MULTIbalancer [1.1.6.0] 30-MAR-2015 + BFHL

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Originally Posted by PapaCharlie9*:

 

@PapaCharlie9 I think the "Top Scorers" from 2.- Exclusions is broken, I've just seen a top scorer get moved to the other team (He was number 2 of his team).

 

Sadly I do not have logs because I had disabled them this morning, but I've seen this happen before too.

Yeah, without logs I can't say if this is a real problem, or just some kind of dispersal or other rule with higher priority than the top scoring exclusion.

 

How many people were in the server? If there were less than 22 players in the server, only 1 player per team counts as top scorer. It's adaptive. More than 42 is 3 players, 22 to 42 is 2 players. The ranges are lower for SQDM.

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Originally Posted by kcuestag*:

 

Yeah, without logs I can't say if this is a real problem, or just some kind of dispersal or other rule with higher priority than the top scoring exclusion.

 

How many people were in the server? If there were less than 22 players in the server, only 1 player per team counts as top scorer. It's adaptive. More than 42 is 3 players, 22 to 42 is 2 players. The ranges are lower for SQDM.

The server was on High Population (Full at 64 players) on Azadi Palace, Conquest Large.

 

I'll enable the logs and see if I can reproduce it again.

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Originally Posted by tarreltje*:

 

unfortunately, again the scrambler srewed up, 3 people on 1 side, the rest of the server on the other

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Originally Posted by feeblemedic*:

 

Just to chime in for what the feedback is worth. I have been running this on a 64 server 400 tickets or so, with CTF, Conquest Large, and Conq. Dom. in the rotation. The only issue I have had is that it is splitting up friends who want to play together, and that is only because of the settings i have chosen or the server balancer interference.

 

I've had no issues with any balancing between teams as far as numbers are concerned, and i've started keeping external logs yesterday so I can attempt to narrow down my delay window currently set at 47.

 

Thanks for all the work going into this, hope it all translates to BF4 as well. I hope you can incorporate some kind of kill teambalancer command, then enable again after balancing to avoid issues and still remain quick match eligible.

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Originally Posted by HAWKSTA24*:

 

MB 1.pngMB 2.pngMB 3.pngCan someone please tell me how I can set this plugin so it won't move a player that has been on one side fro quite some time. I am seeing this a lot. The balancer should move the newest player first rather then picking someone randomly. Or do I have the settings wrong.

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Originally Posted by Firejack*:

 

General praise

Finally had time over the weekend to switch from True Balancer to MULTIbalancer. I have to say I'm overwhelmed just how powerful tool you have created PC9. It really is exceptional and opens up so many new options. Particularly on my mixed mode servers. Well done

 

I particularly am a fan of some things you added that I'd never thought about. Such as the Early, Mid and Late phases.

 

The performance is outstanding too. No slowdown or hanging while pulling Battlelog stats.

 

The guide you wrote was very in-depth too. I had to read it twice and then get a coffee and re-read some sections a third time. However all my config questions were answered in the first 2 posts of this thread. Genius!

 

Feedback

For the first day of MULTIbalancer I used the Retain preset. I was blown away by how well it worked straight away. The only thing I think needs changing with the preset is the Early Phase Balance Speed for Low populations is set to Slow. I Think this needs to be Fast/Adaptive. Had 4 vs 2 situations empty the server.

 

For the second day I used the Standard preset with Unstacking disabled. This seemed to work better once I'd tweaked the tickets for Definition of Early/Late Phase As Tickets from Start/End.

 

For the 3rd day I used the Standard preset with Unstacking enabled. This was quite hypnotic to watch

On longer games (15+ minutes) of TDM/Conquest Unstacking works incredibly well. On shorter rounds it seems to make people rage.. a lot. As a few minutes earlier they were on the winning team.

 

The main issue though is the Battlelog stats fetching breaking friends apart. With 7 servers and 368 slots running Procon on 1 IP the stats fetching, even with Battlelog Cache, is too slow (it seems to of got worse recently). Up to 150 people it seems no problem. Over that it just gets slower and slower to the point were there is a 10 minute queue on the stats fetching. So by the time the Unstacker/balancer kicks in, people are being moved away from their friends.

Totally game breaking. Not your fault I know, just really disappointing from our point of view personally, as it seems we can't use this feature.

 

Question

As an alternative. Is it possible to somehow configure things so only Last Joiner(s) are balanced? So the people who arrived last are the first to be balanced.

It could possibly be done by setting Percent of Top of Team is Strong to 75 (max currently 50). Change Minutes after Joining to 0 (default 5).

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Originally Posted by Helldon*:

 

First it's a great plugin!

