The "Balance" Problem (Survey Feedback)

[Róka]

I hate to say it, but all of this has happened before (cue Cylon music).

I had to (It actually played well with reading your post):

Spoiler: show

phpBB [video]

[Bock]

I just had an idea.

Step 1) Generals choose their high commands.

Step 2) The two high commands meet, look at the list of interested officer candidates and decide on a pool of officers that should cover the needs of two armies. Officers are not assigned to their army at this time.

Step 3) The two HCs and the selected officers take some time to rate the entrants to the player draft, then meet (over the course of a couple weeks if necessary), to create two balanced armies.

Step 4) Once everyone is happy with the two armies, they are assigned by coin flip.

Step 5) The officers are then drafted in some way by the HCs. Could be playground football style draft or a balancing discussion between the two HCs.

The reason for not assigning officers right away and for assigning armies by coin flip is to remove any biasing in placing players or withholding of information. In a perfect world, generals and their high commands would resist the temptation to give themselves a slightly better army when meeting with each other to craft balanced armies. In a balancing pre-draft or complete balanced draft, there is a lot of bartering over which side gets which player(s) or what would be needed to balance out a certain player going to one side. For example, say army A proposes giving army B players 1 and 2, and army A players 3 and 4, suggesting that would be a balanced split. Army B may recognize that they're getting the better end of that deal because they have better information, but may not let Army A know that it isn't actually a balanced pairing.

[lakefisher1]

Bock, thats a great idea! However, as with regular players, officers may have issues with serving with one of the generals or HC. They may also have one of the Generals as a friend and would thus get information that your idea would stop them getting.

[Kilo]

On the other hand we always prided ourselves with wanting players that fit into the GC style of fairplay and friendliness.
I am not saying these are especially difficult to find, but if 30-40% of an army consists of new-blood, it is hard to instill the GC spirit. It is already difficult to enforce the ''no all-chat'' rule with new people and bug/glitch-abusing will happen more often as well. This is just natural, one needs to adapt to the community style and find a balance between being competitive and winning-at-all-cost. (playing and teaching GC-style is also an officer's duty btw)

I just wanted to note that. In principle the idea of recruiting brought up by Kilo should work well enough for us and I am generally a fan of it.

But Necro's point about recruiting high skill players as a meta-contest should be kept in mind as well. However there should be experience with this problem in 21CW! (Kilo?) It might be a theoretical problem, but function ''ok'' in practice.

It works fairly well since the Captains are usually recruiting for their own companies, so they usually don't "over recruit". However at Level it is a "who can recruit the better skilled players" kind of thing, although it evens out due to both sides recruiting some really good people.

The biggest factors are the Generals. If your General wants to win no matter what, he is going to recruit the best players possible. That's generally ok if both Generals are like that. But if only one is and the other isn't, it doesn't turn out well. If both Generals recruit normal BF4 players and don't try to shoot for comp players, that works out pretty well too. (And imo that's what GC should be aiming for, to keep the GC spirit.)

You also shouldn't be mass recruiting like 50+ a week. Usually around 10 is good and gives you time to teach them what is proper GC etiquette. As to allchat, one of the things 21CW implemented for a little while when allchat got really bad was a plugin that autokicked for allchat (make sure you set your TA's on a whitelist though, one of the 21CW TA's got kicked for saying LIVE LIVE LIVE haha)

Yep, that's the tradeoff. Recruitment becomes an important part of winning the campaign. I'd like to give it a shot, but you guys are right that it would be a major shift in how things work. We've deliberately avoided it until now, on the assumption that it would disrupt our carefully crafted army balance. We also haven't had a "Balanced" campaign in two years
/

Yes, recruiting will become a huge part about winning the campaign and it will vastly change how GC works. If one side doesn't do their job of recruiting, they simply will become outnumbered come battle-day. However, it can be well managed if you pace your recruitment so you don't get too many new players at once. There's many things you can do, such as:

1) Setting the amount of new players you can recruit a week
2) Setting a limit where a team cannot recruit more players if they have X amount of players more than the other team
3) Recruit only enough to keep the servers filled at 32v32 (this is on the army leadership)



tl;dr - Recruit at a slow enough pace to teach new guys how GC works and pick Generals who aren't going to go out and recruit super good comp players.

[Divine-Sneaker]

I've mentioned this before, but I actually felt more motivated to help practices, write strategy or work harder to show that I deserved a spot when there was a waiting room. It sort of motivated me to try and make myself invaluable enough to not have to wait.

