Stacking and how Auto-Random should be permanent in every pub server.
PoNeH
Join Date: 2006-12-01 Member: 58801Members, NS2 Playtester, NS2 Map Tester
Join Date: 2006-12-01 Member: 58801Members, NS2 Playtester, NS2 Map Tester
90% of the games I've played (which usually take place in the 5 most popular servers) are heavily stacked one way or another. I know there's is not much that the game can do about such lame players, but there is one feature that can tackle the problem quite efficiently. Auto-Random.
I know, I know, people want to choose what side they play for, but what if, we were able to select this upon joining the server and then change it during the game for the next round? Or maybe upon map-switch. Wouldn't take much coding to implement such a feature. This would remove the lame ass players who wait for the proficient players to join a team and then follow them.
Stacking is the worst thing to happen to a game, especially a novelty game such as NS2. Not only does it completely taint the statistics for the game, but also prevents newcomers from really getting a feel of the gameplay and gauging which abilities and/or behaviors are more beneficial to their experience. Whether you're on the stacked team, or on the crappy end of it, you're not getting a true sense of what the devs spent countless hours trying to perfect.
I know, I know, people want to choose what side they play for, but what if, we were able to select this upon joining the server and then change it during the game for the next round? Or maybe upon map-switch. Wouldn't take much coding to implement such a feature. This would remove the lame ass players who wait for the proficient players to join a team and then follow them.
Stacking is the worst thing to happen to a game, especially a novelty game such as NS2. Not only does it completely taint the statistics for the game, but also prevents newcomers from really getting a feel of the gameplay and gauging which abilities and/or behaviors are more beneficial to their experience. Whether you're on the stacked team, or on the crappy end of it, you're not getting a true sense of what the devs spent countless hours trying to perfect.
Comments
I'm tired of pointless games where one team stomps the other.
If enforcing would be a bit too drastic i'd like to see at least random option ( called by players themselves ) like plugins already provide made official and shipped with the game ( same as autokicker which is not active even on official UWE servers ... ).
I almost want to suggest that when teams become unbalanced, it should force players to switch against their will, but I would personally not be happy with that. I get a loyalty to the team I am on each game. I would not be motivated to win if I were switched by force.
The problem is that auto-random doesn't necessarily mean the teams won't be stacked. I've been on a server where the admin was on and he forced auto-random three games in a row and all three times they ended up randomly imbalanced.
However, I still don't think the answer is to force auto-random on all servers. What will likely end up happening is that people will end up going back to the ready room (or reconnecting) until they get on the team they want, or they'll just go to another server.
The better solution -imho - is to let admins sort this out as they deem it necessary.
my favourite servers have no issue. the 'regular' players don't necessarily go random, but they have presence of mind to see a pattern of stronger players stacking a certain team and they will choose to go on the other team to balance it. you know, like common sense.
i've played on a few servers with a 'randomize teams' mod. ergo it's useless for UWE to waste time making one, you need to persuade server admins to use the pre-existing mod. although that mod is a pile of crap, because the 'good' players with common sense balance the teams, then the noobs start a random vote and the teams auto-stack instead.
You have fun with your friend.
Can't play the game with your friends?
Nobody is going to play the game.
This is possible on servers where there are regulars. On typical pub games, though, even if most players would be happy to switch teams to make a balanced game - which I think they would, most of the time - they don't have a good way to know when the teams are fair because they don't know the other players.
The soft matchmaking system that I've suggested here would help. Players could see before the game starts how well the teams are matched and could voluntarily switch sides as they see fit in order to make a better game. Also, the randomizing server plugins in use now could be augmented to take player skill into account in order to make a more evenly-matched game than the simple random assignment does currently.
NS2 already has a form of autobalance (i.e. the 'spawning limiter') and more invasive forms (forced player switching) are guaranteed to annoy. As such many multiplayer games are going to some form of skill-based matchmaking to address the problem.
Gather more friends and populate an empty server then.
I dont think newcomers to the "ns2 scene" enjoy very much to get stomped all the time.
Matchmaking would be great but based on what criteria ? and the active players base is too small for that.
On respectable servers, the regulars usually aligned themselves across both teams pretty evenly. But now my favorite server has random, and it's stacked 50% of the time and I don't get to choose which side to play on. It sucks!
