I've previously made some post about fixing the team balancing because as it is, the team with less players has a massive disadvantage. I believe that the post didn't get much attention before as I didn't explain why it needs a change too well and why the new option is so much better, I am also adding more detail and more ideas.
The idea is to change the Blockwars team balance and boosts to the team which has less players to even up the game and change how teams with less players are buffed to balance it.
The game unfortunately takes a while to fill up with players and those players frequently leave, this can bring problems to those who do play. I'm mostly focussed on reducing the severe wait times.
Lobby problems and possible solutions
Starting games with even teams
As it is, players will flock to the team with the most ranked players on and what ends up happening is that one team fills up with 8 players and the other team will have none, once the timer finishes the game is unbalanced and will not start with the timer going up 25 seconds to wait for new players.
What tends to happen is that the ranked players will tend to swap teams with their party and the other players will follow them because they want the win and because being in the smaller team will almost always mean they lose, so then the other team gets all the players. This cycle repeats many times with no end in sight.
^ That might sound like an obscure situation, but it happens all the time. This is especially the case late at night when there are less players, this can easily go on for ten minutes.
There are strategies to starting it, like swapping to the other team last second to make it start, but often, not even this will work.
Solution #1
This wont completely resolve the problem, but with other solutions it will help a lot.
On the left, this is the amount of players on each team requires for a game to start and on the right is my replacement for that so games can start a little more easily.
To make it easier, Red has more incrementing players and Blue is the amount of players needed to balance it enough for the game to start.
What this does is allow more unbalanced games to start, meaning that they can start more easily.
You may think that this is really bad but I have a solution to the team unbalances later on
Solution #2
This won't completely resolve the problem, but with other solutions it will help a lot.
As it is currently, when a game is too unbalanced to start, the timer will go up by 25 seconds and a message in chat will come up saying it. This seems to be much too long, players will quit after this happens a few times because it becomes boring. Decrease this timer to 10 seconds.
Solution #3
This wont completely resolve the problem, but with other solutions it will help a lot.
Most players will do not know that the game is unbalanced or do not read chat to see the message that they are unbalanced.
My idea is to put a message in the centre of the screen the first time it is unbalanced in the players language with this message, (or something similar) in small/medium size writing so it's not too annoying. Only send this to players on the team with more players.
Message: The teams are too unbalanced to start, join the other team to make the teams balanced.
Solution #4
If after 60 seconds, the teams are not balanced, players would be placed into random teams and the game will start, this is sometimes necessary when players always follow each other on to the bigger team.
Solution #5
Add my other suggestions so players wont feel that they have to be on the bigger team to win the game anymore, because being on a team with 3 would previously be a death sentence ( regardless of the players skill level )
Games not starting late at night when less players are around
As it is, if you want to play late at night, you cannot get 5 players into a game to start it because players will just leave after a wait so the game just completely dies.
Solution (maybe)
Reduce this number to two people, one on each team, this game will be more solo friendly though ( later on in this )
Wait time for a full game
As it is, when not at prime time ( 7pm GMT ) the game won't always fill up and the long wait for it to start can be very annoying, a 90 second wait is too much to have to do all the time.
Solution
Reduce this to 45 seconds
Build time problems and possible solutions
Build time being too long
Build time can be way too long for modes like half blocks and get very boring waiting for it to end so here are some solutions.
Solution #1
Set build time to certain lengths based on which modifier is chosen with something like these times.
Half blocks =~ 50 seconds
Normal, Speed Boost and Low Gravity =~100 seconds
Double blocks =~150 seconds
Solution #2
Add a voting option to adjust the length of build time with something like these as build time modifiers
Speed build = 1 minute build time with speed 2 effect
Quick build = 1 minute build time
Normal build = 2 minute build time
Long build = 3 minute build time
Team with less players having less total blocks
This isn't a very big issue but teams with less players won't be able to build as good of a defence as a team with more because less have been given less blocks in total so here's an ok solution to that
Solution
Half blocks: Each team gets 250 blocks
Normal blocks: Each team gets 500 blocks
Double blocks: Each team gets 1000 blocks
Fight time problems, solutions and ideas
Unbalanced teams
This is the main reason I made this post and what I originally posted about before, but I didn't explain it too well so here I am again trying to get a change!