 

I've got a question,

 

We have a Conquest Large(64 slot) Firestorm & Caspian 1000 tickets server with MB enabled sinds yesterday, but I need some help with the setup for the 1000 tickets we have.

 

I looked in the collected setting thread but could find one setting for our server only parts of it.

Is there anyone willing to help me out and post some settings which i could use on our server?

 

- We want the "Nailbiting" on our server as much as possible.

 

Thanks in advance!

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Originally Posted by PapaCharlie9*:

 

@feeblemedic @Firejack, thanks for the feedback, it is very much appreciated.

 

I absolutely plan to make MB work for BF4. I hope to have MB ported to BF4 within days of Procon itself being ported. Maybe hours, if BF4 doesn't change the RCON protocol very much.

 

On some test servers I have noticed that the BL queue can get long and stay long, with average fetch times measured in minutes instead of seconds. Even with BL Cache. Your 150 upper limit sounds about right, I'd say it's 3 servers worth. Once you add that 4th server, things start to slow down.

 

Note that MB prioritizes clan tag fetches over stats fetches, even for new players that join later. So the MB code does its best to avoid the friends with tags being split up problem. Even so, if every fetch takes 5 minutes, it is still a long wait even for prioritized clan tags. What I suggest doing in that case is to change all the Unswitcher Forbid settings to LatePhaseOnly, or Never if your queue is always backed up. Then, if friends are split up, they at least have a chance to move back to the team their friends are on.

 

Question

As an alternative. Is it possible to somehow configure things so only Last Joiner(s) are balanced? So the people who arrived last are the first to be balanced.

It could possibly be done by setting Percent of Top of Team is Strong to 75 (max currently 50). Change Minutes after Joining to 0 (default 5).

I need to put this in the FAQ. New players are already the first to be moved, that's what Reassignment does. It happens without the other players in the game noticing it, so they think it's not "fair", but truth is, every new player that joins the server goes through a reassignment move. You can see in the Status log messages yourself how many players get reassigned.

 

If you are asking for the players with the least time in server to be moved again, preferentially over players who have been in the server longer, no, there is no way to do that. Instead, I suggest using the Only Move Weak Players option, or set your Late Phase to Stop and have it cover a good portion of your ticket duration, 50% or more, or some combination. The former might move players that have been in the server longer, but they aren't pulling their weight anyway, so who cares? The latter basically says that if you survive to the Late Phase without getting moved, you will be immune from being moved. Of course, that applies to new players that join in Late Phase also.

 

EDIT: I forgot to mention the exclusion for Minutes After Being Moved setting. While it doesn't prevent an "older" player from being moved before new players once, it does insure that newer players will be moved ahead of them in subsequent rounds.

 

I am not ruling out adding the player age feature. I just want to get more feedback from other experienced users of MB, users who have tried all of the existing features and still aren't satisfied.

[ImportBot]

Originally Posted by PapaCharlie9*:

 

First it's a great plugin!

 

I've got a question,

 

We have a Conquest Large(64 slot) Firestorm & Caspian 1000 tickets server with MB enabled sinds yesterday, but I need some help with the setup for the 1000 tickets we have.

 

I looked in the collected setting thread but could find one setting for our server only parts of it.

Is there anyone willing to help me out and post some settings which i could use on our server?

 

- We want the "Nailbiting" on our server as much as possible.

 

Thanks in advance!

Since you want Intensity, and you are running 2 of the 3 maps and the same mode that Blitz's top rated server runs, I'd recommend consulting with Blitz, who has an open offer to help admins configure their servers.

 

In the mean time, you can try enabling the Settings Wizard at the top, fill in the form, and apply the changes. Choose Intensify for the style. It should get your basic balancing squared away. It doesn't touch unstacking, for that you'll need Blitz's help.

[ImportBot]

Originally Posted by PapaCharlie9*:

 

First, thanks to tarreltje and guapoloko for lending me their servers and letting me use their players as guinea pigs. There were some wild situations, some of which tarreltje mentions above, and no doubt a lot of player complaints, but it was well worth it. I learned a lot.

 

I first tried setting the server config to vars.autoBalance false, but then BL makes the server be Custom, which is death for populating a server, so I gave up on that very quickly.

 

Then I tried setting up a pair of Insane Limits that turned autoBalance to false at the end of a round and back to true at the start of the next round on first spawn, which is always after the game server has done team swapping.

 

From those experiments I learned that:

 

1) MB was indeed doing what I intended and keeping squads together.

 

2) The game server does indeed balance players during team swap when vars.autoBalance is set to true. If it is set to false, it does not balance.

 

3) Even with vars.autoBalance set to false, the game server STILL moves some players to squads different from what MB moved them to. I believe I know why and it explains a mysterious (and uncommented/undocumented) difference in the code between TrueBalancer and MB. What TB does, moving every single player into squad 0 before scrambling, made no sense to me. Now I suspect it is specifically to convince the game server to leave the squads alone and not change them at team swapping time.

