MULTIbalancer [1.1.6.0] 30-MAR-2015 + BFHL

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Originally Posted by PapaCharlie9*:

 

Is this the equivalent to the insane limits anti stack limit? The anti stack limit prevents you from moving to winning side when the game is almost over. There is a setting in IL: Code:

team1.RemainTicketsPercent < 50 || team2.RemainTicketsPercent < 50

It also said it in All chat which was nice.

 

When does MB start preventing moving to the winning team?

 

p.s. sorry if I missed this somewhere in this thread.

It's not equivalent, since there is no way to make it respect ticket count, which is Phase in MB. I guess I have to change the True/False Unswitcher settings to Always/Never/LatePhaseOnly.

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Originally Posted by PapaCharlie9*:

 

Only thing left to make this perfect for my server is allow me to disable lvl dispersal at Late Phase even if I set the Late Phase to Slow so it keeps balancing in case there are uneven player numbers.

That's automatic and is already in the prerelease version you have. There's no setting to change.

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Originally Posted by PapaCharlie9*:

 

Is there a way for MB to remember who it balanced in rounds prior? It would be nice if MB balanced a person one round but won't balance them the next. I had a player who got balanced for 3 rounds, each to the losing side He got mad and ended up leaving saying it was unfair. And I did notice he did get balanced to the losing side 3 rounds in a row.

Well ... fixing that problem would introduce another.

 

MB could remember who was moved, but what if every eligible player from the previous round was moved? That means no one can be moved in the next round. That's the extreme case, but it illustrates the problem. The more people marked as exempt, the smaller the pool of eligible players the next round. What that ends up doing is that only players who joined this round get moved.

 

I know some admins like that and lots of players expect that -- let the new guys who have no time invested in this server be the victims of moving -- but I personally hate servers that move me as the new guy. I waited 20 minutes in the wait queue to join a server my friends have been playing on a few rounds, I finally get it in, then I spend another 5 minutes yelling at them in chat to make room in their squad, which they finally do, then I get autobalanced to the other team.

 

This effect is even worse for Unstacking. If all the good players are exempt because they were moved last round, there's no one left to help a losing team.

 

I'm not ruling out making this change, I just need to see a bit more discussion of the pros and cons. Some thinking needs to be put into how long a player is exempt. Move one round, exempt the next, then eligible again? Basically move on odd rounds, exempt on even? More? Less? Some kind of total?

 

It all gets very complicated.

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Originally Posted by kcuestag*:

 

That's automatic and is already in the prerelease version you have. There's no setting to change.

I don't think it's working as intended, this morning I got someone complaining because he got moved when there were 55 tickets left, he was a lvl 145.

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Originally Posted by PapaCharlie9*:

 

I don't think it's working as intended, this morning I got someone complaining because he got moved when there were 55 tickets left, he was a lvl 145.

EDIT: Oops. Am I confused? I thought I sent you the pre-release 1.0.2.5 version in email. I can't find any record of doing so in my email, though. Apologies if you never got it. Check what version you are running and post it.

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Originally Posted by DeeVeeOss*:

 

KDR is the key.

-

Look. When there is a blowout match, if the kills and deaths are about even between the teams, there is no insult to the losing team.

If there is a blowout and the big killers are on the losing team, there is no insult.

-

The only time an insult occurs is when the LOSING team is victim to the top 3 best in the server being on the opposing team.

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More than appearances, an even KDR also moderates the game as good / better than SPM.

We tried them all and settled on SPM, but then we revisited KDR and found that it's as good or better than SPM.

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Definitely KDR.

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Originally Posted by DeeVeeOss*:

 

"It all gets very complicated."

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Yes and no.

 

The point of unstacking means that the best players in the server help out by switching teams, at some point, in order to better balance.

 

In a 32 man server, this will be between 1-4 people that could actually effect a difference.

To try to "balance" with the 3rd 4th 5th best option on a team is not balancing at all.

 

So as far as unstacking goes, it's quite simple, the same people, day in and day out, will generally be the unstackers.

 

 

In a full 32 man server, 50% of the the top scorers means the top 8 are up for consideration. If #8 gets moved, it's not even a mosquito bite's worth of an effect. 25% means the top 4 on that team are eligible.

 

That's more like it assuming 32 people. If it were 31 people, then that's only 3 people eligible.

 

This is where I have it zoned in on. Any less and it'll ALWAYS be the same person getting swapped EVERY time...any more and the swaps won't be worth a damn.

 

 

In the case of giving people swap immunity across rounds, that would completely negate the efficacy of the swapper.It's a self-defeating idea.

 

 

That said, in the case of inter-round, people should never be swapped more than once at all no matter what.

