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[scroggage]

The Auto-Scramble Balance Thingy (ASBT) on Server 1 has kind of a mixed reception amongst members and regs now I think... could we possibly review it, or at least the conditions it activates on?

Several games last night and on Saturday and Thursday we had rounds where the teams were really nicely balanced and scramble would still kick in, making it a steamroll.

It seems at the moment that if one team does slightly better, they get scrambled, as if no-one is allowed to win. It's often really fun when the teams are slightly stacked so that one team is a bit better, because the other team has more of a challenge and the game can often still be as fun.

Personally I'd quite like to see the ASBT kept in, but only activated when it really is an absolute steamroll and one team is getting obliterated.

I thought I'd make this thread to see what other people's ASBT thoughts are?

[CruelCow]

Agreed, the kill difference seems to kick in at unneeded points. I think it was at attack/defense maps?

In general, I love it, it seems to be impossible to get people to votescramble, no matter how hard the steamroll is. They'd rather leave the server >.<

[Naftman]

I'm just wondering about the logic behind the script.

How does it detect steamrolling ?
Does it take into account players with ridiculously high scores like Cheez for example ?
How about MVP scorings ? I'm just curious.

I think a scramble script is indeed necessary, but a review wouldn't be a bad idea at all.

Sometimes the script nails it (in terms of autobalance), but sometimes, just 1 player gets moved, and the steamrolling continues :-)

[Ringelbeatz]

The Auto-Scramble Balance Thingy (ASBT) on Server 1 has kind of a mixed reception amongst members and regs now I think... could we possibly review it, or at least the conditions it activates on?

Several games last night and on Saturday and Thursday we had rounds where the teams were really nicely balanced and scramble would still kick in, making it a steamroll.

It seems at the moment that if one team does slightly better, they get scrambled, as if no-one is allowed to win. It's often really fun when the teams are slightly stacked so that one team is a bit better, because the other team has more of a challenge and the game can often still be as fun.

Personally I'd quite like to see the ASBT kept in, but only activated when it really is an absolute steamroll and one team is getting obliterated.

I thought I'd make this thread to see what other people's ASBT thoughts are?

Exactly my thoughts!

Maybe add the option to turn it off when Admins are on the server.

[Junta]

In my old leader days, i stayed away from this kind of server mod because there was never the "right solution".

I concur with scrogg that you do get unwanted results, however i disagree with the cause. I personally find the scrambles happening at the right time, ie after a steamroll. However, after the scramble, the sides are often much worse! The mod doesnt try to keep the higest scorers / dominators appart?
 

[CruelCow]

@Naft:

Following a suggestion from Torgue and a consultation with the admin team we have added a more fully featured team scramble plugin to Server #1.

Features:

Auto Scramble
The new plugin will perform an automatic scramble when one of the following conditions is met:
- A team wins with a frag ratio of 2 or greater
- A team wins a round in less than 120 seconds
- The average score difference between the players on the team is greater than 10
- One team has 5 more dominations than the other team
- If one team never captures the point in koth mode

Vote Scrambles
- Public players may now initiate a votescramble if no admin is present.
- 60% majority is needed to initiate a vote and 60% majority is required to scramble the teams
- There must be at least 6 players on the server for votes to work

General Scramble Settings
- Scrambles will not happen with less than 12 players
- If a scramble happens during setup, the setup timer is restored
- No-one has immunity (not even me )
- If scramble happens during set-up, the medic's ubercharge is refilled
- All scrambles are done RANDOMLY
- Auto-scrambles will not happen two rounds in a row or twice during one round

We will be trialling this over the next few weeks - so please leave comments and suggestions in this thread.

Thanks

[discordance]

i think its worth looking into its kill difference behaviour, there clearly should be more kills going to defence and if it ignores that its going to trigger unnecessary balancing.

And at a guess it probably randomises the teams which isn't really a good way of doing things when you are trying to find a balance. The problem though for the script is how does it find a better balance having access to only a scripts allocation of resources and needing to come up with an answer quickly. Perhaps it does do a quick player ranking and tries to move one or two players but quickly gives up and defaults to a random shuffle.

[scroggage]

Seems to me the simplest way for it to balance the teams would be to find an arrangement of teams where total points were as near even as possible, wouldn't require much processing.

[Naftman]

Thx for that Cruelcow !

That's the detection part... But what happens after that ?
Randomizing is the easiest solution, but sometimes doesn't help. Looking at player scores/kill ratios/mvp status (and so forth) is a lot more complex to write, but would result in much better balancing.

Ah well, I'll see where this thread goes.

[Leftism]

(Assumes the scramble plugin is similar to gScramble. Which is what NuB use for both servers.)

Naftman.

Scrambling teams can be random, although it can scramble in terms of:
- Scores
- Scores/Time
- Kill/Death Ratio

Exceptions are:
- Engineers with buildings
- (Possibly) Admins. Although we tend to make admins scramble-able, anyway.

Hope that answers your question.

[DeadlyAvenger]

I picked random because it was the 'fairest' and simplest way to do things. You can't argue with it if it scrambles the teams randomly.

The main reason for putting the mod onto the server was following a lot of complaints of steamrolls and unbalanced teams - and if enough people agreed then an admin could have initiated a team scramble (which would have been random regardless - so you still may get even more unbalanced teams)

But yes - there are a handful or so of other alternative methods to do the scramble such as those that Leftism has mentioned. We are indeed using the gScramble plugin, so by all means look it up on the sourcemod website and propose alternative values.

You can see the conditions for scrambling as quoted above so I will listen to constructive criticism about what values to change and what to.

Unfortunately it will be impossible to please everyone with this - but I do feel that it has overall had a positive impact on the server and when it was instigated I did say it was running as a trial and would be reviewed however this is the first chance I have had to see any feedback on it (considering no-one has either posted in the original threads in the public/admin section of the forums about it)

[Officer Dibble]

I do feel that it has overall had a positive impact on the server

Agreed, I rarely see it make the teams worse.

Is there any option to reverse the scramble or have an automatic vote to reverse it in the odd case it does make the team balance worse?

[Brahms]

I think it's working fine.

[scroggage]

I picked random because it was the 'fairest' and simplest way to do things. You can't argue with it if it scrambles the teams randomly.

Have to disagree there. It still leaves it pretty open to just shuffling Cheez, Dodgy, Beau etc all onto one team. I wouldn't have made the thread if there hadn't been actual occasions where it had made the teams less fair, as John said.

I think the things that erroneously trigger it most often are the "domination difference" and the "average scores" thing. There are some times when it triggers that really leave you wondering why and these seem to be the only explanation.

[Lullaby]

Maybe it is possible to discard this "player xyz want's to rejoin the other team"-thingy? As I noticed mostly everyone is so fair and tries to rejoin if he notices that the teams are unfair..