I was playing some RO tonight and was kinda dispondant, the reason was that we were playing Kryukovo (spelling ?). Anyway i knew we werent going to win 18 minutes before the game ended, the reason ? The map isnt fairly balanced. I have probably played the map 2 dozen times or so and i can only remember winning it once or twice as allies and many more wins as germans.
Now i doubt its the mappers fault, balancing issues are hard to fix sometimes and getting reliable data on what needs changing is difficult. But i know that some of these maps could be just that bit better if they were fine tuned in both the number of reinforcements and the time given.
What im suggesting is a server side mutator which would record the amount of wins and losses of a particular map on a particular server. Some maps will come out a nice even 1:1 in terms of wins for each team. Others may be off by a little or a lot, maybe as much as 4:1. Basically what this mutator would do is take the game time and/or the reinforcement numbers and change them relatively gently and keep watching the wins ratio. It would essentially try to automatically balance the maps on an individual basis, without changing the actual maps themselves at all.
This could probably be quite configurable from the hosts point of view, controls over damping, what ratio is considered acceptable as a pass band and whether or not to change reinforcements or time. It could probably also be set up to be map specific and if a map gets well balanced by a server over a large number of games, the host may be able to share the stats for the map that made it balanced.
The main advantage i see with this is statistics controlled balancing so mappers wouldnt have to release balance patches at all. It also wouldnt harm the original map since the statistics would be super imposed on top of the old settings. I would point out as well that players would be unlikely to really notice the changes as they would be gentle and over a long period of time (weeks to months) to fully balance the map. This is necessary so that erroneous data doesnt affect the changes.
Seems like this might make a fair few of the maps better fights without harming anything at all.
Now i doubt its the mappers fault, balancing issues are hard to fix sometimes and getting reliable data on what needs changing is difficult. But i know that some of these maps could be just that bit better if they were fine tuned in both the number of reinforcements and the time given.
What im suggesting is a server side mutator which would record the amount of wins and losses of a particular map on a particular server. Some maps will come out a nice even 1:1 in terms of wins for each team. Others may be off by a little or a lot, maybe as much as 4:1. Basically what this mutator would do is take the game time and/or the reinforcement numbers and change them relatively gently and keep watching the wins ratio. It would essentially try to automatically balance the maps on an individual basis, without changing the actual maps themselves at all.
This could probably be quite configurable from the hosts point of view, controls over damping, what ratio is considered acceptable as a pass band and whether or not to change reinforcements or time. It could probably also be set up to be map specific and if a map gets well balanced by a server over a large number of games, the host may be able to share the stats for the map that made it balanced.
The main advantage i see with this is statistics controlled balancing so mappers wouldnt have to release balance patches at all. It also wouldnt harm the original map since the statistics would be super imposed on top of the old settings. I would point out as well that players would be unlikely to really notice the changes as they would be gentle and over a long period of time (weeks to months) to fully balance the map. This is necessary so that erroneous data doesnt affect the changes.
Seems like this might make a fair few of the maps better fights without harming anything at all.