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Matchmaking with uneven numbers

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AUrankStuey72727
9 hours ago
Having played a few games recently, I think the matchmaker is slightly off with uneven numbers with a limited number of players. As far as I can tell it tries to average out the skill level. While this in theory works as the team with less players has more resources individually, attention itself is a resource that you don't get more of. I think that generally the smaller team should get an advantage.

For example, if you have a blue, yellow and red in the lobby, it will tend to chuck the orange and blue against the yellow - the blue team should win this every time. Blue probably still wins if it's orange and yellow vs blue, but I think it would generally be closer.

I'm not certain how better players affect this. It may depend whether they are just generally solid, or whether they are the type that win games by themselves. I feel like purple players can probably actually take advantage of the extra resources properly.

I think the fix might just be to give the bigger team a slight elo handicap?
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AUrankAdminAquanim
8 hours ago
(edited 8 hours ago)
I actively disbelieve that the current handling of uneven teams by the balancer is correct.

[Spoiler]

That having been said, I believe that any change to the balancer system is going to need to be backed up by concrete statistics. The effect which uneven teams has on any particular game is strongly influenced by the team sizes and the map, so personal preferences on those points are liable to bias anecdotal evidence quite a bit.

In the past I think there have been datasets floating around which somebody could do those statistics on. I think the only place that the rating of each player at the time the game was played is available is within the replay files themselves, so some amount of replay crawling would be required to reproduce such a dataset.

edit: this thread is quite old and i feel like there are more recent ones, but a place to start looking: https://zero-k.info/Forum/Thread/22898

this thread doesnt have data, but just to say we've been here before: https://zero-k.info/Forum/Thread/36816
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