Ptahhotep's Team Balancer, PTBx 1.7x1d3 for CSS

XAD · **Author**

IMPORTANT! The plugin itself and support has been moved to the "XAD's Plugin" in "Hosted Stuff"...
http://forums.alliedmods.net/showthread.php?t=37454

=========================================
Ptahhotep's Team Balancer eXtended (PTBx)
Version: 1.7x1 BETA

Author: XAD/XAD2000 (www.plan9.se)
Original-Author: Ptahhotep ([email protected])
Contributions:
o Built on Ptahhotep's Team Balancer for AdminMod written in Small.
o Special thanks to: KingPin (for testing)

XAD · 02-14-2005 , 08:50

IMPORTANT! The plugin itself and support has been moved to the "XAD's Plugin" in "Hosted Stuff"...
http://forums.alliedmods.net/showthread.php?t=37454

XAD · 02-14-2005 , 09:44

Some posts by Ptahhotep copied from another thread....

Quote:

Originally Posted by XAD

*** edit *** BTW, how the heck did you find out about this version?? The topic opened yesterday, and you registered today... Have you been sneak reading the forum??

good fellow in the forums of "home" forum at http://www.concarne.org sent my a private message. Somehow the guys at Concarne scan the net very efficiently.

Concarne is, where PTB and Storyteller got started. Its a shame, I don't have enough time to update my prior projects . It all changes as soon as you get your first job and then your first child...

I actually planned to do an article on team balancing a long time ago. At that time I had a few more ideas on my mind. I hope that I dumped them somewhere from where I can retrieve them. Coming up with the way PTB balances was quite straight forward. At that time I played CS each and every day on public servers. I noted of course, that good players assemble in a single team, what is generally called "joining the winning team" as you know. I hated it. Actually there were lots of WTJs on CC|Mutter (the Concarne CS server). The fact that everyone wanted to get good skills and rankings in Storyteller just added insult to injury.

I always thought that existing team balancers just didn't have enough effect on gameplay, because they only balance team sizes. It was easy enough to come up with the idea of grouping players based on their "strength". Now strength is not only the kill/death-ratio, but it's a good starting point. Ah - one of those ideas just came back, good to talk about it - I remember I wanted improve PTB by calculating the strength rating for a player differently. I wanted to factor in the current overall strength of the team he is playing in when rating his individual strength. Actually I should rate someone in the losing team (say 10 losses) with a 15/10 score higher as someone in the winning team (say 2 losses) with a score of 4/2 (assuming both played all rounds in their respective teams). I'll have to come up with some elegant formulas for this.

Anyway, PTB balances team in the known way. But I didn't want to balance each and every round. I wanted to detect those situations, where it just wasn't fun anymore to win or to loose - namely those well known slaughter situations we all love and hate (actually I don't like being in the winning team in those situations either). So I thought, it was ok, if one team won some rounds in a row, as long as it weren't too many rounds.

Of course there are situations, when both teams simply have the same strength, but one team simply collaborates waya more efficiently. In that case a streak is ok. I didn't want to spoil the fun in those situations. I also like the idea of "the loosing team coming back", so a long streak of the loosing team with equal team strengths is ok, too. At that point I invented the "2 or more symptoms" rule. There are 3 symptoms, 2 of which must be met, to qualify the situation as "out of hand".

Somehow all of this let me come up with - as I'd say - quite simple and elegant formulas for calculating the point in time where team balancing should happen. The players at Concarne tested PTB first and somehow PTB just did the right thing at the right time. It's all about meeting the players' expectations. PTB should start acting just after players begin to become frustrated on either side.

I hope this gives some insights into the ideas behind PTB. I am sure there is a lot of room for improvements. There would be way more possible parameters for admins to tweak - how about setting a limit on the interval in which PTB balances (at most every N rounds). You also came up with some interesting ideas (e. g. thresholds on the number of kills in addition to thresholds on the number of players).

Regards, Ptahhotep

PS: I dumped most of my ideas on new versions of PTB in the Concarne forums. Most of it is in German though. After this little discussion with you I'm very motivated to put up the article I told you about. The article will be in English of course and appear on the PTB website, as soon as I have enough time for it - oh well...

-----------------

Quote:

Originally Posted by onedamage

but seriously, since i've first used ur plugin a few years ago....always wondered what your name meant

It's really time to put up a webpage to clarify this...

Ptahhotep was an old Eqyptian philosopher known for his "The Instructions of Ptahhotep. He is said to be the first humanist. When I was searching for an online pseudonym, I asked my parent for some interesting eqyptian persons, since he knows alot about eqyptian history. He came up with Ptahhotep (Pt'hh't'p in hieroglyphs), which I found sound cool even if difficult to pronounce. But most of all I liked the idea of using the name of the first humanist. You should have a look at his instructions. He really was a wise man and I am impressed every time I have a look at them.

Ptah btw. is the name of an old egyptian god and Ptahhotep means something like "He who servs Ptah".

Regards, Ptahhotep

Take mental note: I'll have to elaborate on this on my own webpage...