; but if, after this, player B upgrades player A 3k RU, give player B 10 points, none for the first 2k, and 10 for the last 1k. Should be recorded on a per-game basis.

- If a player upgrades a building, the number of points received should be a hundredth of the RU contributed, NOT the number of levels by which the building is increased.

- Increase all players' scores by 1/100 of their held RU at the end of the game, and disallow anything built, upgraded, or operating after the end of the game from giving points.

- Write a method returning a player's priority rating on the server (based on UT id; remove tie to NextGen to avoid screwing up games before player registration is retrieved). The balancer should call this method when determining who to put on what team by finding which balance of priority methods results in the lowest net difference of priority ratings between teams.

- This rating should be calculated as follows:
-- Average frags per hour for the map, when available, for players that have data for over an hour of play time on that map. If under twenty minutes of play time logged on that map, default to average frags per hour on the server for players with activity logged for over an hour. If this data isn't available either, extrapolate the player's current kills to average frags per hour.
-- Multiply the previous value by the player's efficiency. A player with 80 kills per hour, at 60 eff, should have a priority rating so far of 48.
-- Add this to 1/10 of the player's average raw score per hour. If the previous player has an average of 300 points per minute, they will have 48 + 30 = 78 priority.

- Finally, balancing should work as follows:
-- Balance players with enough data to achieve priority ratings, so that the difference in these ratings between teams is as small as possible.
-- If certain players do not have data, balance them based on the default behavior, i.e. join order, number of players, and then rating. Their priority rating should default to 0.
-- Allow balancing only once every ten minutes, or after someone switches teams.
-- Allow teams with uneven numbers of players if adding a player to a badly rated team brings the priority into balance.
-- Allow manual switching only after five minutes of a balance.
-- Disable rejoining server for up to ten minutes after a spec.

[|uK|Rays]

just accept that you're gonna lose every pub game you play, totally srs

i don't think iv won a pub game in like 2 weeks but then again i am a trash can

v i d e o g a m e r

[Chamberly]

I was thinking of this:
If a player build nukes, and they are end up in the other team, the nuke would be absorbed into the contructor as an available nuke ready to build instantly (or a few seconds) so you can use them. Meanwhile, they disappear from the other team you was on. Ta-da!

But other than that, the balancer haven't been changed afaik? Not Higor's fault. :P It has been like that.

[BONZ]

Had a couple of fairly off balances recently.





And this last one thankfully didnt last long, but why!?

[Higor]

I'm thinking with a points-based system into the balancer kinda similar to ELO ones used in MOBAS.

Let's say we specify a base rating variation:
- 10 points.

Upon winning, all players on the winning team gain an amount calculated from said base rating, and the ones on the losing side have said points deducted.
The way to calculate the points will depend on the rating ratio, with weaker team being 1 at all times:
- Winner:Loser ====> Base / Winner ratio
- 1:1 ===> +- 10
- 2:1 ===> +- 5
- 0.5:1 ===> +- 20
There will be caps at 0.33:1 and 3:1 to prevent huge variations.
Players with negative ratings will be substracted half the points (to keep averages above zero).

During initial balancing, an average of the ratings is calculated and added to each individual rating to prevent 1-man teams.
Let's say the ratings are:
500,350,200,190,180,160,100,40,30,20,10,-20,-30
116 average, so all players will have 116+rating during balance.


Contribution timer.
It would be a preset timer (20 minutes) where contribution gradually goes from 0 to 1, during final game calculations the both the player's win/lose points and rating that goes into the final calculation get scaled down, this way joining a losing team to purposely snipe lower rating is prevented.
===> Joins and wins on a 0.5:1 after 5 minutes ===> Gain 20 * 0.25 points, also this player's strenght is multiplied by 0.25 during the whole stat sum.


De-contribution.
Contribution timer going down, counts 20 minutes after a player has left scaling 1 to 0.
When a player leaves near the end of the game, his contribution will still be considered to whatever team that player was on and ratings will be summed/modified as well and ALSO considered for mid game team balancing.
This is a good measure to prevent ragequitters from not losing/gaining points, and to prevent them from immediately have a game that's about to end re-balanced (as 20 minutes have to pass until that contribution is fully negated).
===> Leaves 5 minutes before game ends, teams were 1:1 ===> Lose/gain 10 * 0.75 points.


Map specific rating.
Ratings could be classified in two categories:
Global and map-specific, while winning a game will add the points to both global and map stats, joining a new game will set the player's current rating (within this map) as 0.5*global + 0.5*map.
This would put players that specialized in a few maps into weaker teams if it's their best map, or in stronger teams if it's a map they underperform.


For much faster and easier coding on said balancer:
- Open source native package.
- Serverside only, no NPLoader or clientside interaction.
- Buildable on all server platforms. (Working gcc 2.95.4 compiler and Visual C++ 6)
- Dynamic Arrays, code easier to handle.
- Binary database, insanely faster to save/load, no limits.

If you think it's a good idea, i'd open a project (code will be public during development).

[Sheepy]

Ouh that sounds very interesting! Would love to help a bit with that, havent done c++ in ages and it always bothered me that the balancer is more obstructive than any help really.
Also, I know theres a rule that admins have to stack teams, but i dont understand the necessarity of that one, maybe thats sumin we could get rid of?
... :-P