MULTIbalancer [1.1.6.0] 30-MAR-2015 + BFHL

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Originally Posted by Jaythegreat1*:

 

Not if branzone changed something with our procon config, but TB has been throwing fits as of lately.

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Originally Posted by xcal*:

 

how do I turn off the rank balance during game ...?

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Originally Posted by kcuestag*:

 

how do I turn off the rank balance during game ...?

Set the Disperse Evenly By Rank to 0.

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Originally Posted by Jaythegreat1*:

 

Anyway to get a version of the plugin with the new scramble code in it... I'd like to test having 1 balance if possible.

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Originally Posted by kcuestag*:

 

Anyway to get a version of the plugin with the new scramble code in it... I'd like to test having 1 balance if possible.

I believe he's already testing it, so we need to wait for the release.

[ImportBot]

Originally Posted by MaccabeeY*:

 

Thanks PapaCharlie for an amazing piece of plugin software. MB has been an an integral part of making my new BF3 server very popular, very quickly.

 

One thing I think absolutely needs to be added. Something akin to "Wait duration until forced player move" or something like. There are two many occurrence where MB unstacks, which occurs in two parts, 1) move a weak player and 2) move a strong player. This is wonderful of of course, but there are two many times, since MB "waits for a death", so that the teams quickly get wildly numerically unbalanced for way too long for the players' tolerances. This occurs, in my observance, often times because with great numerical imbalance, no one on the larger team dies, or said the other way, there aren't enough players on the numerically inferior side on kill anyone on the stronger side.

 

From watching players behavior patterns in my server, it seem the risks of "rage quit" because of large numerical imbalances is not as great as the risk "rage quit" because someone was killed in a kill-forced balance.

 

What do everyone think?

Edward

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Originally Posted by Blitz*:

 

We have never had an issue with player number imbalances on our 64-man server. However, I can see there being an issue with smaller servers.

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Originally Posted by PapaCharlie9*:

 

Thanks PapaCharlie for an amazing piece of plugin software. MB has been an an integral part of making my new BF3 server very popular, very quickly.

 

One thing I think absolutely needs to be added. Something akin to "Wait duration until forced player move" or something like. There are two many occurrence where MB unstacks, which occurs in two parts, 1) move a weak player and 2) move a strong player. This is wonderful of of course, but there are two many times, since MB "waits for a death", so that the teams quickly get wildly numerically unbalanced for way too long for the players' tolerances. This occurs, in my observance, often times because with great numerical imbalance, no one on the larger team dies, or said the other way, there aren't enough players on the numerically inferior side on kill anyone on the stronger side.

 

From watching players behavior patterns in my server, it seem the risks of "rage quit" because of large numerical imbalances is not as great as the risk "rage quit" because someone was killed in a kill-forced balance.

 

What do everyone think?

Edward

Let's do a review of your settings first. Maybe we can tune up your settings so that balance will happen faster. For example, if you are using a ton of exclusions to the point where your eligible player pool for moving is relatively small, that could result in numerical imbalance happening for a long time.

 

BTW, the unstacker is designed to not kick in until the teams are balanced to within the minimum requirement (1 or 2, depending on population). If you are seeing unstacking while teams are out of balance, that's a bug. I'd like to see a log of that so I can fix it.

 

@Blitz, in general, it appears that larger servers suffer this problem less. It also has to do with how big your average wait queue is. If there is always a fresh supply of new joiners available, neither team stays undermanned for long.

[ImportBot]

Originally Posted by dyn*:

 

While I haven't seen a wildly (that is more than 6)player difference, I have seen 2 and MAYBE 4 player difference between the teams during the round caused by unstacking. Sometimes this does lead to players saying 'why was i moved to the bigger team_!'.

 

I will concede that some players don't really understand what's happening or why they were switched. And, in some cases, I'm OK with that. The feedback I've received is that players who are on TS with us get swapped to the bigger team (the winning team) and then they can't figure out why they were switched to a bigger team. But minus the part that they are no longer able to talk with us they are usually not too upset that they get switched to the better team.

 

One thing I did is change the messages a bit to hide the fact that they were moved for unstacking. I'm still able to read the logs and see that they were moved for unstacking, but by the single message players receive (yells disabled) they wouldn't know. The reason I decided to change the message was that usually it's the good players who are upset that they were switched to the loosing team. If the loosing side has less players already, switching for 'balance' is plausible. So, if they think they where switched for 'balance' instead of 'unstacking' that hopefully leads to less rage quits.

 

It could be nice to have independent messages for the strong player and then the weak player so messages could be tailored specifically.

