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Suggesting a consensus for unbalanced teams in CTF

Posted: Tue Aug 29, 2006 5:02 pm
by Sky King
This may have already been tackled in the past, but I'd like to start a discussion on imbalanced teams. Lately, I have seen a lot of teams capping in CTF when they are up by a large margin. When you call them on it, the repsonse is usually "show me the rule that says we can't".

I'd like to suggest two points, for discussion:
  • 1. That we kind of agree on what constitutes a no-CTF situation. Teams are often not perfectly balanced on a non-league server, so simply saying teams have to be exactly even is impractical. The smaller the team, the more critical that parity is; the larger the team, the less it matters and the less likely teams will ever be balanced. So, Just playing with some numbers, how about:

    Code: Select all

    If the larger        then opposing team
    team has             must be
    =============        ================
     1-5                 exactly equal
     6-9                 within 1
     10-13               within 2
     14-17               within 3
     17+                 within 4, but 17+is madness :)
    1a. If an opponent is having a network problem and is [nr], you can't count them as being a team member toward balanced teams. Same with an intentional TKer. If you become aware that the enemy team really does have a TKer, then CTF should stop.

    2. One thing that has also become common practice is to ge get the enemy flag while you are up 9-3... and then take it back and plant it next to your base and wait for the numbers to come back up. This strikes me as being the kind of "skirting the rules" nonsense that takes away from the sportsmanship and comaraderie of any sport or game. At LaserMania, for instance, it is quite common there for a player to return an enemy flag if the teams are uneven, or if there was a friendly flag runner.

    I think that people should have the guts to return a flag if they realize their cap attempt was in error, not just park it at some place your understrength enemy has no hope of getting to.
Competition isn't about winning, it's about having an incentive to put your best game out on the field, and capping a wildly outnumbered enemy doesn't provide any satisfaction to the capper.

Comments?

Posted: Tue Aug 29, 2006 5:56 pm
by joevano
There is already a plug-in that does this and it works quite well (thanks L3m4r :D). Silvercat uses it with lots of success. When it is not in place on a server, I generally use a slightly different scale, and is use the smaller team as the deciding factor.

1-4 must be equal
5-7 within 1
8-10 within 2
over 10 always able to CTF

Lets face it, if you have 10 players and they can cap on you, lets face it... you just suck and you deserve it :p


Concerning your comment about taking the flag back to your base when the other team is at a CTF disadvantage, I agree 100%. I will send the flag back if I see that happening.

Unfortunately, many players are not concerned with competition. The thing that they are most concerned with is their score. To me that just shows a lack of maturity on a CTF server. Score should not be the primary objective if the game is CTF. The game is called Capture the Flag for crying out loud, try and capture the flag. Sometimes that means you are going to die, it happens. If you take risks you are going to die sometimes, but you succeed many times.

EDIT: correctly attributed FairCTF to L4m3r, thanks for pointing it out atd

Posted: Tue Aug 29, 2006 7:47 pm
by temporal distraction

Posted: Sat Sep 02, 2006 1:12 am
by Joe-Schmoe
I agree with Sky King. Capping when you have too many people is no fun.

BUT!

On those servers where as soon as one team has too many people, CTF gets disabled, I have seen people join the observers just so that their team didn't get capped. For instance, I'm right near my base with their flag, teams are fair, and then all of a sudden 2 or 3 opposing guys decide to leave and now I can't cap?

There needs to be some sort of delay to prevent this sort of thing, either that or an admin who watches everything and uses human judgment as to whether or not capping is okay.

Also, sometimes I cap when I have too many people on my team quite simply because I didn't know teams were unbalanced. It's easy to do by accident. Sorry!

Posted: Sat Sep 02, 2006 6:41 am
by Skeeve
Joe-Schmoe wrote:There needs to be some sort of delay to prevent this sort of thing, either that or an admin who watches everything and uses human judgment as to whether or not capping is okay.
Maybe the delay could be: As long as you are holding the flag, capping is allowed. As soon as you loose it, being you got shot or drop it or reach your base, any further capping is disabled.

