Auto-balance

[JiF]AlbieDamned · Post by **[JiF]AlbieDamned** » Mon Feb 05, 2007 6:04 pm

There was a lot of complaining about auto-balance this weekend. Some of the complaining was just whining of course, but I think there is some merit to the complaints. The problem is that auto-balance doesn't seem to take into account human players vs bots. So sometimes you wind up with teams made up of almost all humans vs teams with only a few humans and the rest bots. Needless to say, the humans on the bot-heavy team get slaughtered. And when auto-balance is on, there's no way even for well-intentioned people to switch teams to even it up.

Is there a way to make auto-balance consider human vs bot? If not, should we turn off auto-balance? I suspect that in coop mode, the total # of players will always be balanced anyway, cause the AI will just add/subtract bots as needed. And with auto-balance off, at least people have the possibility to switch teams to balance out the number of human players on each side.

[JiF]KellysHero · Post by **[JiF]KellysHero** » Mon Feb 05, 2007 6:38 pm

Human's vs. bots, sounds controversial, better lock the thread!

And on a side note, we've run into the problem before and no fix has been found that I know of.

[JiF]Stepovich · Post by **[JiF]Stepovich** » Mon Feb 05, 2007 8:48 pm

Yeah, this was beat to death on another thread.

A few things were tried, but I think that's as good as it gets.

I think most of the whining comes from OldSoldier...
He complains about the teams, INVARIABLY, every time
he's on!!
He seems to have a sense of humor about it at least.

[JiF]AlbieDamned · Post by **[JiF]AlbieDamned** » Mon Feb 05, 2007 9:14 pm

Yes, Old Soldier was definitely the chief whiner. Speaking of players, has anyone else noticed how good this guy Panzerbone is? He was killing me over and over yesterday.

Anyway, so the consensus from the previous discussion on this topic was not to turn off auto-balance? I'd vote for turning it off, so that people can voluntarily switch teams to even up the number of human players. Most of the people playing seem pretty friendly and cooperative, so I bet they would switch when asked. And of course us Jiffers would.

[JiF]Sly Gambit · Post by **[JiF]Sly Gambit** » Mon Feb 05, 2007 10:57 pm

[JiF]AlbieDamned wrote:Yes, Old Soldier was definitely the chief whiner. Speaking of players, has anyone else noticed how good this guy Panzerbone is? He was killing me over and over yesterday.

Yeah. A couple times he almost got withing 10 points of my gold star.

There are a few particular maps that have problems with the bot v. human issue. Generally it's large maps (El Al and Gazala are probably the worst) where when the map loads the team assignments give the computer players and anyone loaded at a particular time the first x number of slots - always on one side. When the game starts up, if you have a fast load time, you'll see about 10 bots on one side with 3 or 4 humans and hte other side will just have 3 or 4 humans.

That is a sign that the map took too long to load and the side with only 3 or 4 humans will be the one that eventually receives the rest of the humans. Meaning it'll be 13 on 3 human v. human.

And turning off the autobalance doesn't help. The game won't autobalance bots - only humans. So if you had autobalance off and people switched to the mostly-bot team you'd still end up with a messed up ratio.

I try to switch if the chance comes up but for the most part I just deal with it. I'm trying to get it so some conquest maps are loaded so once we get 12-20 people on the machine we can switch to them and autobalance does what it's supposed to do.