[ImportBot]

Originally Posted by PapaCharlie9*:

 

Progress report: slow going on the Scrambler changes and testing. Despite making my code as close to TB as possible, the game server still insists on messing with my squad assignments. I have no clue why. Doesn't seem to have anything to do with vars.autoBalance. It just doesn't like the squads I assign sometimes. I've seen it completely unsquad a squad (move to squad 0) then assign the players to a different squad on the same team, all during the time it is just supposed to be swapping teams -- upshot is that the squad has a different squad id and the opposite team id that MB assigned. I suspected another plugin was messing with me, but none are running that do player moves.

 

I've added a detector to see if this game server misbehavior results in squads being split. It might not, so keep your fingers crossed.

[ImportBot]

Originally Posted by kcuestag*:

 

Progress report: slow going on the Scrambler changes and testing. Despite making my code as close to TB as possible, the game server still insists on messing with my squad assignments. I have no clue why. Doesn't seem to have anything to do with vars.autoBalance. It just doesn't like the squads I assign sometimes. I've seen it completely unsquad a squad (move to squad 0) then assign the players to a different squad on the same team, all during the time it is just supposed to be swapping teams -- upshot is that the squad has a different squad id and the opposite team id that MB assigned. I suspected another plugin was messing with me, but none are running that do player moves.

 

I've added a detector to see if this game server misbehavior results in squads being split. It might not, so keep your fingers crossed.

Let me know if you want an extra server for testing, willing to help if I can to feedback the new scrambler.

 

Thanks for your hard work, I'll patiently wait until the new Scrambler works like TB's, not in a rush as long as it works properly when it's done hehe.

[ImportBot]

Originally Posted by PapaCharlie9*:

 

Well, that didn't take long. The very first scramble after I added the detector found a split due to the game server swapping teams.

 

Here's what MB assigned. Note that the teams are perfectly balanced for number and closely balanced for metric (Kills).

 

Code:

(Alpha, K:#13) [RBW]XV_Murdoc_VX         -                geliangel1 (Alpha, K:#15)
(Alpha, K:#14) [Pers]miikkessio          -             [Utz]Ramin333 (Alpha, K:#18)
(Alpha, K:#17) [212]Jeofry_Berathion     -              [ADL]3st3ban1 (Bravo, K:#9)
(Charlie, K:#19) fkbs                    -                  EclipzZz3 (Bravo, K:#2)
(Charlie, K:#12) [Khz]BaDeSgOneS         -               [ADL]Sn1PeRz (Bravo, K:#6)
(Charlie, K:#4) [KHz]KHz_Tee3tix         -           [ADL]ArieK4narie (Bravo, K:#1)
(Delta, K:#5) [STS]Kleingeldmann         -            Blackstarexe (Charlie, K:#24)
(Delta, K:#20) [FaD]xPicatu__            -             [OBG]OBG_92 (Charlie, K:#16)
(Delta, K:#10) [STS]FLiPPo_xD            -                  Bomalee (Charlie, K:#7)
(Echo, K:#23) [NNG]PRlNC3                -        [GNC]TonyDinozzoDE (Delta, K:#22)
(Echo, K:#11) kubyslav                   -      [rus]mezza_morta_rus (Delta, K:#21)
(Echo, K:#3) Xtasext                     -            [Pers]waffeline (Delta, K:#8)
US AVG K:8.92                            -                            RU AVG K:9.58

Then within seconds of MB completing this work, three players quit (ingrates!):

 

Players must have left, since US/Bravo is missing: EclipzZz3, Sn1PeRz, end.

Players must have left, since RU/Delta is missing: Kleingeldmann, end.

 

So here's where the teams stand before game server swapping:

 

Code:

(Alpha, K:#13) [RBW]XV_Murdoc_VX         -                geliangel1 (Alpha, K:#15)
(Alpha, K:#14) [Pers]miikkessio          -             [Utz]Ramin333 (Alpha, K:#18)
(Alpha, K:#17) [212]Jeofry_Berathion     -              [ADL]3st3ban1 (Bravo, K:#9)
(Charlie, K:#19) fkbs                    -                  <strike>EclipzZz3 (Bravo, K:#2)</strike>
(Charlie, K:#12) [Khz]BaDeSgOneS         -               <strike>[ADL]Sn1PeRz (Bravo, K:#6)</strike>
(Charlie, K:#4) [KHz]KHz_Tee3tix         -           [ADL]ArieK4narie (Bravo, K:#1)
<strike>(Delta, K:#5) [STS]Kleingeldmann</strike>         -            Blackstarexe (Charlie, K:#24)
(Delta, K:#20) [FaD]xPicatu__            -             [OBG]OBG_92 (Charlie, K:#16)
(Delta, K:#10) [STS]FLiPPo_xD            -                  Bomalee (Charlie, K:#7)
(Echo, K:#23) [NNG]PRlNC3                -        [GNC]TonyDinozzoDE (Delta, K:#22)
(Echo, K:#11) kubyslav                   -      [rus]mezza_morta_rus (Delta, K:#21)
(Echo, K:#3) Xtasext                     -            [Pers]waffeline (Delta, K:#8)
US AVG K:8.92                            -                            RU AVG K:9.58

