Post
by iZumo » Wed 13 Jun , 2012 12:34 pm
Ok let's say it this way - how it went with the voting.
About half and a year ago, we've created a weighted voting system, to boost up AS games (as the server were moreless RACE only). The idea for that was to balance the number of matches the two groups of players want, while the number of players belonging to each group was very different. Initially this worked as a revival for AS. Also when the server is full of racers, let them have their race; and if the server is full of AS players, let them have their AS. We're only issuing force when there is conflict in the demand for both gametypes.
Around August, it turned out that voting AS with high playercount leads to RQs, because either the map was too small or it resulted in pure spam. Thus weighting was reduced for a reasonable playercount for AS (i.e more then 20 plrs -> no weight).
Then in January 2012, AS gathered enough people to get it voted without the need of weigted vote, so it was turned off. Small maps / bad maps received voting penalties (Chaos, Lego etc.)
And you know the rest well: recently, AS was dominating on the server, showing there is enough ppl to keep AS alive: so the server was splitted for a trial: result? RACE server worked fine, AS server not, because most of the players spectated and complained over low playercount (4 spectators, 2 players) or could not be bothered to play on the AS at all. Right - they somewhat would deserve not to merge it back and "care more or no AS", but this would dismiss all the work that was done by Aza and Socio, so it's not an option at all. So it was merged back, but with several penalties. All mapbased penalties in RACE were removed. When balancing RACE and AS, I now view AS as the "second class gametype". And in order to prevent the chainvote domination by AS players, vote weight for AS players has been adjusted, to underweight it: reduces to 0.60 when out of last four games, 2 were Assault. This makes long chainvoting AS quite unlikely now. Here, don't forget that AS game takes twice as long than RACE.
Also, tbh I won't support the effort to have RACE players bumping AS players, I'll just leave it as it is (i.e won't push AS vote after several RACEs). Also many AS players just play AS to pwn noobs, by taking the role of backup players and own all the noobs trying to get objective, without themselves ever trying to get the objective, if they attack, and calling for more players (and crying if it's 3v3 or 4v4). We all know that sole RACE players are noobs, playing just to relax or piss around, it's pointless to force them to play something they don't want to.
But back to the "random map", I don't think that would do any good. Sure, there could be lists from which to pick based on the playercount, eliminating horde of players voting small map, and perhaps helping with some maps being a bit overplayed (such as Ballx - nothing wrong with the map though). But say, a bunch of AS players want a gg in Proseidon, and it would pick Lego or Chaos ... rageworthy, eh?
OBJ and shieldupandrun forward.