The current system is an overly simple, ineffective and annoying one that doesn't achieve much. For each player one team has less than the other, the team with less players are all given resistance at these levels per each player one team has less than the other.
A level of resistance grants 20% less damage taken, this is basically the same thing as a health boost and this is shown on the last column.
If you look at the graph you can clearly see that the resistance boost is far too weak to be effective, and a stronger one wouldn't make things better because it is ineffective at best.
A few examples to show you what I mean:
Red, 5 players Blue, 3 players
This is 67% more players than Blue and Blue receive a measly 11% hit point buff
Red, 8 players Blue, 5 players
This is 60% more players than Blue and Blue receive a measly 25% hit point buff
Red, 7 players Blue, 3 players
This is 233% more players than Blue and Blue receive a measly 43% hit point buff
I hope you see my point to why the resistance is far too weak as it is but there is another reason why resistance should be avoided completely, along with damage boosts.
Using a frequently occurring amount of players on each team, say 8 on blue and 4 on red, if everyone is fighting, each player on red is fighting two blue players, and unless they are all far better, they will all lose, with no hope of winning at all.
If you think about a 2v1, you have players who can deal twice as much damage and have twice as much health in total, so fighting a 2v1 is actually 4x harder than a 1v1. There is some Wikipedia page about this somewhere but I can't find it.
So if you are being directly buffed with strength or resistance, for a technically fair fight you would require a very high level of resistance or strength, which would not be fun or quick to fight against. So thats all health boosting or damage boosting affects out the window.
So here is my alternative solution
Solution part 1
One of the biggest aspects to winning a game is how well you can defend your flag, if you and your teammates are all dead because you have to 2v1 that can't happen, so why not lower the respawn time?
So if you had less players to defend, a normal 15 second respawn time will mean they are nearly already at their flag with yours once you have respawned so if you can respawn instantly, thats not a problem anymore because you can have a second shot at it. SO having players than can instantly respawn can simulate having more players on the team without boosting their attack or hp.
The enemy respawn time would also be increased quite a lot to adjust for it too
I have had many ideas to how this would work but I think this is the best way I've come up with will be in the chart below.
The respawn time will also be doubled in overtime ( I'll explain that later )
This should account for about 40% of the lack of teammates
Solution part 2
The next buff that would work well in Blockwars would be haste! The reason for this is because, you can mine into and break the flag much more quickly, so you actually have a chance to take and capture flags, this does give a slight pvp advantage too.
It can also be quite a unique twist to the Blockwars strategy when with a smaller team to give the game some extra twist!
This will also be shown in the chart below.
This should account for about 20% of the lack of teammates
Solution part 3
The final buff I would like to include is to help with capturing flags. Normally if you take the flag you will lose one level of speed. So if you had speed 2 with runner, you will get speed 1 and if you had no speed with warrior you will get slowness 1 when you have the flag. So what I'm suggesting is that when a team has less players, the amount of speed thats removed in deducted. E.g. If you had a 5v8, the team with 5 would be faster with the flag than the team with 8 so they can capture flags much more easily. This would help quite a lot with the struggle of attacking but wouldn't do that much in the grand scheme of things so it would only account for about 20% of the lack of teammates.
Formula/Values
How I'm going to show this graph is not going to be by how many players one team has over the other because that will effect a large game a lot of more than a small one because 1v2 is a much bigger difference than a 7v8 even though It's the same difference in amount of players so I will show it in how many more players one team has over the other. e.g. 1.25<=x<1 which would be less than or equal to 1.25x and great than 1x and in the second column I'll include the game situations it would include. So that example would include 8v7 6v5 and 5v4, this would give a minor boost and a higher multiplier like 2.5<=x<2 would give bigger buffs.
Coding wise, this could be done with the maths or just with the game examples, so an 8v7 game will give that specific boost, I have no idea how cube likes to code that stuff so I can't say which would be better to use. Obviously I can't test these values because I don't have the access to do that, I'm just basing this off a few thousand games of experience so the values can definitely change.
