Shuffle & Switch
.trixX.
Budapest Join Date: 2007-10-11 Member: 62605Members
Budapest Join Date: 2007-10-11 Member: 62605Members
We all know how annoying shuffle can be when we are playing the same team the 5th time in a row.
How about a very simple, Switch vote option after each shuffle? It would not swap players individually, rather the whole teams if a certain amount of votes are cast.
For eg:
8v8, 4 and 5 players votes to switch, the teams are switched.
8v8, 3 and 8 players votes to switch, no switch occurs (one of the teams has less than 50% votes)
No, it won't help most of the time, but can be useful like 1 out of 10 times and does not mess up the original balance...
It could also hint at team preference per map as a bonus.
How about a very simple, Switch vote option after each shuffle? It would not swap players individually, rather the whole teams if a certain amount of votes are cast.
For eg:
8v8, 4 and 5 players votes to switch, the teams are switched.
8v8, 3 and 8 players votes to switch, no switch occurs (one of the teams has less than 50% votes)
No, it won't help most of the time, but can be useful like 1 out of 10 times and does not mess up the original balance...
It could also hint at team preference per map as a bonus.
Comments
Maybe store the last team a player was on and make it far less likely that they'll get shuffled to that side again. Or last five games...some variation of that.
But I don't think those are reasonable expectations, so why not go for something that is dead-simple and can actually help (sometimes)? :P
Another shuffle suggestion, which I don't want to make an own thread for:
I think it would be helpful if the vote shuffle timeout resets when the skilll deviation of the teams exceeds a configurable amount.
Currently you often have this scenario:
Alternatively, the system should trigger shuffle when players diconnect.
The Shine Admin mod is what has shuffle. Shuffle is not a vanilla feature. Vanilla has Force Even Teams which does something similar. Everybody uses shuffle because it is better.
My point is that the the feature mentioned in the OP, or by Bicsum, would be nice but it would take coding time from @GhoulofGSG9 or @Person8880 to implement it into shine.
Shine is on github. If someone else were to code it, it could potentially be merged into the main shine admin mod. Or it could sit as another shine extension on the workshop.
The problem here is not the idea, but finding someone willing to code it, and then convincing server ops to use the feature.
On a related note, I know a few people have asked @Wyzcrak to seperate a few of TGNS's best features into separate shine extensions so that other communities could beneifit from them. This includes the Switch/Swap feature and Score and Scoreboard Enhancements.
The post still sands though, any (easily implemented) ideas are welcome. I'm not a big fan of LUA, but I could give it a try.
After a pre-game shuffle (or Force Even Teams, or whatever), individual players are able via simple, pre-game chat commands to propose roster changes involving specific players. A player may ask to:
) switch teams with any willing opponent (team preference w/o particular concern for balance)
-or-
) swap sides with a targeted, named player on the other team (personal team change WITH balance effort)
-or-
) ask two other and specifically targeted players on opposing teams to both swap sides (purely a balance effort -- the requesting player doesn't change teams)
Other players who are participants in the request have pre-game chat commands for accepting or refusing the proposal. The entire process commonly takes mere seconds without anyone bitching or moaning about post-shuffle rosters. And of course none of this applies once the game begins.
Shuffle does a forever decent and "imperfect" job at creating rosters, and the knowledgeable actors looking to tweak its results typically don't make balance or gameplay egregiously worse. In the unlikely event that they in good faith might, others can follow with additional pre-game switch/swap proposals. On TGNS, bad faith actors have not been a significant problem, and I'd anticipate same given any UWE design that might include such an offering in the stock game.
This offering strikes directly at the heart of pre-game roster unhappiness:
Unhappiness with post-shuffle rosters is rooted in actual knowledge about the players in those rosters -- if you don't know something about at least some of the players, you can't be unhappy with the rosters. In a world where we're all eager to complain when we're not happy, this gives any players unhappy with post-shuffle rosters the tooling they need to LEAD -- to solve the problem using their knowledge about the players involved. It highlights for everyone else present that anyone idly complaining (without proposing a solution) is doing so at the cost of actually trying to improve things, or that their complaint is all alone (the unhappy player proposed a solution, and no one actively accepted it) -- either way, it keeps the post-shuffle expressions constructive instead of misguided and disgruntled -- and THAT should be UWE's main goal with any offering they add to the stock game.
Given the complexities of proper NS2 roster balance, perception of balance and ownership in its design go a long way toward some players' satisfaction.