6 replies to this topic

[Nitris]

It is not so much of an issue now what with how desperately people are trying to get into games, but soon enough there will come a time when 2 players leave team A, and team B has 2 or sometimes even 3 more people than team A, with nothing anyone can do but hope that someone else joins to even things out.

I want the option to be able to swap teams if I die but only if it will not unbalance the teams. Meaning I can't join the other team if it is already equal numbers on both teams, or indeed if the team I'm trying to join has more people on it than mine.

Autobalance and autoswitch is a touchy subject for me, personally I find it extremely frustrating when I get automatically switched to the other team.

[EmFire]

I mostly agree with the OP.

I just played a match that was imbalanced 2:1 because of people leaving between matches, and the game did not autobalance. I would have switched manually had there been the option. Perhaps the Switch button could only appear when the teams are unbalanced by more than one player to limit team stacking abuse.

Edited by EmFire, October 30 2012 - 02:10 AM.

[Merxe]

Whenever the teams are uneven, for 5-10 seconds, a message would pop-out for every player in the bigger team: The teams are uneven. Would you like to switch to the opposing team_ You press F2 for No and the message disappears or F1 for Yes and you immediately spawn on the other team.

Also, ability to call a vote to shuffle teams according to XP. That worked well in Enemy Territory and thar game is still alive after many years.

[Nitris]

Maybe at the beginning of a match the teams get shuffled based on the amount of EXP earned in the previous match. If it is a fresh match where there isn't a previous match then of course people can swap and join to their hearts content.

I've noticed that at the beginning of new matches after one team has dominated another there are a lot of people who try to join the team with the previous game's MVP, or just the team containing the largest amount of players from the winning team. It is understandable, but there needs to be a fair way to do this.

I would be really against this kind of team scramble thing happening mid match. It is infuriating to be shoved onto the team you were just beating, after all your hard work.
The simple fact is, one team has to win, and the other has to lose.

[Nitris]

buuump

[DarkPulse]

Either this, or some sort of "enforced" Team rebalancing like Unreal Tournament 3. (Please make the balancing logic better than UT3's, though!) I think this, along with Nitris' original idea, would work well:

• If there's an imbalance, the game cycles through the numerically superior team's players, asking if they want to switch.
  
• If the team is down only by one person, auto-switching is not made mandatory. Let's face it, a team can generally cope with being down a single man.
  
• If the team is down by two or more players, auto-switching is enforced if not enough people switch over to balance the numbers (or reduce it to no more than one person advantage). This prevents people from stacking the teams and simply refusing to switch, and it also gives the players on the other team themselves a choice without it automatically slapping someone over. How it decides who to switch, though, is a trickier proposition - and let's not forget, nobody likes to be "stuck" on a losing team if they were winning, although if they quit when they do this, it does effectively weaken the formerly stronger team and could make for a fairer game.

I was part of a Siege match where basically almost the entire enemy team ragequit after we began pouring ships down their throats. At one point it was 1v4. I felt so bad for the guy that I essentially left him alone. That, along with one person on our team leaving, meant he "only" had to deal with a 1v2, basically.

However, I should also stress out that this whole auto-switching system, if implemented, should be optional on the servers. Have some servers with it enforced on, have some servers with it off. Obviously, if private servers are ever allowed, then it should be an option for the server owner to enable or disable at their whim (as clans will no doubt want to have it disabled for things like scrims and the like).

Edited by DarkPulse, October 31 2012 - 10:30 AM.

[BeefC4ke]

I also want to see this.

Simple Rules:
1. Button is only active when the teams are not balanced. Maybe at a timer so that a match that has a lot of people joining/leaving won't have the button active on/off all the time.
2. No auto balance. As much as I hate it when people won't switch teams I hate being forced to switch.