Everything you said is true. But none of those problems would be solved by having the skill measure include judgmental factors instead of pure W/L. It would only introduce bias and incentivise bad player behaviour (skill farming), but all of the problems mentioned above would still exist. Teams would still be composed of an amalgamation of different skill values and playing a role one's not used to would still distort the prediction.
I mostly agree. I don't mean to oversell the supposed ease of implementing a more complex balancing system. But I think there's probably a sweet spot re: skill measurements that we're ignoring. I'm talking about a degree of abstraction that's slightly less generalized than the current pure W/L approach, but which isn't so poorly representative of four primary roles (without getting into a more detailed breakdown of on-the-field proficiencies). A start would be independent (and dynamically updating) skill values for marine play vs. alien play. Another helpful layer would be a comm ranking for aliens and marines respectively. So that gives us four primary brackets to consider even before we get into intense tinkering.
In addition to this, it's not a stretch to imagine having access to accurate stats and visualizations capturing a player's competencies and historical tendencies - both pre-match and post-match - in which the huge range of contributing variables would be covered in the form of per-player and per-team summaries. While this data wouldn't necessarily be able to contribute directly to the skill measure (and therefore wouldn't necessarily be used to determine shuffle balance), it would be more than useful in assessing a team's weak spots, organizing, and defining necessary roles per-round (any tools added to facilitate this sort of communication would be additionally beneficial).
Note that this sample size is super limited, and only on 8v8s. On TGNS, there's almost 2 to 1 alien wins, but interestingly, the lower skill ones are marine wins.
Actually a perfectly balanced match would in fact be decided by the human element. Someone making a mistake, someone executing a brilliant play, someone making a counter.
Football is a perfectly balanced game. A lot of people find that fun. A perfectly balanced game is what we humans seek, so we can truly test ourselves against others. The Olympics are balanced, any serious sport is as balanced as possible so the only deciding factor is the individual human performance.
Sports where focus is on stuff other than the human (modern F1 for example) is pretty boring to watch (although I still do), as the disparity is purely technical, it is procession like .
You are absolutely incapable of separating one issue from another aren't you?
Everything is linked in the universe. Plus it's the goal in the end. Whatever the methods (sparation alien/marine), the end is going to be used for a balance system...
@NousWanderer : Everything you mentioned was said before. Months ago actually. But granted, you did organized it well. My poor English is far behind.
Lastly the things you describe in the second post are related to behavior (good/bad actions). Stuff like damage on players or damage on structures (and other things). We already have the stats if I'm correct.
Note that this sample size is super limited, and only on 8v8s. On TGNS, there's almost 2 to 1 alien wins, but interestingly, the lower skill ones are marine wins.
As much as I like TGNS, I do not think it is really representative here. Yes there are some very skilled regulars but overall hive score is about 1500. A 1500 hive skill is fairly above average but it is not near the skill level of a 2000 hive skill team.
On top of that TGNS is 8v8 so it does not suffer from the large player counts of 12v12 servers.
In my opinion most of the regulars on TGNS, myself included, are much more skilled at aliens than marines. For example, when I play aliens most games my hive skill can go past 2000. When I play marines most of the time it drops below 1800.
From my impression these games are often lost by the aliens because even better players have a hard time to cooardinate the team on pub. If by chance two good marines form a team and push a side, it takes an group engagement to get rid of them but people take a long time to rally for it. While this happens the other marines cap and kill other stuff on the map while aliens have no higher lifeforms which could carry them. Once the lifeforms are up, marines are often so far ahead in tech that its very difficult to come back alone. (Most of the times because there has been little resbiting)
You will break this game if you attempt to balance for 10v10 at 2k-3k skill.
Yep. There are several 7v7 servers (4 spec slots) that would be ideal for this environment in pubs. I think TAW has one as well as Hellarious Bastards.
Easier lane blocking, too much time with shotguns before fades, not enough lerk players. In 7v7 you remove the "easy lane blocking" but i think you still have this issue where aliens are barely trying to stay alive before fade, getting out tech in the mean time. Jambi is THE map where this always happens, very few area to spike shotguners and tier 1-2 alien trying to fight almost tier 2-3 marines, and then if you survive long enough you can have a balance game.