Column one is the player amounts, I've put these in values of increasing range so they all fit in similar game situation amounts
Column two is the specific situations it would include
Column three is the respawn timer, the base would be set to 10 seconds, all the respawn times will double in overtime because of something later on.
Column four in the enemy teams respawn time, this would be increased.
Column four is level of haste, this is added as well as the level of mining fatigue thats' normally there.
Column five will be how much speed you lose taking the flag, represented as a minus number of speed level
The massive respawn times are only used in 3v1+ games so that wouldn't be too much of a problem.
Kit rebalances
Anyone who has ever played with the tank kit will immediately notice that it is useless and really needs a change, the slowness effect means that you can't deal any good knockback with it and the lack of sword means you can't fight at all, so you will always be a free kill and not be able to do anything for your team because of how slow you are, so why not remove the slowness? It will make it more usable to take and capture flags because it can actually run. Remove the slowness effect.
Archer kit is infamous for the bow spamming, so why allow it? Change the amount of arrows an archer spawns with to five, have that as a maximum and give an arrow to the archer every 5 seconds. If you hit an arrow, there would be a 50% chance of getting one back to promote good aim. This will eliminate bow spamming and mean that archers don't need to suicide any more for no reason other than to get more arrows! Since you could consider that a nerf, give it some fancy chain boots so you can tell the difference between that and a sommoner
Overtime change
In overtime, teams are still very able to camp on the flag so if you double the respawn time during it, you will be able to attack much more easily because if they are respawning for longer so you can take the flag back to your base before they are back alive. Why doesn't this help camping? because it takes longer to get to their base than your own, the extra time will hurt you more if you are in defence because instead of 15 seconds going back to your base its 25, 66% increase. Whilst attacking, you can get to their base in 40 seconds instead of 30, and this is only a 33% increase. This means defence is hurt by this twice as much as attacking. Because of the respawn increase, make overtime last 3 minutes instead of 2 so no more draws.
I would love some staff feedback to all of this, and everyone else too.
The idea is to change the Blockwars team balance and boosts to the team which has less players to even up the game and change how teams with less players are buffed to balance it.
The game unfortunately takes a while to fill up with players and those players frequently leave, this can bring problems to those who do play. I'm mostly focussed on reducing the severe wait times.
Lobby problems and possible solutions
Starting games with even teams
As it is, players will flock to the team with the most ranked players on and what ends up happening is that one team fills up with 8 players and the other team will have none, once the timer finishes the game is unbalanced and will not start with the timer going up 25 seconds to wait for new players.
What tends to happen is that the ranked players will tend to swap teams with their party and the other players will follow them because they want the win and because being in the smaller team will almost always mean they lose, so then the other team gets all the players. This cycle repeats many times with no end in sight.
^ That might sound like an obscure situation, but it happens all the time. This is especially the case late at night when there are less players, this can easily go on for ten minutes.
There are strategies to starting it, like swapping to the other team last second to make it start, but often, not even this will work.
Solution #1
This wont completely resolve the problem, but with other solutions it will help a lot.
On the left, this is the amount of players on each team requires for a game to start and on the right is my replacement for that so games can start a little more easily.
To make it easier, Red has more incrementing players and Blue is the amount of players needed to balance it enough for the game to start.
What this does is allow more unbalanced games to start, meaning that they can start more easily.
You may think that this is really bad but I have a solution to the team unbalances later on
Solution #2
This won't completely resolve the problem, but with other solutions it will help a lot.
As it is currently, when a game is too unbalanced to start, the timer will go up by 25 seconds and a message in chat will come up saying it. This seems to be much too long, players will quit after this happens a few times because it becomes boring. Decrease this timer to 10 seconds.
Solution #3
This wont completely resolve the problem, but with other solutions it will help a lot.
Most players will do not know that the game is unbalanced or do not read chat to see the message that they are unbalanced.
My idea is to put a message in the centre of the screen the first time it is unbalanced in the players language with this message, (or something similar) in small/medium size writing so it's not too annoying. Only send this to players on the team with more players.
