OJP Admin Concerns (Team Balance)

[Kurgan]

Okay, you all know how much I hate "admin mods" and the abuse they encourage, but there is one thing that I think should really be added to OJP.

I propose a cvar such as say,

g_forceteamswitch 1

What this does is to take a player (let's say the person with the lowest score and time in game) and switches them to the team that needs people.

Basically what happens is that g_teamforcebalance 1 and g_teamautojoin 1 will ensure a fairly balanced team game in CTF, Team FFA or Siege, but ONLY at the start of a match.

It doesn't take into account people to manually switch teams mid-match, people who leave mid match (resulting in unbalances) and people who join mid-match and manually join.

The only solution now is to either use voting (and hope that it isn't abused, which it generally will be if they are allowed to kick people) or to have an automated system that takes the lowest scoring, lowest time player on the bigger team and transfers them to the other team.

However, there should be a player message from the server to notify them what's going on (I can see the looks of confusion on the people who get "forceswitched.")

Let's say a text message appears in the center of the player being switched's screen like:

"You Have Been Switched By the Server For Team Balance."

And all everybody else would see would be a "server" (top of the screen) message, like "Kurgan was switched to Team 1 by the server."

That seems like the best way to do it. 'Cause when I'm away from my server I got a lot of complaints about people unbalancing the teams and ruining the game.



PS: The "Team Kicking" option that appears in Asteroids Mod doesn't work very well. It was made to allow teams to kick their own members who team kill or otherwise screw up too much (meant for servers with friendly fire on primarily). The trouble is that this option only works if Voting is enabled. And voting as we know is prone to abuse (people tend to vote kick people that are winning, even if winning legitimately or mess up the map rotation the admin has set).

So I still think that teamforceswitch or something like that is badly needed!

[Samuel Dravis]

You'd want to make it where the people couldn't change teams right after the switch happend, maybe a 30 sec delay between changing teams.

[razorace]

Well, actually I think the best way to do it is to simply not let people switch teams when the teams would become inbalanced.

[Samuel Dravis]

Having it set in stone like that would likely make some people angry, and not just the ones that are trying to switch to the winning team. Perhaps that should be optional, but not required.

[Kurgan]

That's all well and good RA, but here's the problem with that.

What if people leave mid game?

That often happens, resulting in unbalanced teams. And it is very hard to get some people to switch teams.

Either they don't know how, aren't paying attention or they don't WANT TO (these are the same folks who will join the winning team a few seconds before the match ends just so they can say they won).

Teamforcebalance and teamautojoin are already setup to prevent people from joining a team to unbalance it, but this only works at the very start. Even if you make it impossible for people to manually join the other team, somebody leaves the game and boom, it's unbalanced.

Example:

Let's say you have 12 people playing, 6 vs. 6.
Two people leave team A (this will often happen if team A is getting it's butt kicked or if the map ends but not the round, etc). Now it's 4 vs. 6. Team B now has a big advantage with 2 extra bodies.

Team unbalances make some players so made they leave, so that makes things even worse!

So if one person joins Team A it'll be fine, but let's say they don't switch, then the game is unbalanced.

[razorace]

hmmm, good point.

[Kurgan]

Another thing (that happens a lot). A person will join and be assigned to a team, but he'll be "connecting" ( " - " next to his name in the scoretable) or have a ping of 999 and then timeout or disconnect. In the meantime other players are assigned to the opposite team for balance.

But then this guy drops out and suddenly we're unbalanced again and balance will never be restored because it will just keep adding 1 to team1 then 1 to team2, etc.