And I find the shotgun recap in ffa way too strong. Unless a gorge is here someone will always recap it. You can't just wait that much time near it and if you try you will need to kill after the shotguner atleast 1 marine nearby plus the respawner again.... with meds. in lower skill games you won't have the med spam or the full marine team trying to steal the free shotgun.
Sadly i don't see a way to adress this without making alien stronger in lower skill games. Maybe reduce the shotgun recap by 75% since the ability to pick it back was something for competitive 6v6 in the first place.
dePARAJoin Date: 2011-04-29Member: 96321Members, Squad Five Blue
edited February 2016
Like warforce said:
Many pub players with a relative high skill score have really problems to gather up for important engagements.
Im far from descent but even i know, if a player like Tane for example is harassing a harvester alone, he is still very dangerous.
So never, really NEVER try to kill him alone.
Maybe with luck or an very good ambush this could work.
But most of the time its going like this:
"Logi under attack"
One skulk runs in - dead
"Its Tane"
Next skulk runs in - dead
The 3rd skulk is waiting for more players.
Meanwhile other marines approach the other natural, and skulks run there-
The 3rd skulk is still waiting
After a endless time, 3 skulks engage Tane
But they doing this in a horrible way, all dead.
Now all harvesters are lost and the aliens are trapped in the defend trap with no resbiting.
Without 1 or 2 descent Lerks, game is over now.
Even very few people parasite and then try to bite around corners which is not true ambushing and gives marine players info to push.
Try ambushing using sound only and without peaking. So few people check corners on public...
Hehehehe that reminds me I once could walk around the entire map behind a marine (MS to furthest away hive) and he did not even look behind him once. Not even responding to the very obvious clicketyclick behind him. I tend to see that as a potential, low quality headphones set to surround so they are kinda deaf from behind.
OR they think that clicketyclick sound is part of the game All other aliens and marines were fighting over System Waypointing/Nanogrid in a big meatball of dewm. We were walking from Marine Start>C12>Pipe->TheDome->Cargo (2nd Hive), very impressive we never encountered other aliens
But yeah, this is some oddball behavior from other games I think. I've done this very same thing in other games as well. They do not look up, they do not look behind them and they tend to ignore sounds. Ambushing also doesn't come into their mind and if you do ambush they tend to pull the camper card.
Thanks for all the posts. I don't have hard evidences, but I've played around 10 games like that lately, where there were no chance for aliens to win, even close. The problem is that pro players know how to block and support each other, so they win most of the fight and advance fast. Just as people in above post were stating.
One easy solution would be not to balance teams skills equally.
Function that will give uneven ratio when server is big and avg. player skill is big:
ratio = 1 + ((x / 2500)^6) * ((y / 22)^3)
where:
x - avg. skill ratio of players on server
y - server slots
Sorting with a skill bias toward aliens is a really shitty solution.
If you have skill separated between factions though, there shouldn't BE a need for this.
What I expect will happen realistically, is that most high level players will have much higher marine skill than alien skill. The system should balance the teams correctly then, even accounting for imbalanced factions. The guys with monster high marine ranks, will simply have to endure always playing aliens in pubs..
1. Both teams have identical skill averages. But due to a huge difference in intra-team variance, Team One will win a majority of matches for the simple reason that they're better positioned to win a majority of engagements due to having relatively better players entering a majority of engagements.
Actually team 2 will win in nearly all matches. You have a selection of scores wherin the rest of team 2 is not useless, and you have one extreme outlier to carry the team. A 3800 represents a pro fade who cannot be killed in a pub, or a similarly skilled marine who can lock down an entire lane by himself, or who requires a massive response to prevent RT harass/killing. He can't win the game solo, but provided the rest of his team is competent enough to do the grunt work he can guarantee victory.
There The major issue here is that a single 4000 does not equal two 2000s. He equals about 5. On the other hand, a spread of only about 300 hive points is relatively minor. A 1500 vs a 1200 is near enough to an even match in any given engagement. At best, the 1500 might win 3 to 2 in one on one, but with the 3800 occupying nearly half of his team he's going to be outnumbered in almost all engagements.
Sorting with a skill bias toward aliens is a really shitty solution.
If you have skill separated between factions though, there shouldn't BE a need for this.
What I expect will happen realistically, is that most high level players will have much higher marine skill than alien skill. The system should balance the teams correctly then, even accounting for imbalanced factions. The guys with monster high marine ranks, will simply have to endure always playing aliens in pubs..