Posted: Sat Nov 11, 2006 5:45 pm
by Ck_asdf
good idea, skeeve

Posted: Thu Dec 28, 2006 9:06 pm
by A Looney Kumquat
hmm- good ideas

but what if when people leave, as long as their team flag is under possesion by the other team, bots (spawned by the server) would replace them until the team capped.

just an idea- probably wont work but just throwing stuff out there

Posted: Fri Dec 29, 2006 6:59 pm
by Da Best
There could be a lot done to this plug-in, first i would like to say that even if you have more players, that doesn't mean they are as skilled as you are. upon joining a game, the CTF could look up your stats (If you are registered =), and judge your skill by your overall ratio, although my idea is not that great something could be done with it i think :shock:

Posted: Fri Dec 29, 2006 7:30 pm
by meeba
Da Best wrote:There could be a lot done to this plug-in, first i would like to say that even if you have more players, that doesn't mean they are as skilled as you are. upon joining a game, the CTF could look up your stats (If you are registered =), and judge your skill by your overall ratio, although my idea is not that great something could be done with it i think :shock:
The only problem with this is that most of us are not consistant players. For example, I generally suck. But at times I am unstoppable.

It would be quite complicated to judge equality of skill.

Posted: Fri Dec 29, 2006 7:34 pm
by Da Best
Ah, Yes, maybe we could have it judge how good you are on GU style or Skill servers? that would prove skill with tank, not flags?

Posted: Fri Dec 29, 2006 9:23 pm
by Longhair
Personally, I'm all for using the fair-ctf plug-in. It's in use on borrego, and it makes the life of a cop/admin much easier. It frees you up from getting into a million little arguments with the cantankerous poor sportsman du jour. They simply can't pick up the flag, so there's nothing to argue about. I'm thinking that you can configure it either that the minority team can cap or so that they can't.

Posted: Sat Dec 30, 2006 12:33 am
by macsforme
Longhair wrote:I'm thinking that you can configure it either that the minority team can cap or so that they can't.
Yes, this "configuration" is done by means of a patch. See the original FairCTF release thread for details.

Posted: Wed Jan 31, 2007 10:14 pm
by The Vaxorcist
Hehe, I have to disagree with everybody here.

I don't really believe that artificial limits on capping are a good thing: they're are more of a pain than they're worth. You can be on a really good killing spree, you have the other teams flag, you are soo close to their base, and someone leaves. Arrrrggh.

In fact, I have sometimes quit on purpose to do just that. It IS rather cheap, so I don't do it anymore. (Of course) :)

The rules just seem to get in the way - IMHO, stricter admins are a better way to get people to play fair.

Cheers

Defecting

Posted: Fri Feb 02, 2007 12:23 pm
by asciimonster
Most often unbalanced teams are due to people leaving. You can select a colour at login, but most people have the sever decide. And the server usually manages the teams fine. But when many people leave, it is helpless.

I suggest creating a command called /defect that let's you get out of this jam easy without too much hassle. When the sever detects an unbalanced situation (lets say there is 2 reds too much with respect to blue), it remarks to the red team:
"[SERVER]Teams are unbalanced, CTF is OFF. You may DEFECT now."

When 3 reds apply for defection, the first defects, i.e. changes team:
"[SERVER]You have defected to the BLUE team"
The other 2 get:
"[SERVER]Your defection failed"
And everybody gets:
"[SERVER]Player X defected to the BLUE team \n Teams are even CTF=on"

Pro's:
- Quick & easy break from CTF lockdown.
- Volountary, nobody gets forced
- Defecting player does not loose stats when changing teams.
- Transparent.

Internal note: Should defection force a relocation to his/her now base? (if not, what rules should apply?) How 2 update team stats.