Message: The teams are too unbalanced to start, join the other team to make the teams balanced.
Solution #4
If after 60 seconds, the teams are not balanced, players would be placed into random teams and the game will start, this is sometimes necessary when players always follow each other on to the bigger team.
Solution #5
Add my other suggestions so players wont feel that they have to be on the bigger team to win the game anymore, because being on a team with 3 would previously be a death sentence ( regardless of the players skill level )
Games not starting late at night when less players are around
As it is, if you want to play late at night, you cannot get 5 players into a game to start it because players will just leave after a wait so the game just completely dies.
Solution (maybe)
Reduce this number to two people, one on each team, this game will be more solo friendly though ( later on in this )
Wait time for a full game
As it is, when not at prime time ( 7pm GMT ) the game won't always fill up and the long wait for it to start can be very annoying, a 90 second wait is too much to have to do all the time.
Solution
Reduce this to 45 seconds
Build time problems and possible solutions
Build time being too long
Build time can be way too long for modes like half blocks and get very boring waiting for it to end so here are some solutions.
Solution #1
Set build time to certain lengths based on which modifier is chosen with something like these times.
Half blocks =~ 50 seconds
Normal, Speed Boost and Low Gravity =~100 seconds
Double blocks =~150 seconds
Solution #2
Add a voting option to adjust the length of build time with something like these as build time modifiers
Speed build = 1 minute build time with speed 2 effect
Quick build = 1 minute build time
Normal build = 2 minute build time
Long build = 3 minute build time
Team with less players having less total blocks
This isn't a very big issue but teams with less players won't be able to build as good of a defence as a team with more because less have been given less blocks in total so here's an ok solution to that
Solution
Give the team a total amount of blocks which would be spread across the team evenly so both teams will be able to make as good of a defence as each other and change the voting modifiers to:Half blocks: Each team gets 250 blocks
Normal blocks: Each team gets 500 blocks
Double blocks: Each team gets 1000 blocks
Fight time problems, solutions and ideas
Unbalanced teams
This is the main reason I made this post and what I originally posted about before, but I didn't explain it too well so here I am again trying to get a change!
The current system is an overly simple, ineffective and annoying one that doesn't achieve much. For each player one team has less than the other, the team with less players are all given resistance at these levels per each player one team has less than the other.
A level of resistance grants 20% less damage taken, this is basically the same thing as a health boost and this is shown on the last column.
If you look at the graph you can clearly see that the resistance boost is far too weak to be effective, and a stronger one wouldn't make things better because it is ineffective at best.
A few examples to show you what I mean:
Red, 5 players Blue, 3 players
This is 67% more players than Blue and Blue receive a measly 11% hit point buff
Red, 8 players Blue, 5 players
This is 60% more players than Blue and Blue receive a measly 25% hit point buff
Red, 7 players Blue, 3 players
This is 233% more players than Blue and Blue receive a measly 43% hit point buff
I hope you see my point to why the resistance is far too weak as it is but there is another reason why resistance should be avoided completely, along with damage boosts.
Using a frequently occurring amount of players on each team, say 8 on blue and 4 on red, if everyone is fighting, each player on red is fighting two blue players, and unless they are all far better, they will all lose, with no hope of winning at all.
If you think about a 2v1, you have players who can deal twice as much damage and have twice as much health in total, so fighting a 2v1 is actually 4x harder than a 1v1. There is some Wikipedia page about this somewhere but I can't find it.
So if you are being directly buffed with strength or resistance, for a technically fair fight you would require a very high level of resistance or strength, which would not be fun or quick to fight against. So thats all health boosting or damage boosting affects out the window.
So here is my alternative solution
Solution part 1
One of the biggest aspects to winning a game is how well you can defend your flag, if you and your teammates are all dead because you have to 2v1 that can't happen, so why not lower the respawn time?
So if you had less players to defend, a normal 15 second respawn time will mean they are nearly already at their flag with yours once you have respawned so if you can respawn instantly, thats not a problem anymore because you can have a second shot at it. SO having players than can instantly respawn can simulate having more players on the team without boosting their attack or hp.