Santaclaws is very correct here. If hive 2.0 is finished, one of its supposed features is separate skills for aliens and marines. This alone should increase the likelihood of balanced games.
1. Both teams have identical skill averages. But due to a huge difference in intra-team variance, Team One will win a majority of matches for the simple reason that they're better positioned to win a majority of engagements due to having relatively better players entering a majority of engagements.
Actually team 2 will win in nearly all matches. You have a selection of scores wherin the rest of team 2 is not useless, and you have one extreme outlier to carry the team. A 3800 represents a pro fade who cannot be killed in a pub, or a similarly skilled marine who can lock down an entire lane by himself, or who requires a massive response to prevent RT harass/killing. He can't win the game solo, but provided the rest of his team is competent enough to do the grunt work he can guarantee victory.
There The major issue here is that a single 4000 does not equal two 2000s. He equals about 5. On the other hand, a spread of only about 300 hive points is relatively minor. A 1500 vs a 1200 is near enough to an even match in any given engagement. At best, the 1500 might win 3 to 2 in one on one, but with the 3800 occupying nearly half of his team he's going to be outnumbered in almost all engagements.
Reading this I think I should note that balancing on average skill alone is not enough. Teams should be balanced with both average skill and the standard deviation of skill in mind. The default configuration for shines shuffle function does just that.
Standard deviation is a measure of the variation in a distribution or set of data. Basically it is a measure of how far apart the values are.
Even if teams are balanced with both average skill and the standard deviation of skill in mind, that does not guarantee good games. In my experience I see the standard deviation of skill on a team range from 400 to 1000. Both are ridiculously high values for a standard deviation, but that is the nature of ns2. Ns2's playerbase is too small to realistically find near skill games. That small playerbase is the root cause of those high standard deviations.
Even very few people parasite and then try to bite around corners which is not true ambushing and gives marine players info to push.
Try ambushing using sound only and without peaking. So few people check corners on public...
Hehehehe that reminds me I once could walk around the entire map behind a marine (MS to furthest away hive) and he did not even look behind him once. Not even responding to the very obvious clicketyclick behind him. I tend to see that as a potential, low quality headphones set to surround so they are kinda deaf from behind.
OR they think that clicketyclick sound is part of the game All other aliens and marines were fighting over System Waypointing/Nanogrid in a big meatball of dewm. We were walking from Marine Start>C12>Pipe->TheDome->Cargo (2nd Hive), very impressive we never encountered other aliens
But yeah, this is some oddball behavior from other games I think. I've done this very same thing in other games as well. They do not look up, they do not look behind them and they tend to ignore sounds. Ambushing also doesn't come into their mind and if you do ambush they tend to pull the camper card.
If it's a chill game, which all of them are at this point, your clickety clacks gotta compete with music, video, cooking show... You get the idea. It's just ns2 it's not that important.
1. Both teams have identical skill averages. But due to a huge difference in intra-team variance, Team One will win a majority of matches for the simple reason that they're better positioned to win a majority of engagements due to having relatively better players entering a majority of engagements.
Actually team 2 will win in nearly all matches. You have a selection of scores wherin the rest of team 2 is not useless, and you have one extreme outlier to carry the team. A 3800 represents a pro fade who cannot be killed in a pub, or a similarly skilled marine who can lock down an entire lane by himself, or who requires a massive response to prevent RT harass/killing. He can't win the game solo, but provided the rest of his team is competent enough to do the grunt work he can guarantee victory.
There The major issue here is that a single 4000 does not equal two 2000s. He equals about 5. On the other hand, a spread of only about 300 hive points is relatively minor. A 1500 vs a 1200 is near enough to an even match in any given engagement. At best, the 1500 might win 3 to 2 in one on one, but with the 3800 occupying nearly half of his team he's going to be outnumbered in almost all engagements.
Yeah, once you get to 2300 ish the Marines start to have better aim, and they finally know how to move as skulks.
I just want there to be a way to be able to gorge or command in a pub without having a terrible team as player with higher skill; anyone with higher elo is basically forced to carry lerk or fade or they're just gonna get steam rolled based on how the current elo system works, uwe pls
As a pub player who stays 1000-1500 who has 3k rounds on hive and near 100more wins than losses : the hive scores are worthless.
