There is another thread vaguely discussing balance issues in pubs currently and I want to propose a very rough-draft idea for a pub class balance system. 99% of this was worked up by my teammate Slider. This doesn't address rebalancing teams by individual player skill but rather by the mix of classes on the field. Unlike something like a weapon balance discussion where you must assume that a highly skilled player is trying to get 100% effectiveness out of the item this instead assumes everyone in the pub is of the same, average pubber skill. Also the standard format assumed is a 12v12 though the system should work for any amount of players (but would be totally disabled when there's less than 6). All of the individual values and numbers can be tweaked and are subject to deliberation.
Everyone knows the scenario... You have 3 spies and 3 snipers on your team while the other team has a couple of soldiers, a couple of demos, a heavy a pyro and a med as well as some supports/specialists and the game is generally all but decided. Your team has no pushing power, no ability to maintain a front line and it's generally a one sided affair.
The basic idea is that every class has a point value assigned to it, either positive or negative. The classes in the table below are arranged by HP, but also you could say there's a pattern of generalists being at the top vs specialists at the bottom, or maybe even lower skill floor at the top (kind of, a bit). The sum of all of the values of the classes on team has to be at or above zero, and the game would not allow you to choose classes that would drive the value below zero at any point. Basically the team needs to invest into strong all-arounder fighting classes to get points with which to afford specialist classes. The system roughly enforces classes which are "good for the team" and helps maintain a certain balance and pace to the game.
http://i.imgur.com/p2mKGIF.jpg
The fighting classes maintain the same positive values regardless of their quantity but the support-ier classes have an increased negative cost with each aditional one. Not only does this system encourage a certain ratio between the "diferent types" of classes but also it discourages stacking too hard into one specialist class. A sniper and a spy is a better deal than 2 spies. 3 spies is terrible as they bump into people more, make the enemy team more paranoid (to their detriment), target the same players and generally step on each other's toes, not to mention the lack of contribution to the fighting at the front. Engineers are also kind of special because they are very important, so their initial penalty is small, but each next engie raises it by a higher amount. Too many engies on offense hurts in an obvious way but for defense it's often very good for your team-- too good if we're actually playing the objective and the game. It kind of makes the game crappy for everyone in the server.
So purely as example, if you have 10 soldiers and 2 spies on your team the total sum is 11 (good). 9 soldiers and 3 spies comes to 0 (still good). You cannot, however, have 8 soldiers and 4 spies (nor 3 spies, as 8 soldiers does not afford 3 spies).
Obviously this system isn't perfect. You can still argue that Valve wants zero restrictions or that it's too draconian and there are still ways to "game" the system and end up with some weird or less than ideal team setups (but some flexibility is a good thing). That's all reasonable but it still seems like a pretty decent system, or at least a place to start from. Once more all credit goes to Slider.
Thoughts?