Clan balancer improvement suggestion

[ShrykeAbyss]

Hi admins,

Just a quick suggestion for improving the clan balancer. Currently, if five players from a clan are on the same team and a sixth player joins the server and gets automatically placed on the same team, the clan balancer will simply move whoever dies first when room becomes available on the other team. Odds are that this won't be the player who last joined and instead will be someone who was already on the server. This can obviously be quite frustrating.

My suggestion would be to move the player who most recently joined instead, even if an admin kill is required. I believe this would make playing as a full squad much easier. The same goes for if a player switches teams mid round, move the player who last switched instead of the one who dies first.

Another issue if that when there are two Babu squads on the server, they will occasionally be placed on the same team by the end of round autobalance. This can also lead to being suddenly switched through no faults of our own. To solve this, the end of round balancer could be updated to not place two squads including members of the same clan on the same team.

Thanks for taking the time to read my suggestion.

[EBassie]

Hi ShrykeAbyss,

I do get your point and I like the idea.

But... the balancer plugin we use has not been developed by us and is very complex.
Unfortunately, the original author of the plugin is AWOL, so I can't request him to make these changes.

With regards,

EB

[ShrykeAbyss]

Is the plugin you use open source? I could ask around and see if anyone would be able to make the changes.

[EBassie]

I don't want to be an all-knowing ass, but this plugin has 15253 lines of code.
The author has put in 100's of hours (maybe even 1000's) to get where it is now.

I know this, because I have worked closely with the author debugging the plugin and helping getting the balancer to be as good as it is now.

It's not as easy as looking at the code and start changing some rule or setting. Every rule has exclusions.
Changing ONE rule has consequences to other rules and it's exclusions and so on.

And without having access to a BF4 server using Procon, you cannot test it.

I'm not willing to open up our server to test this.
I'm also not willing (mainly because lack of time) to put time in debugging a plugin that has worked very well during the last 2 years.

Sorry, but this change is just not going to happen on our servers.

[ShrykeAbyss]

In that case, I can see why you don't want just anyone playing around with the code. Thanks for taking the time to respond.