 

So I'll have to try making that change to MB's Scrambler.

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Originally Posted by tarreltje*:

 

First, thanks to tarreltje and guapoloko for lending me their servers and letting me use their players as guinea pigs. There were some wild situations, some of which tarreltje mentions above, and no doubt a lot of player complaints, but it was well worth it. I learned a lot.

 

I first tried setting the server config to vars.autoBalance false, but then BL makes the server be Custom, which is death for populating a server, so I gave up on that very quickly.

 

Then I tried setting up a pair of Insane Limits that turned autoBalance to false at the end of a round and back to true at the start of the next round on first spawn, which is always after the game server has done team swapping.

 

From those experiments I learned that:

 

1) MB was indeed doing what I intended and keeping squads together.

 

2) The game server does indeed balance players during team swap when vars.autoBalance is set to true. If it is set to false, it does not balance.

 

3) Even with vars.autoBalance set to false, the game server STILL moves some players to squads different from what MB moved them to. I believe I know why and it explains a mysterious (and uncommented/undocumented) difference in the code between TrueBalancer and MB. What TB does, moving every single player into squad 0 before scrambling, made no sense to me. Now I suspect it is specifically to convince the game server to leave the squads alone and not change them at team swapping time.

 

So I'll have to try making that change to MB's Scrambler.

Have you already found a solution for the scrambler going nuts, when its puts 90% in team A and B the 10% of players?

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Originally Posted by dyn*:

 

Have you already found a solution for the scrambler going nuts, when its puts 90% in team A and B the 10% of players?

Did you not read the post you quoted ?

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Originally Posted by kcuestag*:

 

3) Even with vars.autoBalance set to false, the game server STILL moves some players to squads different from what MB moved them to. I believe I know why and it explains a mysterious (and uncommented/undocumented) difference in the code between TrueBalancer and MB. What TB does, moving every single player into squad 0 before scrambling, made no sense to me. Now I suspect it is specifically to convince the game server to leave the squads alone and not change them at team swapping time.

 

So I'll have to try making that change to MB's Scrambler.

Very happy to see you've encountered our issue, let's cross fingers and hope that upcoming fix in the future helps keep all players in same squad together.

 

Glad I wasn't paranoid, sorry for not being able to help you out, any time I enabled plugin logging it worked fine, then disabled it and had this issue few times, as if Procon was playing me lol.

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Originally Posted by PapaCharlie9*:

 

Did you not read the post you quoted ?

Language barrier. @tarreltje, yes, I am planning to make a change that will make that less likely to happen.

 

Though I should have said in the original post, even with the squad 0 change, it still won't be perfect. Had several test cases where players left or new players joined during critical time windows (measured in seconds) that messed up the scramble. So everything I wrote in the FAQ is still true. You still will not be able to get a perfect scramble every time. Players with the same clan tag/friends/dispersal, etc., will still end up in the wrong place from time to time.

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Originally Posted by tarreltje*:

 

Did you not read the post you quoted ?

Got a brainfreeze i think.. -.- I have read it, but was doing to much stuf all together, multitasking is for my wifey

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Originally Posted by kcuestag*:

 

Language barrier. @tarreltje, yes, I am planning to make a change that will make that less likely to happen.

 

Though I should have said in the original post, even with the squad 0 change, it still won't be perfect. Had several test cases where players left or new players joined during critical time windows (measured in seconds) that messed up the scramble. So everything I wrote in the FAQ is still true. You still will not be able to get a perfect scramble every time. Players with the same clan tag/friends/dispersal, etc., will still end up in the wrong place from time to time.

Honestly, as long as we get the Scramble to work like TrueBalancer, I'd be more than happy. I NEVER encountered an issue with TB's scrambler, it never splitted any squad at all.

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Originally Posted by Jaythegreat1*:

 

Honestly, as long as we get the Scramble to work like TrueBalancer, I'd be more than happy. I NEVER encountered an issue with TB's scrambler, it never splitted any squad at all.

Same... pretty much the only function i use for TB at the moment.

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Originally Posted by kcuestag*:

 

Same... pretty much the only function i use for TB at the moment.

Wait, so you use both balancers at the moment? And Scrambler from TB works well with MB enabled?

 

This is interesting.

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Originally Posted by Helldon*:

 

Since you want Intensity, and you are running 2 of the 3 maps and the same mode that Blitz's top rated server runs, I'd recommend consulting with Blitz, who has an open offer to help admins configure their servers.

 

In the mean time, you can try enabling the Settings Wizard at the top, fill in the form, and apply the changes. Choose Intensify for the style. It should get your basic balancing squared away. It doesn't touch unstacking, for that you'll need Blitz's help.

