Random teams in public servers
LtChambers
Join Date: 2011-05-04 Member: 97005Members
Join Date: 2011-05-04 Member: 97005Members
<div class="IPBDescription">Who enjoys watching the Patriots play the Lions?</div>This is my first post here and it's a critical one, but I hope constructive.
I was playing Dead Space 2 MP earlier and thinking how much it was like Natural Selection (without RTS). Yet in many ways it's an incredibly frustrating step backward in multiplayer experience on the PC: no team switching, no text chat, terrible voice chat (no press-to-talk option?!?!?!), and no team balance. I couldn't even leave the game I was in to join a different one because there's no server list; 'quick match' would probably put me right back in the same game.
But bad team balance is a problem that plagues most team games on public servers. You get a bunch of veterans on one team and a bunch of newbies on the other and what follows is a massacre that, for me at least, isn't much fun on either side; I assume that this is true for most players, at least when they're on the losing side. This balance issue plagued the original NS and eventually incited me to move on to other games. When players refuse (even roughly) to balance the teams themselves (as is often the case), it's just depressing to me.
The best solution as far as I'm concerned is to give public servers the option to randomize teams every new map (or every two rounds if there are more than two per map and races are swapped between rounds). There could be exceptions for pairs of players that want to stay on the same team, but any more than that and it easily allows team stacking. I would definitely filter for those servers when doing public play (while those who don't like it can filter for it OFF). I actually consider random to better for FPS than a "smart" system that tries to even the teams by summing players' skills. That may be appropriate with a 1v1 game like Chess, but not so much for FPS. And one nice thing about random is that the teams won't ALWAYS be balanced. It won't be rare that one team, by random chance, gets the best players. It doesn't seem bad to me to occasionally have dominating or crushing rounds. It's when the same extreme result happens for 5-10 rounds in a row that it gets depressing and/or boring.
I haven't bought NS2 yet. Given my experience with NS1's team balance, I want to know that this option will be coming before I buy.
I was playing Dead Space 2 MP earlier and thinking how much it was like Natural Selection (without RTS). Yet in many ways it's an incredibly frustrating step backward in multiplayer experience on the PC: no team switching, no text chat, terrible voice chat (no press-to-talk option?!?!?!), and no team balance. I couldn't even leave the game I was in to join a different one because there's no server list; 'quick match' would probably put me right back in the same game.
But bad team balance is a problem that plagues most team games on public servers. You get a bunch of veterans on one team and a bunch of newbies on the other and what follows is a massacre that, for me at least, isn't much fun on either side; I assume that this is true for most players, at least when they're on the losing side. This balance issue plagued the original NS and eventually incited me to move on to other games. When players refuse (even roughly) to balance the teams themselves (as is often the case), it's just depressing to me.
The best solution as far as I'm concerned is to give public servers the option to randomize teams every new map (or every two rounds if there are more than two per map and races are swapped between rounds). There could be exceptions for pairs of players that want to stay on the same team, but any more than that and it easily allows team stacking. I would definitely filter for those servers when doing public play (while those who don't like it can filter for it OFF). I actually consider random to better for FPS than a "smart" system that tries to even the teams by summing players' skills. That may be appropriate with a 1v1 game like Chess, but not so much for FPS. And one nice thing about random is that the teams won't ALWAYS be balanced. It won't be rare that one team, by random chance, gets the best players. It doesn't seem bad to me to occasionally have dominating or crushing rounds. It's when the same extreme result happens for 5-10 rounds in a row that it gets depressing and/or boring.
I haven't bought NS2 yet. Given my experience with NS1's team balance, I want to know that this option will be coming before I buy.
Comments
Lock Join Marines and Join Aliens in the Ready Room? (Or, have them simply randomise your team, and/or change the text for both to Join Random)
(+ignore console command)
The only other option is an auto-balancing feature like the one Player is working on for <a href="http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/forums/index.php?showtopic=112026&st=120&p=1841426&#entry1841426" target="_blank">GmOvrmind</a>.