Hey all. Thanks for looking into my little pet balancing idea. It's mainly supposed to be a middle-ground between the complete chaos of a pub, and the rigidity of hard class limits by punishing detrimental redundancy; basically that, you can play any combination of 3 support classes as long as you have the combat classes to balance it out, rather than a hard cap of 2 spies, for example.
Anyway, there's a lot of good points I'd like to respond to.
MasterKuniSeems like it still doesn't heavily weight the fact that the team without a medic is at a significant disadvantage against the team with a medic.
Yeah, the numbers should probably be adjusted to encourage medic play, at least for the first one. I just didn't want the addition of a medic to contribute to the gaining of a support class because a medic with "nothing good to heal" doesn't help much.
ThomasYour system would never be implemented with it's current class values on any server purely for the fact that a highlander team would be breaking the points limits.
True, I think a good goal would be to rework the numbers such that it allows a HL setup at minimum, while still not allowing for support classes to be the first to join.
GeosusWhy is multiple Scouts a bad thing? And for that matter, why is multiple Heavies a GOOD thing?
You have to take into account that this is a balance system for pubs, where the average numbers of hours of TF2 played by most people is 74. As such it's better to encourage newer players to play classes with a lower skill floor like heavy where they can still contribute positively.
Scout is harder to justify though I admit, as in competitive we're used to it being one of the strongest if not the strongest class, but that's only in the hands of really skilled players. Your average pub scout isn't, on the other hand, going to be as effective as a pub soldier or pub heavy, or even a W+M1 pyro maybe. Side note, if you do get a lot of good scouts on one team, this can make the other team feel pretty helpless as well, a pretty common complaint I hear on pubs.
Geosusit doesn't take into consideration the fact that a player might run Demoknight, and thus mitigate the pushing potential Demoman normally has. So you have four Demoknights running around being about as useless as four Spies.
Right so, this system isn't a fix-all. Ultimately nothing, including hard class limits, can stop players from being a useless demoknight, or doing nothing but taunt in spawn, or otherwise be useless.
Geosus I don't see any advantage this has over just putting regular class limits...Just putting a class limit on 2 Spies or 2 Snipers will accomplish the bare minimum this setup attempts to solve
The advantage is it allows for different combinations of support classes provided your have the combat classes to balance it, while also keeping their total number in check, e.g., you can run 3 spies with this system, but you can't if you just do a 2 spy class limit. Furthermore, a simple class limit of 2 spies and 2 snipers still allows for the server to have 2 spies and 2 snipers constituting a makeup of an entire 1/3 of a 12 player team, which is more than enough to sink them. Worse, with class limits only, servers can start filling with snipers and spies, so you could get a situation where, you join first on the server as soldier, the first enemy joins as soldier, but your next 4 teammates are snipers and spies, while the enemy's next 4 teammates are a heavy, demo, pyro, and medic. There is really no fun to be had on that team IMHO.
Geosusit doesn't address Engineers, but that's a whole different can of worms.
I think I would adjust it so there's no penalty to the first engineer, as it's pretty important to have 1, but the reason I'd keep him going sharply into the negatives is the same reason they're limited to 1 in 6v6. It becomes next to impossible to push last if you have 3 engies with level 3s. Have you ever tried to push upward or snakewater last on a pub with 3 engies sitting on it? It takes an enormously disproportionately large amount of coordination and skill to break that compared to what it takes to build and whack a sentry, especially if they're using the magic wand that is the short circuit, with wranglers, with pyros helping. Multiple engies get a penalty to alleviate that.
Frost_BiteThe system also doesn't take into account the changing value with team sizes. 3 medics on a 4 person team is bad. 3 medics on a 9-12 person team is great.
Good point, you're right. The good news is that the numbers can be adjusted to fix that
Frost_BiteYou also have to account for the fact that "fun" and "best for winning" are not necessarily the same.
So yeah, there's always an argument that can be made that anything that takes away from any amount of freedom inherently takes away from the fun of the individual. The reason I thought this up was because I didn't think it was fair that a minority of the team can completely sink a majority of the team via their class choice alone. The 4th sniper's fun may be preserved because he got to play what he wanted when he wanted, but in doing so he made it decidedly unfun for the entire rest of the team to play, as they're outnumbered and outclassed on the front lines while the sniper sits cozily behind. Net fun for the team is in the negatives, and I would personally strongly prefer a system that was conducive to team play in team fortress two, even if it meant I couldn't play my favorite class all of the time. But that's just IMHO.
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Ultimately I think there is an ideal set of numbers that could be put together to achieve the best balance, and these responses made me realize I was farther than I thought from that. Thanks for indulging my nerd essay.