Stock 4 Autobalance

[Zephyr 14]

Mana,

Please reconsider Valve's auto scramble that is on Stocks 4. Before this autoscramble, several good regulars would switch to the losing side in order to balance the teams because on Stocks 4, we prefer a good game rather than a win. This has completely stopped because of the scramble. However, team balance is worse than it was before the scramble was put in place. Giving donators immunity to the scramble completely ruins it because the donators are better than the average player. If they're not auto switched, it does nothing to balance teams.

The vast majority of the regulars agree with me on this. I've asked them dozens of times to complain on the forums, but they refuse because, for some reason, they think you won't listen to the people that play on your servers and pay you money.

Please, please change it back to the way it was before. We always had a votescramble that worked just fine. At the absolute least, please increase the number of wins required to auto scramble. It only gets rid of some players good will and usually does nothing to balance the teams.

[Lemon Jelly 26]

I agree and think it should be changed or modified.

[DDuckMan 0]

I agree. It actually makes the imbalance worse as often as it makes it better, and the threshold is way too low.

[Mana 3,867]

The autoscramble is a Valve default. Meaning it's on by default and the default criteria is 2 wins.

I won't be changing it per server and since there's only been a few complaints that's not nearly enough to make me increase the win limit on all servers.

For now, I deffer to Valve on autoscramble, so if its an issue to other people as well then complaints will make Valve adjust it. Except it seems there's more people thanking Valve for it than complaining.

[Zephyr 14]

Its not Valve default because Valve doesn't grant immunity to the best players. If its not a full scramble, what's the point?

[Zephyr 14]

At least on stocks 4, donors are almost exclusively better than average players.

[Bombz 31]

I don't play stocks but I tend to agree, most donors do wind up being better players. There's actually quite a good explanation as to why.

Usually, in the case of donors who only donate for their choice of 2 servers, they have vast knowledge of the map/gamemode they play. Besides that though, I wouldn't mind at all being balanced/scrambled even though I'm a donor.

But yeah overall valves scrambling/balancing sucks. Sometimes it will scramble the teams and they'll roll even harder the next time around.

[DAR 0]

I like the idea of the autoscramble, but I think the threshold is way too low. Say you have two evenly matched teams, yet one team wins twice in a row. If there is a scramble, that will just upset the balance. A lot of players enjoy the thrill of playing a balanced game, and it shouldn't be interfered. I think, at the very least, the threshold should be 3. Also, the point of a scramble is useless if there is even one person who is immune to it. Many of the donators seem to enjoy playing on the same team as each other and, regardless of any scramble, they will tip the balance. In addition, there are times when I've seen the autobalance not do a good job at all. I don't know how much control admins have over how it works (I doubt they have much at all), but there have been occasions when the player scores were not distributed evenly. I don't think the autobalance should be removed, because frankly, TF2 has a lot of casuals and pseudopros who think they are hot shit by being on the winning team and they refuse to help the losing team. However, I would enjoy some constancy as far as balanced teams go.

[HexStream 0]

I have to agree with Zeph and DAR here: the autobalance is broken and is in dire need of fixing.

[Mana 3,867]

I like the idea of the autoscramble, but I think the threshold is way too low. Say you have two evenly matched teams, yet one team wins twice in a row. If there is a scramble, that will just upset the balance. A lot of players enjoy the thrill of playing a balanced game, and it shouldn't be interfered. I think, at the very least, the threshold should be 3. Also, the point of a scramble is useless if there is even one person who is immune to it. Many of the donators seem to enjoy playing on the same team as each other and, regardless of any scramble, they will tip the balance. In addition, there are times when I've seen the autobalance not do a good job at all. I don't know how much control admins have over how it works (I doubt they have much at all), but there have been occasions when the player scores were not distributed evenly. I don't think the autobalance should be removed, because frankly, TF2 has a lot of casuals and pseudopros who think they are hot shit by being on the winning team and they refuse to help the losing team. However, I would enjoy some constancy as far as balanced teams go.

There's also votescramble which does not use Valve's scrambling system and will scramble everyone (no immunity).

[Uilamin 5]

There's also votescramble which does not use Valve's scrambling system and will scramble everyone (no immunity).

problem with votescramble is that with donator's ability to switch teams regardless of balance (can join teams when they heavily outnumber the other), people scrambled from the votescramble tend to just rejoin their old team if they have the power to do so. With the votescramble that takes into account people's immunities this happens less frequently/severely because the people with the power to arbitrarily switch teams at any time never get team switched so they will not forcefully move themselves back.

Maybe adding a votescramble option that takes into account immunity could help alleviate this

[Mana 3,867]

problem with votescramble is that with donator's ability to switch teams regardless of balance (can join teams when they heavily outnumber the other), people scrambled from the votescramble tend to just rejoin their old team if they have the power to do so. With the votescramble that takes into account people's immunities this happens less frequently/severely because the people with the power to arbitrarily switch teams at any time never get team switched so they will not forcefully move themselves back.

Maybe adding a votescramble option that takes into account immunity could help alleviate this

They can't switch teams anytime. Only exception being the very short grace period (in case they change their minds and want to go back). Depending on which version of our plugin the server is running it's either once every 10 minutes or once every 20 minutes.

[Uilamin 5]

They can't switch teams anytime. Only exception being the very short grace period (in case they change their minds and want to go back). Depending on which version of our plugin the server is running it's either once every 10 minutes or once every 20 minutes.

Hmmm k, my experience with the autoscramble is that it scrambles the teams and then all the donators just switch back to their original team if they moved away from it (assuming there was a stacking problem). This also however is on Stock #2 where the plug-in ruleset may be different (I have no idea)

[Zephyr 14]

There's also votescramble which does not use Valve's scrambling system and will scramble everyone (no immunity).

This is what we used frequently before the autoscramble was implemented. The threshold was set at a very reasonable 50% and it worked well.