This is something that is currently giving me issues with the MB.

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Originally Posted by DeeVeeOss*:

 

Things we like about the MB:

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1. The Unswitch section is mint. We're loving that. (Functional)

 

2. The idea of our clan being evenly dispersed between teams at the beginning of the rounds (haven't figured out how yet, it often starts 5-2 not sure why...not listening to the disperal list or something)

 

3. The idea of swapping a maximum of 2 people, after 200 tickets in, if more than 130% out of spec, in order to help anti-stack (haven't figured out the setting yet as Max unstacking "2" and Number of Swaps "0" seems to allow for way more than "2" instances of balancing)

 

-

 

Questions:

 

1. Can we have the MultiBalancer evenly divide our clan members between teams at the beginning of the round?

 

2. Can we have the Multibalancer select 2 people, 1 time, mid-round, if needed, to swap from the winning team to the losing team?

Highest 25% KDR for Lowest KDR 25%

Early-0,0,0 Mid-0,130,130 Late-0,0,0.

Early defined as 200 tickets in. Late defined as 175 from finish.

 

3. Can we cancel the balancer function and use MB only as an...

-unstacker (no more than 2 instances @ mid-round if needed),

-pre-round clan divider

-unswitcher

 

...and then leave all the rest of the actual balancing features to TrueBalancer/Adaptive Balance?

 

-

 

Issues with MB:

 

-swapping the same person twice within a round

 

-no 'wait-death' option

 

-disperse list is causing undue targeting and balancing of clan members

a)when members join mid-round, causing an imbalance

b)members leaving mid-round, causing an imbalance

c)members being unstacked, causing an imbalance

 

This function needs to be a '1 and done' thing, pre-round, 1-time, and that's it.

 

It needs to turn itself off and not be a consideration until the next round so that if a clan member happens to be unstacked and/ balanced and/ joins and/ leaves that it doesn't then go ahead and balance based on clan tags, mid-round, for a second, third, fourth, or even fifth time.

 

For now, we can simply turn this function off, but we'd LOVE to have it in the future, but only as a 1-time pre-round consideration.

 

 

These are the preliminaries after a half-dozen hours of testing and tweaking.

 

I hope I didn't raise any stupid concerns, but to us, as it stands, it's a little too aggressive and I have a feeling it's mainly because of the "disperse list".

 

 

Ideas?

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Originally Posted by Necromancer*:

 

thanks PapaCharlie9 for the plugin.

however, i think there is a better way to balance the teams and keep them balanced.

first of all, the concept:

teams needs to be balanced by skill, not numbers. so allowing 20 vs 25 is fine, as long as the team with the 20 has higher skill then the team with the 25.

secondly

passive balancing:

balancing should be done at player join. as the player loads the game, he is already assigned to a team by the server.

find out that he's a new player, and put him in the less skilled team. this balances the teams without moving players.

a tune-able variable for it should be: if a team has more then % skill then the other team, then a new player cannot join the strong team.

(even teams have %50 - %50 skill, a good value for this would be 65%)

this is also true to players trying to change sides. they should not be permitted to join the strong side even if it has lower number of players ( because having more players on one team then the other is fine, its not an indication of unbalanced teams.)

 

introducing these options should greatly reduce the amount of active balancing done on the server.

 

there should also be a difference threshold tune-able variable. so that balancing accrues only if

|skill_team1 - skill_team2| >= threshold move a player.

skill is whatever the admin wants to use: SPM,K/DR, skill, etc...

 

this has been tested with great success in ETpub by josh.

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Originally Posted by kcuestag*:

 

EDIT: Oops. Am I confused? I thought I sent you the pre-release 1.0.2.5 version in email. I can't find any record of doing so in my email, though. Apologies if you never got it. Check what version you are running and post it.

I got 1.0.2.4, and dispersal by rank 145 still occurs in late phase.

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Originally Posted by HexaCanon*:

 

can the "MULTIbalancer: Collected Settings" be a sticky ?

 

Edit :

 

my only wish now is for the balancer :

 

1 - log information for round status and all kind of actions made on players.

2 - end of round reports logged in a separate file.

3 - onJoin the disperse list is prioritized over whitelist for choosing a team for a player.

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Originally Posted by DarkFouiine*:

 

This plugin works?

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Originally Posted by XRay206*:

 

Hello can i test the new MultiBalancer 1.0.2.5 for my Rush Server?

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Originally Posted by xFaNtASyGiRLx*:

 

This plugin works?

Yes, but requires a lot of reading- especially the first post. Then you have to figure out the settings. Its complicated but once you understand it- It works great!