Scrap it all, because they just promote smurfs. When considering the price drop and the skin market::: I just want to say: Let's have a pay to own game again... Let's remove the Rookie color all together. The people who just turn that trash on when they feel like it, and no one cares just happens to be another item in a list of failing attributes that seem ignored.
I would love to point at admins and tell them to do their job, but they have to strugle for support to maintain their server...
In the mean time, People can only wonder if balance issues are EVER going to be addressed.
Comments
In addition to this, it's not a stretch to imagine having access to accurate stats and visualizations capturing a player's competencies and historical tendencies - both pre-match and post-match - in which the huge range of contributing variables would be covered in the form of per-player and per-team summaries. While this data wouldn't necessarily be able to contribute directly to the skill measure (and therefore wouldn't necessarily be used to determine shuffle balance), it would be more than useful in assessing a team's weak spots, organizing, and defining necessary roles per-round (any tools added to facilitate this sort of communication would be additionally beneficial).
Does that sound like fun?
Note that this sample size is super limited, and only on 8v8s. On TGNS, there's almost 2 to 1 alien wins, but interestingly, the lower skill ones are marine wins.
Actually a perfectly balanced match would in fact be decided by the human element. Someone making a mistake, someone executing a brilliant play, someone making a counter.
Football is a perfectly balanced game. A lot of people find that fun. A perfectly balanced game is what we humans seek, so we can truly test ourselves against others. The Olympics are balanced, any serious sport is as balanced as possible so the only deciding factor is the individual human performance.
Sports where focus is on stuff other than the human (modern F1 for example) is pretty boring to watch (although I still do), as the disparity is purely technical, it is procession like .
Maybe the issue could be simply addressed by playing 6v6 and not 10v10
@NousWanderer : Everything you mentioned was said before. Months ago actually. But granted, you did organized it well. My poor English is far behind.
Lastly the things you describe in the second post are related to behavior (good/bad actions). Stuff like damage on players or damage on structures (and other things). We already have the stats if I'm correct.
As much as I like TGNS, I do not think it is really representative here. Yes there are some very skilled regulars but overall hive score is about 1500. A 1500 hive skill is fairly above average but it is not near the skill level of a 2000 hive skill team.
On top of that TGNS is 8v8 so it does not suffer from the large player counts of 12v12 servers.
In my opinion most of the regulars on TGNS, myself included, are much more skilled at aliens than marines. For example, when I play aliens most games my hive skill can go past 2000. When I play marines most of the time it drops below 1800.
Basically this.
More than 8 man servers are great for less that 2000 skill groups.
As the skill goes up, the number of players per team should decrease and approach 6.
You will break this game if you attempt to balance for 10v10 at 2k-3k skill.
Yep. There are several 7v7 servers (4 spec slots) that would be ideal for this environment in pubs. I think TAW has one as well as Hellarious Bastards.
And I find the shotgun recap in ffa way too strong. Unless a gorge is here someone will always recap it. You can't just wait that much time near it and if you try you will need to kill after the shotguner atleast 1 marine nearby plus the respawner again.... with meds. in lower skill games you won't have the med spam or the full marine team trying to steal the free shotgun.
Sadly i don't see a way to adress this without making alien stronger in lower skill games. Maybe reduce the shotgun recap by 75% since the ability to pick it back was something for competitive 6v6 in the first place.
Many pub players with a relative high skill score have really problems to gather up for important engagements.
Im far from descent but even i know, if a player like Tane for example is harassing a harvester alone, he is still very dangerous.
So never, really NEVER try to kill him alone.
Maybe with luck or an very good ambush this could work.
But most of the time its going like this:
"Logi under attack"
One skulk runs in - dead
"Its Tane"
Next skulk runs in - dead
The 3rd skulk is waiting for more players.
Meanwhile other marines approach the other natural, and skulks run there-
The 3rd skulk is still waiting
After a endless time, 3 skulks engage Tane
But they doing this in a horrible way, all dead.
Now all harvesters are lost and the aliens are trapped in the defend trap with no resbiting.
Without 1 or 2 descent Lerks, game is over now.
Even very few people parasite and then try to bite around corners which is not true ambushing and gives marine players info to push.
Try ambushing using sound only and without peaking. So few people check corners on public...
Hehehehe that reminds me I once could walk around the entire map behind a marine (MS to furthest away hive) and he did not even look behind him once. Not even responding to the very obvious clicketyclick behind him. I tend to see that as a potential, low quality headphones set to surround so they are kinda deaf from behind.
