Can we tweak team joining a little?
Rokiyo
A.K.A. .::FeX::. Revenge Join Date: 2002-10-10 Member: 1471Members, Constellation
A.K.A. .::FeX::. Revenge Join Date: 2002-10-10 Member: 1471Members, Constellation
<div class="IPBDescription">Team limit = Player Count / 2</div>Instead of preventing a team join if it would cause that team to have +2 members, why not just cap it based on total active player count?
Eg on a 16 player server, at the start of a new round, the first 8 players to walk into the marine portal instantly become marines, and everyone else has to go alien.
It would pretty quickly stop all those annoying little stand-offs!
Eg on a 16 player server, at the start of a new round, the first 8 players to walk into the marine portal instantly become marines, and everyone else has to go alien.
It would pretty quickly stop all those annoying little stand-offs!
Comments
As it stands you get people in the ready room who play the 'stand in the portal game'. Well if they are really willing to stand in the portal until someone goes aliens, then let them sit in a spawn queue instead.
Let people join a team until half the server count is reached. Then when the game starts the first X number of player will spawn based on team balance. If it's 8 vs 3, then only 3 players on each team spawn.
The key here is that people in the ready room know they have two choices, either play the game as the other team or leave. Either way it works. If they play you get balanced teams. If they leave you get an open slot which will then fill with a player to balance the teams. Having 5 people standing around in the ready room jumping around in a portal helps no one.
And this would make it even worse.
What about people that are slow to load the map? Just say screw them they never get a chance to pick their team?
If you don't like the stand off then go random team.
16 player server, 2 players spectate, limit is 8 players, the game would allow 8v6 if there was nothing to balance them (beyond auto-balance).
Secondly, not every game starts from the beginning of a map change. There are plenty of servers that don't rotate maps as often, so 'slow loaders' wouldn't be impacted by this.
Bottom line is that we need to get people out of the ready room and into the game. This achieves that.
No, I think the thread's suggestion would take a bad situation and make it worse.
Although extending the warm up round an extra 10 seconds could alleviate dud rounds.
16 player server, 2 players spectate, limit is 8 players, the game would allow 8v6 if there was nothing to balance them (beyond auto-balance).<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Easy, just stop counting the spectators as active players, put a delay on going back to the ready room once you've gone spectator, say, four seconds or less, so they don't just hop back into the ready room in order to go the team they desire to go the instant a slot becomes free.
I think this is a good idea in general. Usually I have a hard time deciding which team to go, but am somewhat more marine oriented, so this system may force me to play more aliens, yes, but then again, just going one team and never the other is not very sportsmanlike, is it? And what's better, sitting in the ready room all day, waiting for that marine slot, or finding yourself on the alien team and deciding you may as well play? Of course I realize there are people who may rather just quit instead of playing as the unfavored team, but then we have to ask, do we want to encourage those people? Or do you propose we should keep the decision what to play as free as possible and not make any changes? Mind you, there will always be those who will sit by that one team door, whether we like it or not.
How will changes after the initial game start be treated, though? Say the game has just begun, everyone has joined/was forced to join and some people decide they don't want the team they got, so they head back to the ready room and leave the teams unbalanced. How would this be dealt with?
I don't believe expecting players to magically know how to pull down the console is a good solution, nor do I particularly want to resort to jumping into the random portal when I'm actively making decisions about what team I'm going to play on.
I agree that there are other considerations here about early round balance. For one, don't think a round should start until 60-70% of the players have joined a team anyway. Starting a round as 2v3 on a full 18 player server while people are running back and forth between join portals is not a good solution.
I wouldn't mind 60 second countdown. "You will be auto-assigned when this reaches 0".