hey guys, i think it's a good place to ask, sooooooooooooooooo
we said we want to set up a [hl.]tf2pickup.eu in the future and one of the biggest struggles we have is that our EU community is basically fucking huge (at least 1k+ gamers for 6v6, probably a half of it would be highlander gamers (it's a crazy estimate btw)), compared to the national pickups where local communities have something between 50-200 gamers
at the current state of the tf2pickup.org project the site admin staff sets up "skills" which are reflection of the player's skill on a certain class, one value per class where off-classes on 6s aren't counted and it's a moderate task for a group of 5-10 people to balance the skills for players in order to make pickups balanced and enjoyable
these groups are i'd say mostly built from higher tier gamers + a few low gamers in order to know how to balance gamers from low-open
i think it's safe to say that balancing games even for a group of 20-30 people while having 1k+ people community would be a nightmare, so we thought of some prediction system which could help admins balance pickups easier where the prediction system is supposed as a help for an admin and where the admin can override some prediction "skill" values if they think it can be adjusted better
mały's initial idea was to make some sort of AI which could learn player's performance from all his logs (from the gamemode they play) and predict his performance on certain classes...but i'm not quite sure if that would be the best idea
another idea on the other hand would be utilizing trends.tf if they had some sort of api letting it check the player ratio and stuff, trends.tf in general is a piece of good statistical work
the simpliest system for balancing i could find (and the most broken one) is the one which is used in the tf2center chrome plugin/tf2stars where it checks the player's ETF2L/UGC current division or division from the last season and based on that gives an assessment if the player is good or bad on let's say 10 point system where one star out of five is 2 points
one huge note: we ain't making any captain based system https://docs.tf2pickup.org/docs/faq#why-no-captain-based-system so don't ask for it
reasons? people getting constantly fatkidded and simply preventing from having circlejerks destroying the site
ok and now it's a time for my question: what do you think would be the most reliable balancing system? is it one of these i mentioned above? or maybe you have a better idea? please tell us what would be the best idea in your opinion so we could start tf2pickup.eu and hl.tf2pickup.eu in 2022