It might entirely just be me being weird, but being able to just randomly show up, unpracticed and unprepared because you can clearly see there are available slots certainly doesn't foster my desire to put in any extra effort.

A little bit of overpopulation is also what helps alleviate that variance in attendance that everyone will have. Obviously it helps noone if there's 64 active players on each side with full attendance, but a little more than the actual 32(33) needed to fill a server has no negatives in my opinion.

[Kilo]

That's actually a very good point. The first time I took an officer position in 21CW was to make sure I could get a slot during battle-day. Of course that also meant I had to do work, but being guaranteed a spot made it worth it.

[Fanne]

You recruite for GC, not a Army.
If one recruites to much - some go to the other side.
I do hope no one spends money to bribe ppl instead to give it to GC to fill more servers

[Kilo]

Did you even read the previous posts in the thread?

I've seen this time and time again. People will are recruited to play 32s usually want to play on the side with the person who recruited them. Whenever they are put on the other side, big surprise, they don't show up and play.

[Fanne]

not all -
and some times I don't get it
get used to it - I do my best

[Tea-Assault]

I've mentioned this before, but I actually felt more motivated to help practices, write strategy or work harder to show that I deserved a spot when there was a waiting room. It sort of motivated me to try and make myself invaluable enough to not have to wait.

It might entirely just be me being weird, but being able to just randomly show up, unpracticed and unprepared because you can clearly see there are available slots certainly doesn't foster my desire to put in any extra effort.

A little bit of overpopulation is also what helps alleviate that variance in attendance that everyone will have. Obviously it helps noone if there's 64 active players on each side with full attendance, but a little more than the actual 32(33) needed to fill a server has no negatives in my opinion.

I agree, the waiting room is pretty much what kept me in GC from the first two battledays I played. It makes you feel like you are really needed by the army and makes you want to improve so you get cycled in more often. Also the waiting room chat whilst watching the streams was the best

[InsanityRocks]

This dialog is a beautiful thing - take the blue pill and keep it up!

At this point I feel like saying: let's stop talking about attendance. We all know it's a variable that can't be accounted for. I think a viable solution is continuous recruiting, especially if you happen to be on the losing Army. Having low morale in your Army nearly always guarantees low turn-out, not by the veterans (though that can also happen) but from the new guys.

These kids today and their short attention spans and need for immediate gratification. I digress.

As was mentioned by Neco, Army balance and the Risk meta-game are interconnected; I'd add Army morale too. IIRC, the situation Necro described was a complete surprise and really set the tone for the rest of the campaign IMHO.

One observation I've had: if you look at the BF4 Platoons of the winning Armies for the past 3 campaigns you'll notice the ones with the higher levels are also the campaign victors. Even if it's just pubbing, the Army that plays/works together is also the one that improves together. This leads me to believe: no matter how competitive the General is, no matter how good the HC and Officers are, if you don't have an Army that works together, PTFOing if you will, you wont be the campaign victor. I'm not sure balance addresses that.

And, now, having jibber-jabber all that nonsense: let's do something. We shouldn't be afraid to try new things. Some will work. Some won't. It does us no good to theorize when reality could be completely different.

What's the simplest thing that could work? Word of mouth recruiting, I believe.

And I believe if you recruit a friend they should play on your side for their first campaign. For their next campaign, though, they enter the draft like everyone else and take their chances.

[CognitoCon]

So some people have mentioned that recruiting is challenging or doesn't work. I've found that the best way to recruit randoms is simply being a good squadmate. Often when I'm going around reviving my squad and repairing tanks and what not, people add me on battlelog and from there they can be recruited without violating any silly server rules. The benefit of this is also that we recruit people who enjoy team play. All other balance concerns I've talked to death in other threads I think, so I'll leave that out here.

[RazY70]

This leads me to believe: no matter how competitive the General is, no matter how good the HC and Officers are, if you don't have an Army that works together, PTFOing if you will, you wont be the campaign victor. I'm not sure balance addresses that

Don't forget who's responsible for the army roster. Hopefully they don't just sit there drawing names out of a hat.

[Necromancer]

Another option is to play with the server unlocked to pubbies.
The cons are obvious - A lot of TA work to keep server rules, and the biggest problem is pubbies taking assigned vehicles or loosing them (though this can be addressed by TAs).
The pro is no need for armies to actively recruit 10 people per week, and since pubbies are random, it doesn't influence balance like one side recruiting high caliber players.