Free Allegiance Forums

I agree--I've been out for a couple a weeks, but the times I've seen autobalance used, it's looked quite good to me.

IMO, if we went with Randomise start, then after start new player goes to team with the lowest ranksum, that would be the simplest solution that would handle practically all problems.

The only trouble is one of incentive. We either force it on all the time, or we have to find a way that people will want to use it. That's where I get stuck....

Once it's percieved to work without bugs I hope that it'll be used more. Certainly the current perception that it just plain doesn't work is one of the reasons autobalance is used so rarely.

I was in a game yesterday afternoon. DreamWalker put on autobalance to make me happy (TY DW). I can't remember who was comming my team. However, as game went along, it appeared that Jaybird could not join.

I am not sure if our comm was having problems with how it was working, if Jaybird was only trying to join the team that was down people (we were up two players to balance out the stack), or if this was actually the bug that folks are complaining about.

Is there anyway to check that game? AB was turned off and I left. Dream seems to insist that AB is buggy or broken. I am not sure it is -- but is just that folks trying to join think it is if they can't join the team that is down a player or two.

batman wrote:QUOTE (batman @ Apr 16 2007, 01:36 PM) I was in a game yesterday afternoon. DreamWalker put on autobalance to make me happy (TY DW). I can't remember who was comming my team. However, as game went along, it appeared that Jaybird could not join.

I am not sure if our comm was having problems with how it was working, if Jaybird was only trying to join the team that was down people (we were up two players to balance out the stack), or if this was actually the bug that folks are complaining about.

Is there anyway to check that game? AB was turned off and I left. Dream seems to insist that AB is buggy or broken. I am not sure it is -- but is just that folks trying to join think it is if they can't join the team that is down a player or two.

I think I was comming that one (nobody else would!). I got awesomely stacked against and lost. Great fun. There was a slight HELO stack at the start against me (it was a small game, and DW was on the other team - I think I had 4, and they had 3), but every joiner went to their team, and I got squished.

I don't know if it was AB related or not, but there seemed to be a glitch not allowing me to accept players in that game. When a player was asking to be accepted I'd go to F6, click on accept, the buttons would all change status, but the pilot would not actually be accepted onto the team. Autoaccept didn't work either. The bug seemed to resolve itself later on in the game though - I think AB was turned off later, so it could be connected.


Relating to a comm modifier - there is potential for exploitation. Before game start you could place a lower ranked player on the comm, making your AB score lower, and as soon as the game started switch to the higher ranked comm. Once people started joining this probably wouldn't be so much of a problem, but if the modifier was significant it could be quite exploitable. Not sure.

The thing is, you can't join either side. The game ended up being 7 vs 4 as some people dropped and as I believe non of us was able to accept new players (the other comm had people requesting but the accept button didn't work, or something to that effect). At that point I turned off ab.

It seems that helo is only a very, very rough estimate of player's ablity to contribute to the team. helo is influenced by such factors as how individual player's go about chosing the team they fly for, and thus we have several 20s that are not * real * 20s, and several 14s and below who are kick ass. Than we have people like Kage and Denga who are roughly around 6.

As it is right now, helo is extremely rough. Now one can say that we gotta wait till more date is collected and so on. Ok, let's wait.

Maybe helo will to some extent contribute to games being more balanced, but for now it seems to be a peculiarity that transforms the landscape of the gameplay, but in a rather random direction that can give very peculiar results.

Also, which sucks, there is a whole lot of people who are overly sensitive to helo, and judge team's and individual's aptitude more by those skewed numbers than anything else. Now we have a "helo stack" where the teams are semi even, or no "helo stack" where the teams are perfectly... imbalanced.

Well, I don't know guys. I really appreciate the work that you are doing, and I fully understand that it is very hard to quantify how much a player contributes to team's success.

It's good that we are still getting good games often, and very often there are good games if one team has an advantage over the other in terms of players. Excessive staking is bad, but I've flown for either of such team's and I know people still have fun as long as there is a will to fight, and quite often (especially with the commander's help) you will see the seeming better team lose. This is alleg.

As to the idea of a modifier for the comm, this seems to be a step too far. Maybe, maybe you could double the comms helo for assigning players and than exclude this from when the helo after the game is calculated. Even that seems very rough on the higher ranked comm especially in small games. An attempt at the comms modifier seems to be an attempt at creating an artificial system in which the actual prediction of outcome of a game would be 50 - 50. This is not alleg. This is thinking along the lines "when a 20 fights vs a 10, let's reduce the pw dmg of his int by 50%). The concept, in general, of trying to balance teams can be arguable, and it should be customary whether to enforce it in games or not. Just like AB is and it is up to the comms to decide whether to use it or not, just as the money setts and so on. Handicapping for skills, making it harder for the better player/comm by giving him lesser weapons/lesser team, should never be done and never hardcoded. The system should not take the skills out of the equation. You want balanced teams, but you don't want Aarm's mini to do half of it's dmg vs somedude(10)'s hull.

So yeah, trying to make teams more balanced is one thing, and something that would make the game more fun and better for everyone. Trying to take the skills out of equation and punishing people for their skills, is a completely separate thing.

For now, I'm really happy that alleg is still fun.

DW

yes Tigga, I think you were the other comm

I read your post after I finished writing mine

...great to see that it's being used. Only way to fix it is to use it.

Greator_SST wrote:QUOTE (Greator_SST @ Apr 16 2007, 07:19 PM) ...great to see that it's being used. Only way to fix it is to use it.

Yeah, DW did this after I pm'd crap outta lobby to use Ab pls. (TY DW).

SO, what happened in this game with accepting players? Was it something like max imbalance at 3, although I swore I thought it was set at auto. Dog? Pook? Can you guys tell? Is this a 'bug' or is it 'human' error?

Thanks for your help guys and gals.

Another suggestion:

Can we pick a server and make auto balance mandatory on that server? Just as an experiment to try to work out any kinks in AB and to see if some in community will play with AB on all the time with no choice?

its all well and fine to argue this, but as long as that 6 and 7 are masauu@pk and Thebored@srm, i think you would be hard pressed to find a 13 that could take on both of them.

(seriously, have you SEEN some of these newbie ranked vets????)