The enemy respawn time would also be increased quite a lot to adjust for it too
I have had many ideas to how this would work but I think this is the best way I've come up with will be in the chart below.
The respawn time will also be doubled in overtime ( I'll explain that later )
This should account for about 40% of the lack of teammates
Solution part 2
The next buff that would work well in Blockwars would be haste! The reason for this is because, you can mine into and break the flag much more quickly, so you actually have a chance to take and capture flags, this does give a slight pvp advantage too.
It can also be quite a unique twist to the Blockwars strategy when with a smaller team to give the game some extra twist!
This will also be shown in the chart below.
This should account for about 20% of the lack of teammates
Solution part 3
The final buff I would like to include is to help with capturing flags. Normally if you take the flag you will lose one level of speed. So if you had speed 2 with runner, you will get speed 1 and if you had no speed with warrior you will get slowness 1 when you have the flag. So what I'm suggesting is that when a team has less players, the amount of speed thats removed in deducted. E.g. If you had a 5v8, the team with 5 would be faster with the flag than the team with 8 so they can capture flags much more easily. This would help quite a lot with the struggle of attacking but wouldn't do that much in the grand scheme of things so it would only account for about 20% of the lack of teammates.
Formula/Values
How I'm going to show this graph is not going to be by how many players one team has over the other because that will effect a large game a lot of more than a small one because 1v2 is a much bigger difference than a 7v8 even though It's the same difference in amount of players so I will show it in how many more players one team has over the other. e.g. 1.25<=x<1 which would be less than or equal to 1.25x and great than 1x and in the second column I'll include the game situations it would include. So that example would include 8v7 6v5 and 5v4, this would give a minor boost and a higher multiplier like 2.5<=x<2 would give bigger buffs.
Coding wise, this could be done with the maths or just with the game examples, so an 8v7 game will give that specific boost, I have no idea how cube likes to code that stuff so I can't say which would be better to use. Obviously I can't test these values because I don't have the access to do that, I'm just basing this off a few thousand games of experience so the values can definitely change.
Column one is the player amounts, I've put these in values of increasing range so they all fit in similar game situation amounts
Column two is the specific situations it would include
Column three is the respawn timer, the base would be set to 10 seconds, all the respawn times will double in overtime because of something later on.
Column four in the enemy teams respawn time, this would be increased.
Column four is level of haste, this is added as well as the level of mining fatigue thats' normally there.
Column five will be how much speed you lose taking the flag, represented as a minus number of speed level
The massive respawn times are only used in 3v1+ games so that wouldn't be too much of a problem.
Kit rebalances
Anyone who has ever played with the tank kit will immediately notice that it is useless and really needs a change, the slowness effect means that you can't deal any good knockback with it and the lack of sword means you can't fight at all, so you will always be a free kill and not be able to do anything for your team because of how slow you are, so why not remove the slowness? It will make it more usable to take and capture flags because it can actually run. Remove the slowness effect.
Archer kit is infamous for the bow spamming, so why allow it? Change the amount of arrows an archer spawns with to five, have that as a maximum and give an arrow to the archer every 5 seconds. If you hit an arrow, there would be a 50% chance of getting one back to promote good aim. This will eliminate bow spamming and mean that archers don't need to suicide any more for no reason other than to get more arrows! Since you could consider that a nerf, give it some fancy chain boots so you can tell the difference between that and a sommoner
Overtime change
In overtime, teams are still very able to camp on the flag so if you double the respawn time during it, you will be able to attack much more easily because if they are respawning for longer so you can take the flag back to your base before they are back alive. Why doesn't this help camping? because it takes longer to get to their base than your own, the extra time will hurt you more if you are in defence because instead of 15 seconds going back to your base its 25, 66% increase. Whilst attacking, you can get to their base in 40 seconds instead of 30, and this is only a 33% increase. This means defence is hurt by this twice as much as attacking. Because of the respawn increase, make overtime last 3 minutes instead of 2 so no more draws.
I would love some staff feedback to all of this, and everyone else too.
