Freq balancing

[Deathmonger]

In the spirit of today's freq balancing discussion, let me make a proposal for what a HS freq balancer ought to do. I realize that this requires work.

 

- No pub freq limits

- Private freqs limited to 33% of total non-spec population. I.e. a constant 2:1 pub:priv ratio limit regardless of total zone pop.

- Pub players can freely switch between pub freqs, including having all of pub on one big pub freq. This is meant to reduce flanking and enable pub to reach 2:1 advantage vs. priv.

- Lock all freqs including pub when the last flag is being carried (no freq hopping once the music starts). This will allow pub to win flag games without everyone hopping to dilute jp. It will also foil vets hopping onto pub to try to prolong the flag game and ruin the privs' victory.

- As population increases, additional priv spots are available--announce to arena that the max priv size has changed

- As population decreases, priv spots are taken away. If a priv is over the limit, priv has 30 sec to switch someone to pub or freq balancer will switch one at random. That way when a pub starts to dwindle the priv gets nerfed in order to even things out again.

 

In this system, privs are incented by winning 2x jp, killing more pub cannon fodder, and being able to scale up if a larger pub pop shows up. Pub gets a way to avoid flanking and gets a 2:1 numbers advantage. The system balances itself regardless of current population. Cats and dogs become friends.

[Dr Brain]

My initial system will do the following:

 

Enforce ship limits in the way that everyone expects. Can't play in ships you don't own, etc.

 

Try to balance teams by exp. If a team becomes unbalanced (within some number), it will select players to move based on how well their movement will help bring balance and also based on how long they've been a part of the team.

 

Publics are only balanced with respect to other publics. Players will never be moved from a public to a small private to make it balanced.

Privates can never exceed both the balanced publics and the balanced privates (need to account for the possibility of having privates with no real public teams existing). To even private frequencies WRT other privates, players will be pulled from privates and moved to a public. I may need additional code to allow a single pub when large privates exist, but I'm not sure how it could be implemented.

 

I will not be implementing the dynamic priv sizing proposed because of complexity and the fact that I'm not sure how much benefit it would provide.

 

I will try to implement a lock when the flag game is winnable, but probably only prevent people from hopping to the winning team (not preventing them from moving to a losing team). It will not be part of the initial system, however.

[Corey]

^ very nice

[vetta64]

^^