#Comprehensive Team Balance Theory

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

lucid pendant
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The screenshot provided is the result of very minimal team switching. It is entirely up to round-robin to assign players to teams. The teams assigned in this screenshot are the result of round-robin assignments. The game is two years old and the level disparity is getting to a point where balancing is becoming crucial to the overall enjoyment of the game. Good samariatans and bad actors can only effect the balance so much. The worst enemy of team balance right now is round-robin assignment. Lets observe a few reasons that round-robin is absolutely terrible for the balancing of teams.

Map_Balance.png
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Backfill and Percieved Disadvantage

If you were to assign an average level to your everyday backfill player, It would be around level 40. Players are much more likely to stay in games with perceived advantage and more likely to leave games with percieved disadvantage. Knowing which maps are easier for Agatha or Mason is a piece of knowledge that takes time to aquire. A level 20 player is not going to know that Dark forest defense is agony. A level 100 player likely will. Therefore the level 20 has no perceived disadvantage so they dont leave as often.

This is where backfill comes in. Players with knowlege of match-ups will leave games with disadvantage and stay in games with advantage. This leads to round-robin destroying teams with the law of averages alone. High level players stay on winning teams and low level players backfill losing teams.

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Random Assignment is Inherently Bad

Without even considering backfill, teams can become completely imbalanced just by nature of the round-robin assignment. All the high-level and low-level players can happen to end up on the same opposite teams by nature of random chance. Round-robin seems to apply to groups in the same way that it does to individuals (Correct me if im wrong devs). Resulting in huge swings of team strength with one random assignment. For example. If a 4-man group comes up for team selection in the queue, it can just as easily end up on the same team as another 4-man group. The screenshot shows a simple way to do it instead that would help make teams more balanced from the jump

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A self-fulfilling prophecy: Checkpoint Balance

Checkpoints that are winnable often become impossible due to the perceived disadvantage. Especially at the start of the game. The first point of Dark forest (The real first point, not the barricades) is extremely winnable, yet the perceived disadvantage of the map often leaves the defenders down 3-6 people for a huge portion of the beginning of the game. When backfill arrives, its more commonly an average level player as apposed to someone higher level with the ability to turn the tides, also even when they do arrive, the attacking team has made such a large zerg with its numbers advantage thats its often too late.

This is a blatant self-fullinling prophecy. "We are gonna lose this point anyway". I would argue many "unwinnable" points in the game are just the result of poor team balance and lack of desire to win them.

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High-level Players are not the only issue

There is never any discussion about actually balancing teams. Only that high level players should be evenly divided evenly, which honestly would only solve part of the problem. Having too many brand new players can ruin a team. I'm not trying to shame new players, but its just a reality that they tend to make big mistakes that do lots of damage to the team. Having too many sub-level 25 players is just imbalanced teams in a different way. Having all level 30's while your enemy team has mostly level 100's is also imbalanced.

My proposed tiers for which levels should be evenly balanced are as follows. Is this a perfect solution? No. Its better than nothing though.

  • Level 1 - 25 (Will make massive mistakes constantly that will ruin engagements)
  • Level 26 - 100 (Your average player)
    -Level 100-250 (Often has the power to make big swings in the game)
  • Level 250+ (Often players that carry)

Teams would automatically balance this way at the start if the players were sorted by level before assigning teams. There would need to be an algorithm that deals with this in the middle of games.

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In Summary + TL;DR

Would this perfectly solve team balancing ? Is it a perfect system? Absolutely not. Yet something should still be attempted. Fighting experienced players with nothing but level 6's on your team is not fun, for either team. Stomps are boring, getting stomped is boring. The randomness of teams just gets worse as the average level of players gets higher. When the game first released, round-robin was fine, because everyone was close to the same level. Now its just a disaster.

TL;DR

  • Round-robin is bad.
  • Balancing low levels is just as important as balancing high levels
plain gull
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You got one red circle supposed to be green

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Totally agree though

lucid pendant
teal veldt
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Having a low level doesn't necessarily mean they're shit. Highly experienced players can buy multiple accounts if they wanted to

lucid pendant
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Mainly trying to avoid critical mass games of complete imbalance.

plain gull
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With this steam release i see some sneaky guys pretending to be noob when we start fighting but i can tell

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If they that high level and bad they know what they getting into

proud crypt
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I wanna be on elbow's team!

visual citrus
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Biggest issue is that on most maps defense just absolutely blows to play, so most swap to Offense and that doesn't help the problem

plain gull
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Dont swap pus..... Person

bright siren
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You could have a threshhold that has a limit of level differences, for example if a team has a total level of 3000 and the other is 1500 you could force an auto balance

lucid pendant
bright siren
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@lucid pendant I just want them to fix it lol, been years and is still an issue which is a bummer because I prefer defense, find it much more satisfying to win. Dark Forest (when the teams are far) is an incredibly enjoyable map, but sucks because it is unbalanced a large majority of the time

proud crypt
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Dark forest gives me ptsd (Post Traumautic Stack Disorder)

visual citrus
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Just add old Dark Forest

proud crypt
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Least stacked dark forest match

