Better Team Balance

Yet another autobalance mod. Except it's a lot smorter and comes with additional features, all with the overarching goal of improving team balancing, so that we might enjoy challenging and even matches more often.

Relies on FSU for chat commands. If using FSU, you will want to disable its built-in auto balance and team shuffle features.

Get FSU here: Fifty's Server Utilities

You can also run BTB without FSU. Though this will disable voting to balance teams, all automatic features will work.

Check mod.json for all convars and config options!

Several of the more powerful team balancing features are disabled by default!

Changelog

1.3.1/2/3

• Bugfix
• Fix crash on rebalance vote

1.3.0

• Updated for FSU2!
• Can now be used without FSU, albeit without the ability for players to vote for a rebalance
• Imbalance detection has been improved
  • Now takes into account calculated team strength, not just score
  • A game where the stronger team is losing, will not be detected as imbalanced
• Can now be run with FFA gamemodes, without crashing, though only AFK kicking will work for obvious reasons

Features

Complex Team Balancing

This mod now uses a balancing system where each player is assigned a value based on their KD and contributed score. These values are then used to create two teams with equal total skill. This is able to account for players who are as good as several others put together.

Other balancing methods, such as the one used in the playervote mod and until now this mod, would sort players from best to worst, then go down the list sorting every other player into opposing teams. This works well, but in cases of very skilled players, this always creates a team in their favor. When they perhaps should get none who rival their skill on their team, they would still get half of the skilled players on the server as teammates.

For example, in a game with three players, the best player would go to team one, the next best to team two, but then the third best would go to team one again, even though team two is the one who needs help to go up against the best player.

This mod will in that scenario pit the two less skilled players against the single more skilled one. With this mod, highly skilled players and even to an extent cheaters will find themselves fighting against even odds.

Below is an example of how the mod rebalanced a match where one player was doing orders of magnitude better than the next best. In this match the automatic rebalance treshold was activated early on, allowing the remainder of the match to play out as seen in the screenshot.

Team Shuffle

• Player ranking information is saved into a couple convars at the end of each match
• At the beginning of a match, this data is retrieved and used to inform the shuffle
• The shuffle incorporates some randomness, so as to leave room for variation
• Accounts for players leaving/joining between games, by waiting until the next match to actually build the teams
• Player scores are taken into account in Attrition, PvP, Skirmish, and Titan Brawl, in other modes, balancing is done based on KD alone

Mid-Match Rebalance

• Same algorithm as team shuffle, but without any randomness
• Redistributes points earned by players to their respective new teams (in round based modes, simply equalizes them)
• Can trigger on vote, and/or on crossing a configurable team imbalance threshold
• By default, only informing players via chat about the "!teambalance" command, when relevant, is enabled
• To activate balancing automatically, set the relevant threshold using the correct convar (check mod.json)
• Tresholds accumulate/decay, the score difference has to remain at or grow past the treshold in order for the relevant action to eventually trigger

Auto-PlayerCount-Balance

• Handles joining players, placing them first onto the team most in need of bolstering
• When one team has too many players, one of them is swapped over on death
• Only swaps over a player, if that player is one that would make the match more even
• Before doing so, will wait a moment in case new players join
• Wait is disabled for the first 40 seconds of a match, in order to quickly level team imbalances due to possible leaving players
• Disabled for the last minute of a match, no victories ruined by a last second swap over to losing side

Auto-TeamStrength-Balance - DISABLED BY DEFAULT

• Active balancing aka "insidious mode"
• This is DISABLED BY DEFAULT and must be enabled with a convar (check mod.json)
• Set an imbalance treshold above which insidious mode is activated
• When activated, BTB will compare team strenghts using the balancing algorithm
• If team balance appears to be getting worse (snowballing) the mod will swap the teams of two suitable players
  • A weak player will be moved to the winning team, and a strong player to the losing one
  • The swap can only occur while they are dead
• BTB will then wait and see if team strength begins to develop towards even, and only act again, if not

AFK Kicking

• Set a playercount, below which afk players waiting for the server to fill up, wont be kicked
• UIDs set as admin in FSU are immune

Changelogs for previous versions

1.2.6

• Fixed active limit convar being commented out

1.2.5

• New feature: insidious mode
  • Active balancing aka "insidious mode"
  • Set a score difference treshold above which insidious mode is activated
  • When crossed, the mod will compare team strenghts using the balancing algorithm
  • If team balance appears to be getting worse (snowballing) the mod will swap two suitable players teams
  • The swap can only occur while they are dead
  • Then it will wait and see if team strength begins to develop towards even, and only act again, if not
• RUI support
• Fixed round based modes triggering team rebuild on each round

1.2.4

• Further improved joining player handling
• Corrected some logging errors
• !balance command is now !teambalance/!tb
• Force rebalance can now trigger earlier (if conditions are met)
• Suggestion message is now sent even less frequently
• Overarching chat color theme support using MentalEdge.theme (included)
• Removed automatic disabling of FSU auto-balance/shuffle for comptaibility with FSU-fvnk

1.2.3

• Fixed joining player handling stacking the weaker team a bit too hard

1.2.2

• Now handles joining players, placing them first onto the team most in need of bolstering
• Fixed bug that would cause shuffle/balance to sometimes fail keeping the playercounts equal between teams

1.2.0

• Vastly improved team sorting/building algorithm, as explained above
• !balance vote can no longer be used during the first three and half minutes of a match
• !balance vote can no longer be used if teams are already balanced, or were already rebalanced
• Treshold trigger behaviour improved, should now trigger/not trigger more logically
• Auto-balance now has a team balance check, swaps that would exacerbate the lead of a team are avoided

1.1.1

• Better team balancing/shuffle calculation (score weight reduced, KD weight increased)

1.1.0

• New feature: Team shuffle between matches that will attempt to use stats from the previous game to create balanced teams
• New feature: The mod will now override FSU setting convars and disable a conflicting FSU feature, if the corresponing one is enabled in BTB
• Auto-balance now works immediately during the first 40 seconds of a match

1.0.4

• Bugfix - the mod now runs again

1.0.3

• Forced rebalance and chat suggestions can now both be enabled, with different activation thresholds
• Same as 1.0.2 but comes with sane defaults

1.0.1

• Admin afk check fixed