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Originally Posted by dyfuzor*:

 

Can I upgrade or buy somewhere to get it in some other way

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Originally Posted by kcuestag*:

 

Can I upgrade or buy somewhere to get it in some other way

This plugin is completely free, not sure what you're talking about.

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Originally Posted by tarreltje*:

 

KDR is the key.

-

Look. When there is a blowout match, if the kills and deaths are about even between the teams, there is no insult to the losing team.

If there is a blowout and the big killers are on the losing team, there is no insult.

-

The only time an insult occurs is when the LOSING team is victim to the top 3 best in the server being on the opposing team.

-

More than appearances, an even KDR also moderates the game as good / better than SPM.

We tried them all and settled on SPM, but then we revisited KDR and found that it's as good or better than SPM.

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Definitely KDR.

Do you mind sharing your settings?

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Originally Posted by PapaCharlie9*:

 

1. Can we have the MultiBalancer evenly divide our clan members between teams at the beginning of the round?

Do you mean as a feature of the Scrambler or as something else?

 

You can achieve something close by putting your clan tag in the Dispersal list and if there is an imbalance, the "extra" players on a team should spawn and suicide. Crude and not much better than just doing a manual team switch, but doesn't require having to wait for a new version of the plugin. A simpler approach would be to spawn and suicide regardless of what team you are on or the counts, let the plugin sort you all out.

 

2. Can we have the Multibalancer select 2 people, 1 time, mid-round, if needed, to swap from the winning team to the losing team?

Highest 25% KDR for Lowest KDR 25%

Early-0,0,0 Mid-0,130,130 Late-0,0,0.

Early defined as 200 tickets in. Late defined as 175 from finish.

You can almost do all of that with the current plugin. Set Max Unstacking Swaps Per Round to 1 and Number Of Swaps Per Group to 1. The rest of the settings should be obvious from what you wrote, except for "Lowest KDR". There is no way to specify that. The Percent Of Top Of Team Is Strong implies the lower part, as 100%-setting. So if you set high to 25%, you get the lower 75% of KDR for the weak.

 

I thought about adding a Percent Of Bottom Of Team Is Weak, but I couldn't figure out what to do with the middle players when it came to balancing. Should the pool of players eligible to be moved to the losing team be Strong + Middle, or just Strong? Should the pool of players eligible to be moved to the wining team be Weak + Middle, or just Weak? If the middle is left out, that's a big reduction in the pool of eligible players.

 

3. Can we cancel the balancer function and use MB only as an...

-unstacker (no more than 2 instances @ mid-round if needed),

-pre-round clan divider

-unswitcher

Yes, except for the pre-round clan divider as previously discussed. If you set the Preset to UnstackOnly, you can observe what settings have to be changed to achieve that.

 

...and then leave all the rest of the actual balancing features to TrueBalancer/Adaptive Balance?

Why? What do you get out of those plugins that you don't get out of MB.

 

-swapping the same person twice within a round

I need to see logs. I keep seeing these claims, but the code absolutely disallows that, except for Dispersal players, who may be move up to 2 times per round, but not more than that.

 

-no 'wait-death' option

What does that mean?

 

-disperse list is causing undue targeting and balancing of clan members

a)when members join mid-round, causing an imbalance

b)members leaving mid-round, causing an imbalance

c)members being unstacked, causing an imbalance

I would say rather that it is working exactly as intended. The feature is intended to constantly keep the Dispersal players in balance. So sure, if one or two leave, Dispersal players will get moved. That's why the limit on them is 2 moves per round.

 

This function needs to be a '1 and done' thing, pre-round, 1-time, and that's it.

 

It needs to turn itself off and not be a consideration until the next round so that if a clan member happens to be unstacked and/ balanced and/ joins and/ leaves that it doesn't then go ahead and balance based on clan tags, mid-round, for a second, third, fourth, or even fifth time.

 

For now, we can simply turn this function off, but we'd LOVE to have it in the future, but only as a 1-time pre-round consideration.

Then that would be best accomplished as a new feature of the scrambler.

 

However, that will come at a cost. It will have to be all or nothing, the scrambler either balances Friends (clan tags, whatnot), or it does its normal work of ScrambleBy for all players. I can't make it do both.

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Originally Posted by PapaCharlie9*:

 

can the "MULTIbalancer: Collected Settings" be a sticky ?

Done.

 

 

1 - log information for round status and all kind of actions made on players.

_? It already does that. Perhaps "log information" means something other than write text to plugin.log?

 

2 - end of round reports logged in a separate file.

I'm putting everything into an external log file, will have the same contents as plugin.log.

 

3 - onJoin the disperse list is prioritized over whitelist for choosing a team for a player.

Okay, that's easy to add.

