I'm so glad that we're having a conversation about the balancer, thank you @skynet for starting this post.
As a person who plays pretty much every day, I feel like I've got a decent insight into the natural behaviours of the system and I'm always trying to understand the balancer's configuration and what it's trying to achieve. I wanted to just put a few thoughts down to add to the discussion and also take the opportunity to ask a few questions.
When player churn occurs, and we go from an 8-8 balance to an 8-6, the balancer does indeed do its job although it may take a little while for it to recognize it has to do it, so I often call !t immediately especially in clutch situations because IT IS GOING TO HAPPEN but it can often be delayed.
Is the balancer really taking a player's historical profile into account for balancing purposes? This is my main question, it's very interesting that certain players and I never get to play on the same team and I wonder if that's by design or if it's just a random occurrence.
I'm completely in favour of punishing players who try to either use !r or !b to switch to winning teams (which happens all the time) or folks who purposefully !s in order to fuck with team balance. I think punishing folks who use !t is a little more severe; again for me personally, I try to use !t sparingly and only when it's obvious when the game is going to be a runaway. It really depends on the map.
Finally, my main plea, and I don't know if this is even possible, but here goes.
This is a perfect game to use as an example: https://eatsleeput.com/utstats/?p=match&mid=138735
So we started off and I was able to make good early ground, getting red up 3 caps and the score was 3-0. Then I got switched to blue. It's been difficult but I've been trying to accept the circumstances of the balancer. In some ways, I just consider it an added challenge to see how many caps I can get personally, so that's what I did here. I got 2 caps for blue, and now it's 3-2.
Then I got switched back to red again.
This is not a unique example, it happens all the time. So my plea is, if the balancer were going to reward anyone on a team, it should be the person who has the most CTF points (grabs, caps, flag tags, flag returns, and possibly flag kills but the number of points you get for them would skew the results). If I try to establish dominance as the Ronaldo of my team for that game, it would be nice if I got to play out the game on that team, even in the situation of player churn. My thought is, it IS a CTF server, so shouldn't CTF players be rewarded? Just a thought.
There was a time recently when I went !1 and it said +135 which was the HIGHEST number I've ever seen, and the balancer still refused to do anything. Perhaps this number really doesn't mean anything. I'm truly fascinated to understand the brain of this (occasionally evil) entity...