OR they think that clicketyclick sound is part of the game
But yeah, this is some oddball behavior from other games I think. I've done this very same thing in other games as well. They do not look up, they do not look behind them and they tend to ignore sounds. Ambushing also doesn't come into their mind and if you do ambush they tend to pull the camper card.
One easy solution would be not to balance teams skills equally.
Function that will give uneven ratio when server is big and avg. player skill is big:
ratio = 1 + ((x / 2500)^6) * ((y / 22)^3)
where:
x - avg. skill ratio of players on server
y - server slots
http://www.livephysics.com/tools/mathematical-tools/online-3-d-function-grapher/?xmin=0&xmax=2500&ymin=0&ymax=40&zmin=Auto&zmax=Auto&f=1+((x/2500)^6)*((y/22)^3)
example values:
skill | server slots | balance ratio
500 12 1,00
1000 12 1,00
1500 12 1,01
2000 12 1,04
2500 12 1,16
500 18 1,00
1000 18 1,00
1500 18 1,03
2000 18 1,14
2500 18 1,55
500 20 1,00
1000 20 1,00
1500 20 1,04
2000 20 1,20 <-- we start balancing our case
2500 20 1,75
500 30 1,00
1000 30 1,01
1500 30 1,12
2000 30 1,66
2500 30 3,54
500 40 1,00
1000 40 1,02 <-- big servers with low skill aren't affected
1500 40 1,28
2000 40 2,58
2500 40 7,01
If you have skill separated between factions though, there shouldn't BE a need for this.
What I expect will happen realistically, is that most high level players will have much higher marine skill than alien skill. The system should balance the teams correctly then, even accounting for imbalanced factions. The guys with monster high marine ranks, will simply have to endure always playing aliens in pubs..
Actually team 2 will win in nearly all matches. You have a selection of scores wherin the rest of team 2 is not useless, and you have one extreme outlier to carry the team. A 3800 represents a pro fade who cannot be killed in a pub, or a similarly skilled marine who can lock down an entire lane by himself, or who requires a massive response to prevent RT harass/killing. He can't win the game solo, but provided the rest of his team is competent enough to do the grunt work he can guarantee victory.
There The major issue here is that a single 4000 does not equal two 2000s. He equals about 5. On the other hand, a spread of only about 300 hive points is relatively minor. A 1500 vs a 1200 is near enough to an even match in any given engagement. At best, the 1500 might win 3 to 2 in one on one, but with the 3800 occupying nearly half of his team he's going to be outnumbered in almost all engagements.
Santaclaws is very correct here. If hive 2.0 is finished, one of its supposed features is separate skills for aliens and marines. This alone should increase the likelihood of balanced games.
Reading this I think I should note that balancing on average skill alone is not enough. Teams should be balanced with both average skill and the standard deviation of skill in mind. The default configuration for shines shuffle function does just that.
Standard deviation is a measure of the variation in a distribution or set of data. Basically it is a measure of how far apart the values are.
Even if teams are balanced with both average skill and the standard deviation of skill in mind, that does not guarantee good games. In my experience I see the standard deviation of skill on a team range from 400 to 1000. Both are ridiculously high values for a standard deviation, but that is the nature of ns2. Ns2's playerbase is too small to realistically find near skill games. That small playerbase is the root cause of those high standard deviations.
If it's a chill game, which all of them are at this point, your clickety clacks gotta compete with music, video, cooking show... You get the idea. It's just ns2 it's not that important.
Yeah, once you get to 2300 ish the Marines start to have better aim, and they finally know how to move as skulks.
1500 isn't a concern ever
(an the Hive/Shuffle should count skill levels separately for tsf/kharaa/comm/khomm)
Scrap it all, because they just promote smurfs. When considering the price drop and the skin market::: I just want to say: Let's have a pay to own game again... Let's remove the Rookie color all together. The people who just turn that trash on when they feel like it, and no one cares just happens to be another item in a list of failing attributes that seem ignored.
I would love to point at admins and tell them to do their job, but they have to strugle for support to maintain their server...
In the mean time, People can only wonder if balance issues are EVER going to be addressed.
They wont though. They'll make smurf accounts, as they do already
This, started playing again and they stand out like a sore thumb.