Now the game server team swapper kicks in with these results (keep in mind that teams have been swapped, so right hand column is now the left, and vice versa):

 

Code:

(Alpha, K:#22) [Utz]Ramin333             -             [STS]FLiPPo_xD (Delta, K:#6)
(Alpha, K:#15) geliangel1                -             [FaD]xPicatu__ (Delta, K:#3)
(Bravo, K:#12) [ADL]ArieK4narie          -      [212]Jeofry_Berathion (Delta, K:#5)
(Bravo, K:#16) [ADL]3st3ban1             -           [Pers]miikkessio (Delta, K:#4)
(Charlie, K:#17) [OBG]OBG_92             -          [RBW]XV_Murdoc_VX (Echo, K:#10)
(Charlie, K:#14) Bomalee                 -            [KHz]KHz_Tee3tix (Echo, K:#2)
(Charlie, K:#18) Blackstarexe            -                    Xtasext (Echo, K:#19)
(Delta, K:#13) [Pers]waffeline           -                    kubyslav (Echo, K:#1)
(Delta, K:#20) [GNC]TonyDinozzoDE        -                 [NNG]PRlNC3 (None, K:#7)
(Delta, K:#21) [rus]mezza_morta_rus      -            [SN]SN-Starshiip (None, K:#8)
                                         -            [Khz]BaDeSgOneS (None, K:#11)
                                         -                        fkbs (None, K:#9)

The detector reported:

 

UNEXPECTED: RU/Alpha was split! XV_Murdoc_VX to Echo, end.

UNEXPECTED: RU/Charlie was split! KHz_Tee3tix to Echo, end.

UNEXPECTED: RU/Echo was split! PRlNC3 to None, end.

 

It split every single squad on the original US team! Sending some leftovers to squad None.

 

It's not like it doesn't like squads with less than 4 players, the original RU Delta squad was swapped to US intact.

 

Maybe it has something to do with the players leaving? I can't imagine why.

 

This is the sort of thing that makes me say that I doubt that TB never had this problem. It doesn't seem to matter what arrangement of teams and squads that end up being assigned, the game server swapper seems to want to mess with it -- if players leave. I'll have to find a log entry where no players leave during the critical swapping times.

[ImportBot]

Originally Posted by kcuestag*:

 

This is the sort of thing that makes me say that I doubt that TB never had this problem. It doesn't seem to matter what arrangement of teams and squads that end up being assigned, the game server swapper seems to want to mess with it -- if players leave. I'll have to find a log entry where no players leave during the critical swapping times.

If you want I could give you the version of TB we have so you can try it, I can assure you no squads get splitted.

 

Sometimes it can make teams uneven due to players leaving right on round start, like you said, but then TB would balance the last joiners into the lesser team, without damaging any squads, just the last joiners that get balanced.

[ImportBot]

Originally Posted by Jaythegreat1*:

 

One thing I've noticed... if teams are scrambled... shouldn't teams be "locked" in so people just can't swap to the other team. I even had unlimited switching set to 0.

[ImportBot]

Originally Posted by Firejack*:

 

Just throwing this in. No idea if its relevant.

 

While running the TrueBalancer scrambler we sometimes had an issue where people were taken out of their squad and placed in a new squad with a friend.

 

What turned out to be happening was. A friend connected to the server by clicking on Join Game option in the Com Center. This was while the server was full.

 

What happened next was the friend was put on the other team when a slot opened, split from their friend. The round ended. TrueBalancer scrambled. Then while the next map loaded. The server moved to 2 friends into their own new squad.

 

Could that be interfering here?

[ImportBot]

Originally Posted by MaccabeeY*:

 

If you are seeing unstacking while teams are out of balance, that's a bug. I'd like to see a log of that so I can fix it.

WONDERFUL! But, how do I generate a log for you to review and how do I get it to you (I will get it right out).

 

Also, to clarify, what we're seeing is that when unstacking occurs (the teams may very well be in balance before unsstacking), but post the unstacking, the stay unbalanced for quite a while, many minutes in some cases.