PC9,

 

Thanks for the reply, Blitz has got a message from me in his inbox.

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Originally Posted by Jaythegreat1*:

 

Wait, so you use both balancers at the moment? And Scrambler from TB works well with MB enabled?

 

This is interesting.

Yep. Just set player differential for TB at 32 so it doesn't do any balancing, and set scrambler on MB to False, so it doesn't scramble.

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Originally Posted by kcuestag*:

 

Yep. Just set player differential for TB at 32 so it doesn't do any balancing, and set scrambler on MB to False, so it doesn't scramble.

I'm giving this a try, thanks.

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Originally Posted by Jaythegreat1*:

 

It does a pretty decent job, though the 1 drawback is if TB flips out, then teams don't get scrambled. TB had been doing pretty good but it's been acting up for us the past couple days.

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Originally Posted by PapaCharlie9*:

 

Honestly, as long as we get the Scramble to work like TrueBalancer, I'd be more than happy. I NEVER encountered an issue with TB's scrambler, it never splitted any squad at all.

I doubt that very much.

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Originally Posted by kcuestag*:

 

I doubt that very much.

I can definitely tell you we NEVER saw TrueBalancer splitting squads, NEVER.

 

That's why I'm convinced if you use TB's scrambler we'll get no splitting. I'm not saying MB is bad or something, I'm just trying to help by saying with TB we never saw this problem with it's own Scrambler.

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Originally Posted by Jaythegreat1*:

 

The only thing I notice with TB, is the the squads themselves get scrambled... you may be SL (Squad Leader) one round, but then someone else in your squad will be SL the next round

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Originally Posted by kcuestag*:

 

The only thing I notice with TB, is the the squads themselves get scrambled... you may be SL (Squad Leader) one round, but then someone else in your squad will be SL the next round

That's true, but you'll never see a Squad get splitted with TB's Scrambler.

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Originally Posted by PapaCharlie9*:

 

I can definitely tell you we NEVER saw TrueBalancer splitting squads, NEVER.

Never is a very long time.

 

It is simply not possible for any plugin to do a perfect, squad keeping scramble every time. Maybe it happened rarely, maybe you never personally experienced it, but it did and will happen. All it takes is one new player to join at a critical moment just before the squad is moved to the new squad/team. If that new player is assigned to the same team/squad that the scrambled squad is heading for, and if the scrambled squad is already 4 players ... the game server won't let a single squad have 5 players. The last player getting moved ends up getting "splitted" out of the squad. It's not that infrequent, either. I saw it happen just a couple of days ago, that's why I even know about this failure mode. If you run a server that is always full and always has a wait queue, there's a non-zero chance that it will happen.

 

That said, TB definitely had a trick up its sleeve with the squad 0 stuff. That reduces the chance of a squad having more than 4 players ... reduces, not eliminates. I've already added that trick to MB and am testing it now. Ironically, setting all squads to 0 actually increases the chance of the new player problem, but the amount of time the players are in squad 0 is less than 2 seconds max, so the added risk is tiny.

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Originally Posted by kcuestag*:

 

Never is a very long time.

 

It is simply not possible for any plugin to do a perfect, squad keeping scramble every time. Maybe it happened rarely, maybe you never personally experienced it, but it did and will happen. All it takes is one new player to join at a critical moment just before the squad is moved to the new squad/team. If that new player is assigned to the same team/squad that the scrambled squad is heading for, and if the scrambled squad is already 4 players ... the game server won't let a single squad have 5 players. The last player getting moved ends up getting "splitted" out of the squad. It's not that infrequent, either. I saw it happen just a couple of days ago, that's why I even know about this failure mode. If you run a server that is always full and always has a wait queue, there's a non-zero chance that it will happen.

 

That said, TB definitely had a trick up its sleeve with the squad 0 stuff. That reduces the chance of a squad having more than 4 players ... reduces, not eliminates. I've already added that trick to MB and am testing it now. Ironically, setting all squads to 0 actually increases the chance of the new player problem, but the amount of time the players are in squad 0 is less than 2 seconds max, so the added risk is tiny.

Maybe it doesn't eliminate it 100%, but we weren't on the TB's Whitelist and it never splitted us, it did with other Balancers, but not with TB.

 

Can't wait for that update to be released, thank you for your big work, it's always very much appreciated, this will make our server players very happy.

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Originally Posted by xXMysterio*:

 

Can't we force move specific players (manually)?

Like your TrueBalancer with "tb-fmove" ...

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Originally Posted by kcuestag*:

 

Can't we force move specific players (manually)?

Like your TrueBalancer with "tb-fmove" ...

Of course you can, you can use the standard !move command.