Petition to change metal share in uneven teams

i do come from TA directly and i think coms are mostly disposable. i would like to limit their morph to lvl 5 again (what does the feature of customiseable bring to the game if coms suck anyway?) but i like their role in 1v1 very much. having something to expand that not dies to the first few raiders is quite a thing and they are still vulnerable to the second or third raider-wave. I can also live with the flipside of not being able to raid in team-games.
What i don´t understand is that it is possible to morph them basically indefinitely until you run out of modules. they suck for cost then AND WHY IS THIS OPTION IN THE GAME? other noobtraps like storage have niche-uses and are somewhat necessary, yet unlimited morphing was introduced without any need and without any real use other to be an annoyance and metal-sink. hooray.


anyway: petition signed

quote: What i don´t understand is that it is possible to morph them basically indefinitely until you run out of modules. they suck for cost then AND WHY IS THIS OPTION IN THE GAME?

Yeah I complained about that 2 years ago when they were developing it. They nerfed coms to death and then turned them into the ultimate noob trap with infinite levels. Coms got nerfed even more since then with changes to weapons modules too.

My opinion is basically that I don't like coms, but if you're going to have them and have them be customizable then they ought to at least be able to do something cool/unique to justify their existence. Instead any time a com does something interesting and viable they remove it or nerf it to make it useless. It just makes coms generic and crappy. Character building is a whole other skill set that's interesting in its own right even if it's orthogonal to RTS, and dynacoms robbed us of that.

quote: having something to expand that not dies to the first few raiders is quite a thing and they are still vulnerable to the second or third raider-wave. I can also live with the flipside of not being able to raid in team-games.

That might be less of an issue if you removed fac plops so you no longer have instant raiders. Admittedly that might lead to a pathological case in the other direction where you can expand, or even naked expand, completely unimpeded. Like, forget facs just have your workers take half the map and porc up before the enemy can get their fac down. Impossible to say how that would balance out without testing though.

I mean starcraft does it that way, but SC's economy is so different from TA/ZK that it's not directly comparable. The early game in SC also sucked, but I think that was more due to general design and balance issues.

Back to the actual topic here, this isn't the first time this issue has come up. A related issue is that, when balancing uneven teams the balancer seems to think that the side with more players should get more lower rated players (ie bigger team = stronger), when in reality that means that lower rated players get a bigger chunk of the team's income. I've seen some recent games where more than half of a team ended up being made up of storage spammers, leaving the competent players completely unable to do anything. The smaller team got all the reasonably competent players and won by default.

For example B782696 9 on Delta Siege Dry Reloaded vBETA4

Apparently this wasn't an isolated incident, either.

aeonios o god i played a game where you have to build your fac first (TA). never. ever. again. pls.
Although i would finally have time to take a smoke between games then.

The balancer assumes every player to contribute the same share, so they get the same share of metal. The best player getting 2x coms is actually a bias away from what the balancer assumes.

Because it is assumed that Kingstad plays for 100% of the team, while Zenfur only plays for 50% of the team. So your rating is "halved". Kingstad also receives 100% of the metal of his team, while Zenfur only receives 50%.

If you take the current ratings of each player and make the average per team the averages are almost equal (I assume they changed a bit in the meantime): 2192 for the 5 people versus 2194 for the 4 people team.

The medians though are rather different with 2281 for the 5 people versus 2108 for the 4 people. Did someone check if median would be a better predictor than average (edit:) for larger games..?

And then there are times where the balance doesn't weigh highly rated player nearly enough. For example when Svatopluk builds a terraformed DDM and 10 enemy players lose all their units over and over again running into it. You simply can't predict these games solely from rating.

doesn´t matter in this case. unpredictable is unpredictable. elo/whr becomes useless at the bottom of the skill level. it´s like too much background radiation.

quote: doesn´t matter in this case. unpredictable is unpredictable. elo/whr becomes useless at the bottom of the skill level. it´s like too much background radiation.

I do believe you're talking nonsense. For players with little to no data it may have to make assumptions, and the assumptions it's currently making may not be valid statistically. That's probably the issue in general. Somewhere it's making dumb assumptions and getting dumb results. The question is what are those assumptions?