 

It appears to me, the balancer is waiting for players on the larger team to die, which they don't since the teams are heavily numerically unbalance (i.e. there are not enuff players on the smaller team to kill players on the larger team) so it seems the unbalancer gets "stuck", since it "waits for death" and won't balance "living" players. So it waits, and waits and waits. In some cases, in order to get teams balanced after a number of minutes, it took so long, I've had to manually move players using Procon Frostbite because everyone was alive and the balancer could do nothing.

 

Hence the idea of a "Wait duration until forced move live players". This would allow server owners to decide whether they want living players kill for balancing/unstsacking purposes. I know I would use it, and I suspect my balance related "rage quits" would drop back down to Insane Balancer levels.

 

Speaking of Insance Balancer, it was what I used prior to MB. And of course MB, is light-years more sophisticated and the unstacking and other feature are amazing.

 

However, IB has this "wait for death=yes/no" capability, and in that regard worked wonderfully. As mentioned, before, I kill-for-balance "rage quiting" was relatively rare, now it is becoming commonplace. I tried an experiment to run both IB and MB to compensate for this, but sadly IB undoes too much MB unstacking, and IB will move each teams' top scorers (which I do not want), so that didn't do it.

 

Anyway, let me know how I generate and then get logs to you and I will get right on that.

Edward

[ImportBot]

Originally Posted by WileECyte*:

 

Crossposting this here. I already posted in the UMM thread as well.

 

I'm running in to a plugin conflict between Ultimate Map Manager and MultiBalancer:

 

Running into a weird interface issue... When I have the MultiBalancer plug-in installed, part of the plugin settings interface for UltimateMapManager is cut off. It only shows my map lists, but all the settings above the map lists is hidden. As soon as I remove MultiBalancer, I can once again see all the settings for UMM. This means physically uninstalling the plugin (removing from the plugin folder) and recycling Procon. Has anyone else seen this?

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Originally Posted by dyn*:

 

I have never seen this before, but, have you deleted the DLL files and started a config from scratch ?

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Originally Posted by PapaCharlie9*:

 

If you want I could give you the version of TB we have so you can try it, I can assure you no squads get splitted.

I already have a copy, thanks.

[ImportBot]

Originally Posted by PapaCharlie9*:

 

One thing I've noticed... if teams are scrambled... shouldn't teams be "locked" in so people just can't swap to the other team. I even had unlimited switching set to 0.

You would use the Unswitcher settings (Section 6, if I recall correctly) to prevent that, if you want.

[ImportBot]

Originally Posted by PapaCharlie9*:

 

Just throwing this in. No idea if its relevant.

 

While running the TrueBalancer scrambler we sometimes had an issue where people were taken out of their squad and placed in a new squad with a friend.

 

What turned out to be happening was. A friend connected to the server by clicking on Join Game option in the Com Center. This was while the server was full.

 

What happened next was the friend was put on the other team when a slot opened, split from their friend. The round ended. TrueBalancer scrambled. Then while the next map loaded. The server moved to 2 friends into their own new squad.

 

Could that be interfering here?

It's definitely another failure mode. I don't think it is this specific failure, but I have seen so-called "party joins" completely screw up the balance of a server. I imagine it would do worse in the middle of scramble.

[ImportBot]

Originally Posted by PapaCharlie9*:

 

Anyway, let me know how I generate and then get logs to you and I will get right on that.

Edward

You have to have access to your logs from your Procon hoster. Assuming you do, it's Tools => Options => Basic tab and then check all of the Enable xxx logging check boxes. The logs are deposited in procon/Logs/ip_port/YYYYMMDD_plugin.log files, where ip_port is the ip and port of your game server connection.

[ImportBot]

Originally Posted by PapaCharlie9*:

 

Crossposting this here. I already posted in the UMM thread as well.

 

I'm running in to a plugin conflict between Ultimate Map Manager and MultiBalancer:

 

Running into a weird interface issue... When I have the MultiBalancer plug-in installed, part of the plugin settings interface for UltimateMapManager is cut off. It only shows my map lists, but all the settings above the map lists is hidden. As soon as I remove MultiBalancer, I can once again see all the settings for UMM. This means physically uninstalling the plugin (removing from the plugin folder) and recycling Procon. Has anyone else seen this?

I suspect this is actually a Procon limitation, since both UMM and MB have very long settings lists. I run UMM myself, so tell me how many maps are in your longest list and I will try to reproduce. If I can, you and I can report a bug to Procon.

 

In the mean time, as a workaround, did you try collapsing the MB plugin setting sections? Click on the [+] symbol to the left of each unused section to reduce the vertical space used. That might help.