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agile grove
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TLDR

wet sparrow
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Honestly I don’t even mind team swapping, my only gripe is that defense is inherently unfun to play due to map design. You’re put into forced lose situations until you get the one defensible stage of the map.

agile grove
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Devs just need to make every map more defense sided. Stronger spawns for defense, better forward respawns for retreaters. More defense controlled healing stations

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Only map where it’s genuinely hard for attack is Thayic & Baudeyn which have ample healing stations and defense controlled stationary weapons

bright siren
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@agile grove I actually find Bridgetown to be easy on defense, the part with the farm and protecting the stands in the second last stage is pretty easy to win, Id say Bridgetown is almost defensively favoured

agile grove
bright siren
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We actually just got a defensive win on the nobles stage, second time only for me, if it gets there it is usually game over

agile grove
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Last 5 games that got to last stage in Bridgetown tenosia won for me

bright siren
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@wet sparrow my main issue with team switching is it usually leads to severly unbalanced teams usually in favour of offense, defense is already tough enough as it is lol

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@agile grove i find the same in Baudwin, plenty of defensive wins pre bombard stage but it is insanely hard to win at that stage

eager topaz
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the problem with defense is that defense ends maps early, and people like to play the maps they like, but defense loses without reward or purpose until it simply wins for the most part

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the obvious solution is that chiv 2 should run TO lobbies in some form of stopwatch configuration, but that's rough when that'd make each map something like 30-50 minutes

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most of the maps up through tenosia have problem points which are problems because of 64p playercounts because this is actually a 40p game, and torn banner thinks they can simply balance for both(they're wrong) and have the maps be good.

Galencourt is their sole victory there, and even that has a fucked point(the second explosives gate) and every single point on the map other than the statues is defensible.

warm crystal
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Nice writeup 🙂 I agree that team balance on match creation needs improvement. I think that backfill improvements are nice-to-have but less important than improving initial lobby balance

I'm not convinced that player level is the best heuristic for skill. What do you think about KD or win rate? No individual metric is perfect, but I think either of those better approximates a player's current skill and contribution to team success than player level can

bright siren
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@warm crystal kill/death isnt a great measure of skill all the time, some players run around finishing off people and do next to no actual fighting ("kill stealing" but I dont like that term as the point of the game is too kill but it is incredibly easy to just seek out people who are in 1vx situations and get the final strike), ive seen people with low k/d who are great at the game and people with high k/d who are crap. Obviously this doesnt apply all the time

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Realistically there is no set in stone measure of skill, you can do w/l but people who switch teams constantly may have high win ratios solely based on that

I think level is the best way because while higher level doesnt mean better, it usually means they have a better understanding of how maps go and will be more likely to contribute to the objectives

warm crystal
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I don't disagree there are edge cases. There's never a perfect solution. But we're really considering two things here:

  1. What best approximates TO success for the average player
  2. How bad is it when the approximation's wrong due to an edge case

Based on my personal experience as a 250+ USW player I feel like it's very rare to see someone at the top of the scoreboard (high KD) who has low impact on team success. Typically, even if someone is farming kills in TO they're still contributing to the team's success by preventing opponents from completing the objective. The only players with high KDs and low impact are the rare few who farm AFKs. It's not really possible to have a high KD and not also understand how maps and objectives work, which was your justification for player level

W/L is interesting where it should theoretically be a good approximation but because you can freely team swap right before the match ends it fails the 2nd criteria. The type of people who team swap do so consistently and thus would have an outsized negative effect on W/L's ability to predict success. I concede that it isn't a good idea

eager topaz
warm crystal
plain gull
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Objectives are hot spots hot spots means more death

bright siren
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Pretty much every game Ive played tonight has been totally unbalanced, pretty bad

eager topaz
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idk what the fuck was up today, but before MFL the games were such an unbelievable shitfuck that I had a 13 minute darkforest and I had this coxwell happen.
I was just messing around leveling cudgel a bit since I'm still eventually going to get every melee weapon to rank 30, maybe throwing axes and throwing mallets if I feel like it(I have the 1h spear at 30 so I'm not also doing the javelin. They're the same weapon but javelin is faster and has heinous throwing damage.)

Screenshot_from_2023-07-28_14-32-45.png Screenshot_from_2023-07-28_15-10-26.png
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after MFL I went to play some LTS and then queued with a couple pax members so we imbalanced the lobbies ourselves after that, but even then it wasn't as bad as what was happening earlier today when I was alone

bright siren
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@eager topaz jeeze thats bad, you like using many weapons eh? I stick with the same lol, through out two classes too (falcion/mace on man-at-arms and guardian)

eager topaz
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took a couple months break after 2.8 or my cav sword would have a lot more exp

bright siren
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Yeah I took a break for 6 months when I left Canada due to my internet being bad

agile grove
lucid pendant
wicked niche
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also consider both team have the same amount of PC/console ratio, (attacking team are high levels, but so easy to beat)
also consider KD ratio too into the equation, because level can be an outliar

visual citrus
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Hi Elbow

lucid pendant
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No one switched. Game made these teams.

image.png
plain gull
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Literally