 

Would the new Scrambler mode that DeeVeeOss wants achieve what you want also?

myrcon.net/...multibalancer-30-mar-2015-bfhl#entry33926

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Originally Posted by Blitz*:

 

KDR is the key.

-

Look. When there is a blowout match, if the kills and deaths are about even between the teams, there is no insult to the losing team.

If there is a blowout and the big killers are on the losing team, there is no insult.

-

The only time an insult occurs is when the LOSING team is victim to the top 3 best in the server being on the opposing team.

-

More than appearances, an even KDR also moderates the game as good / better than SPM.

We tried them all and settled on SPM, but then we revisited KDR and found that it's as good or better than SPM.

-

Definitely KDR.

We found the opposite. For our CQ large server SPM is a much better choice (we tried them all too). There are players who may not have the top KDR in a round, but they are flag cappers, revivers, repairers. For us those types of players contribute hugely, and if they happen to have moderately good KDR, then even better.

 

I would think it would be better to use KDR on certain game modes like TDM, SQDM, Scavenger or on certain maps like Metro.

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Originally Posted by PapaCharlie9*:

 

I would think it would be better to use KDR on certain game modes like TDM, SQDM, Scavenger or on certain maps like Metro.

Actually Kills or KPM are better for TDM and SQDM, on the theory that losing by one death is the same as losing by 50 deaths, but I agree that SPM vs KDR depends on map/mode. For example, I'd expect KDR to be better for some Assault maps. When ticket bleed is the key to winning, low KDR is the key to losing.

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Originally Posted by PapaCharlie9*:

 

I'm going to make a slight change to the syntax of this grouping feature. Keeping the Friends list in mind, I'm going to have one consistent syntax across Whitelist, Dispersal List and Friends list.

 

1) You can specify an external file, so that you can have one common file shared across multiple game servers if you want. The contents of the file follow the same syntax as the list itself, one item or group per line.

 

If the first line of the list starts with the character, the rest of the line is treated as a file name, no spaces. For example:

 

Code:

<file.txt
Able
Baker

The file file.txt will be read and merged with Able and Baker to make the entire list.

 

2) You can use the grouping syntax in the Dispersal List to disperse into Group 1 or Group 2

Code:

1 C2A ARF WAR
2 FAP LGN
Able
Baker

This means that all of C2A, ARF and WAR are in Group 1. FAP and LGN are in Group 2. Able and Baker are individual dispersal list members.

 

3) Assuming the Friend's list wins the poll, grouping syntax will apply

Code:

MacArthur Patton Sherman
BearCat111 I3-Dog -STFU-Rawhyde H3LLSANG3L1469  Slavenator NinjaWithAMull3t BrownxThunder

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Originally Posted by XRay206*:

 

Hello can i test the new MultiBalancer 1.0.2.5 for my Rush Server?

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Originally Posted by HexaCanon*:

 

_? It already does that. Perhaps "log information" means something other than write text to plugin.log?

sorry i was not clear, i wanted the round status and actions made on player to be on one file, and round end report on another file.

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Originally Posted by PapaCharlie9*:

 

sorry i was not clear, i wanted the round status and actions made on player to be on one file, and round end report on another file.

Sorry, I don't plan to do that. Once you have all the stuff in one external file, there are other tools that can be used to separate specific parts into other files. Perhaps someone here would be willing to whip up a Python script (or Java or C# or whatever) to parse the external log into whatever you want.

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Originally Posted by Jaythegreat1*:

 

Does the unswitcher work if unstacking is set to false?

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Originally Posted by PapaCharlie9*:

 

Does the unswitcher work if unstacking is set to false?

Yes, it's supposed to.

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Originally Posted by mizehh*:

 

How do I set up this plugin so it doesn't overbalance everytime? I don't get what is point to balance teams until other team is losing all flags.

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Originally Posted by Blitz*:

 

How do I set up this plugin so it doesn't overbalance everytime? I don't get what is point to balance teams until other team is losing all flags.

Increase the delay between swap groups, and/or decrease the number of swaps per group. You will need to monitor a few rounds and adjust according to your liking. There are other settings that can influence this, but try with those suggestions first.

 

Every server situation is different and every admin's personal tastes are different. There is no golden setting for everyone.

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Originally Posted by Blitz*:

 

Papa, when are you going to start working on ticket rate implementation. Let me know and we can figure out tolerances for the plugin acting on specific thresholds with CQ large. I believe this can solve a lot of unnecessary QQ'ing, and over/under unstacking.

 

We can extrapolate this model, have others test on their servers for other game modes. I still believe this is the solution to reduce complaints while still trying to keep the game intense to every server admin's preference.

 

This method should also reduce the number of setting options in the plugin.