• General

  • Spectating to affect team balance

For better or worse, the balancer is indeed doing its job. I've still witnessed a few people trying to winning team switch, and I think we confirmed before that it's not possible to completely remove the !r/!b commands because the balancer needs them to do their job, but for the most part I think team balance has been okay.

That being said, I've seen a sharp increase lately of players who are spectating to remove themselves from the game, let the balancer do its job, and then popping back in.

So I just wanted to offer a possible suggestion for this: is it possible to put a time block for any player who spectates, that would prevent them from rejoining for, say, 5 minutes after they spectated? At least then players couldn't just spectate and then hop back on immediately after team balance was affected. Not sure if it's possible, just thought I'd throw it out there as a thought!

    It always amazes me how people stroke their ego on a 25 year old game and doing shady shit instead of just trying to play like a regular person

    That can be a last resort to counteract people with random names that unbalance teams heavily.

    • UTNL replied to this.

      UTNL
      and what about those who have a temporary network failure while playing and get disconnected?

          Ooper It seems to me, based on the balancer and what's been laid out so far, that the prevailing attitude of the server should be that it's not up to us to make these decisions. I truly hope the balancer might get a more fine tuning to more value CTF players over DM players (which I think, if possible, would go a long way) but it still shouldn't be up to us to make these decisions. If there is a balancer, it should be up to the balancer, hard stop.

            player_0 I am just making suggestions, I don't know what's possible, but you're right, someone could just drop and then pop back on, so if there was a way to still force them spectate and wait something like 120 seconds if they re-enter an existing game for any reason, it would be a small price to pay for those who might abuse the system.

              Name based teambalncers don't work period, why do you think pug players use random nicks to get around it and have easier games to then over compensate and lame public players.

              If you want to play a more competetive and fair game, go play tetris!

              UTNL So I just wanted to offer a possible suggestion for this: is it possible to put a time block for any player who spectates, that would prevent them from rejoining for, say, 5 minutes after they spectated? At least then players couldn't just spectate and then hop back on immediately after team balance was affected. Not sure if it's possible, just thought I'd throw it out there as a thought!

              Yes thanks, I was considering for quite a long time already to put some sort of waiting period on returning to a match after going to spectate but it is tricky as others have pointed out. For the time being, I have been dealing with players that do that based on their history which eventually seems to display their intent when doing this.

              I've also considered having a maximum number of times each match that a player could reconnect and/or play/spectate. This max number of reconnects would stop the cheaters that won't install ACE problem, after ACE kicks them a few times, but it hasn't been a huge problem really anyway. It's maybe a once a year sort of issue that is solved manually pretty quickly.

              I still have plans to continue improving the balancer including doing something about how the records are hashed so simply changing names won't get you a lower strength. I also haven't forgotten all the other suggestions and cautions that were given in all of the previous discussions.

              • UTNL replied to this.

                  snowguy You're the best as always! Thank you for your tireless efforts to keep alive my only source of fun in a life otherwise completely blocked with coding. YOU ROCK!

                    we need some UT AI lol it can talk to the bots when no one is playing.

                    I wonder what these bots do when no one is playing? I think they go to some pubs to get drunk, because the next day they don't even listen to orders :\

                    Write a Reply...