Playing with your friends is great and all, but if the game ends up being a boring stompfest as a result, what's the point of that? I'd rather play against my buddies for an epic game than stack for easy wins all the time. The best solution I have for this is to just play with enough friends that you always have some on your team, and some to play against. :P
I think a very unobtrusive soft 'ranking' system could be useful though, to get at least an idea of how much a given person has played so you can get a better idea of how to balance the teams. Time played and number of victories isn't indicative of raw skill, but someone with 300 hours is generally going to be at least knowledgeable and able to contribute to the team more than a freshly minted rookie. I think Tribes (Ascend) is a good example of how that kind of system works in practice.
It may also be the fact that these good marine players are too used to a typical fps game and can't or don't know how to get a good kdr playing aliens, so they choose marines most of the time.
I prefer playing Aliens myself, however, I don't mind if the marine team is stacked even when I'm playing Aliens. I enjoy a challenge and playing against that only improves my play...... why other people don't take that mindset is beyond me.
Stacking is a self feeding loop, The more people stack the more it makes other people want to stack... because i mean who wants to play in a game thats almost completely not winnable ? if you cant beat them ... join them ... is the way it normally goes.
Try different servers. I will switch servers if i see the same names together after a couple of wins in a row.
Thanks for the heads up, I'll definitely be avoiding your servers in the future. That sounds like a huge pain in the ass for anyone that's looking to hop in a game quickly or play with their friends.
I only pub with friends, most commonly in groups of 2 or 3. If you count a group of 3 friends going on the same team as "team stacking" then you probably just need to get better at the game.. 3 people can't carry a team of 12 unless the enemy team is straight garbage.
Obviously that depends on the 3 people in question, and skill gaps are relative. You may have a team of perfectly decent midrange players getting destroyed by top tier pros, it doesn't make them garbage. I could easily name 3 DFA members who are significantly better than the average pubbers that would consistently imbalance games if they always played on the same team. Most of the time we random is to split ourselves up.
It seems like you're deliberately misinterpreting in any case. The goal is getting teams which are relatively balanced for more enjoyable matches. If a given group of friends aren't so far ahead of the curve that it's not possible to counterbalance, then it's not a problem.
Edit to add: We also cap our servers at 16-18 players, so our team sizes are 8-9 at most, not 12.
The active player base is too small for the type of matchmaking you find in most games. But the soft matchmaking system I suggested here would work just fine with the current playerbase.
I agree. That's the intention behind my suggestion.
Time played is a good metric to use for matchmaking, but it's not great, because it's a somewhat close proxy for skill but by no means a perfect proxy. Something like Elo or TrueSkill is a much better matchmaking metric.
I really don't think that is the case, was the before babblers alien advantage a fluke?
One thing I find is that people who communicate will follow other people who also communicate. If someone is using a mic/has a mic/ text chats a lot, on average, they will be a greater contributor to victory. These people then say:
"I'm gona go X next", many will try and follow such as other people they are talking to.
Random at this point is not really random ether... it’s just an auto-assign unless both teams have equal amounts of players (unlikely)...
It would be pretty easy to extend the soft matchmaking system I've suggested into something more like the traditional matchmaking systems or the ENSL gather system. It could go something like this:
- Some subset of servers set a flag to designate that they are matchmaking servers. This would be strictly optional and up to the server operators, but presumably UWE would run at least a handful of matchmaking servers themselves.
- Servers with the matchmaking flag set will only allow players to join if they are within X skill rating of the players already present.
- Clicking the "Quick Match" button (or whatever) in the server browser will connect you to a randomly chosen server that has the matchmaking flag set and that has a current-player skill rating within X of your own.
That's it. Whether this would work would depend entirely on the size of the playerbase, the proportion of the playerbase that wants to use the matchmaking feature, the width of the skill bands, and the length of time people are willing to wait for a game to fill up and start. If there's not enough people or if the wait times are too long then we'd still have the soft matchmaking system to fall back on.Agreed, generally, one team is going to be better than the other, one team is probably going to lose most of the early engagements, it's not deliberate, it's just next to impossible that by chance both teams have equal skill levels.
Auto random doesn't help at all, because it's the same thing, random chance that one team is going to be better than the other, all it does is piss people off by taking away more choice and preventing people from teaming with friends as much (btw not all "friends" are automatically better than other people and stack a team).