 

Also, if it is just a refresh issue (unlikely, but worth a shot), click the MB plugin name on the left panel and then click the UMM plugin name. That forces a refresh of settings.

[ImportBot]

Originally Posted by dyn*:

 

so tell me how many maps are in your longest list and I will try to reproduce. If I can, you and I can report a bug to Procon.

We use both as well, and the longest map list is 26 maps. Then we also have multiple 20 round map lists, several smaller, and then some old ones which haven't even been deleted yet. All told we have over 90+ maps in different UMM Map Lists.

 

I also just tested a single map list with 99 maps in one UMM map list plus all of the other maps lists (so over 180 total maps) we have. I did not restart the procon layer but did restart my local client. Minus a few procon "time outs" from adding so many maps at one time, I didn't see didn't see the issue WileECyte was experiencing.

 

There was an issue I had previously where there was some garbage left over in the sever conf file. Having this extra plugin data in there resulted in a plugin not functioning correctly. If I'm not mistaken, the plugin in question was Voteban. Once all the voteban plugin stuff was removed (and then refilled in by the plugin) it started working correctly again.

 

Edit: LOL!! I would definitely not recommend adding / removing maps like this with a populated server. The damn procon layer (hosted on a VPS) didn't like it too much: all my connections went red several seconds after I removed the 99 maps from UMM, procon lagged, & CPU usage went to 90%. After 3 minutes it came back and all is well.

[ImportBot]

Originally Posted by PapaCharlie9*:

 

Slow going on the Scrambler fixes, but progress is being made. I was up until 1AM last night trying out a new strategy. For hours it just made things worse, but this morning it started to show the first signs of maybe being a workable solution.

 

The total amount of code in the plugin dedicated to Scrambler now exceeds all of the balancing and unstacking code combined. Now you know why I was reluctant to put the Scrambler into Version 1. This shit is complicated!

[ImportBot]

Originally Posted by WileECyte*:

 

I suspect this is actually a Procon limitation, since both UMM and MB have very long settings lists. I run UMM myself, so tell me how many maps are in your longest list and I will try to reproduce. If I can, you and I can report a bug to Procon.

 

In the mean time, as a workaround, did you try collapsing the MB plugin setting sections? Click on the [+] symbol to the left of each unused section to reduce the vertical space used. That might help.

 

Also, if it is just a refresh issue (unlikely, but worth a shot), click the MB plugin name on the left panel and then click the UMM plugin name. That forces a refresh of settings.

I have more than just MB and UMM running... So you could be on to something. I went through my server config file and cleaned out some settings for old plugins I've since removed/uninstalled and it made a little bit more visible.

 

I've got Adaptive Server Size, Adaptive Ticket Count, In-Game Admin, Latency Manager, Server Rules on Request, Spambot, Squadless nag, UMM, TeamSpeak3 Sync and MB.

[ImportBot]

Originally Posted by Jaythegreat1*:

 

Slow going on the Scrambler fixes, but progress is being made. I was up until 1AM last night trying out a new strategy. For hours it just made things worse, but this morning it started to show the first signs of maybe being a workable solution.

 

The total amount of code in the plugin dedicated to Scrambler now exceeds all of the balancing and unstacking code combined. Now you know why I was reluctant to put the Scrambler into Version 1. This shit is complicated!

That would be great... I'm trying my best to use both the scrambler and balancer through MB... but the scrambler I feel sometimes make things worse instead of better due to that bug.

[ImportBot]

Originally Posted by PapaCharlie9*:

 

That would be great... I'm trying my best to use both the scrambler and balancer through MB... but the scrambler I feel sometimes make things worse instead of better due to that bug.

Well I just reviewed the log for one of the test servers, 48 player Rush, and it performed 29 consecutive scrambles with no squads split. So far, so good.

[ImportBot]

Originally Posted by WileECyte*:

 

I have more than just MB and UMM running... So you could be on to something. I went through my server config file and cleaned out some settings for old plugins I've since removed/uninstalled and it made a little bit more visible.

 

I've got Adaptive Server Size, Adaptive Ticket Count, In-Game Admin, Latency Manager, Server Rules on Request, Spambot, Squadless nag, UMM, TeamSpeak3 Sync and MB.

Adaptive Ticket Count has a massive number of config lines. I removed that plugin and its config lines and now UMM & Multibalancer both seem to co-exist with all their settings visible.

[ImportBot]

Originally Posted by Jaythegreat1*:

 

That would be great... I'm trying my best to use both the scrambler and balancer through MB... but the scrambler I feel sometimes make things worse instead of better due to that bug.

Sweet... but I was also referring to where it piles all the players to one team and left-overs to the other .