Well last night proved that manual balancing has it's flaws, we let the other team choose who they wanted to take from our team but it still didnt change the outcome. No matter who was taken off the team we still had 3/4 medics :S (and if people move themselves back, you are perfectly capable of warning them and moving them back)

But perhaps prohibiting choosing a team is the easiest solution if there is no widely available alternative scramble plugin to the unsupported one we have abandoned.

I don't know if these are good or not, but what scramble voting system do the hampshire heavies or UKCS for example use?

Any of these? (examples - i dont know much about the techy side of things!)
http://forums.alliedmods.net/showthread.php?t=83043
http://forums.alliedmods.net/showthread.php?p=657631

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-"You've really worked out your banter, haven't you?"
-"No, not really. This is a different thing, it's spontaneous and it's called wit."

There is a discussion about this idea here:http://forums.alliedmods.net/showthread.php?t=67240

About half way down a guy called Scuzzy posts a script which he says would do what we need. I am uncertain though as I know nothing about this.

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"Fire rained from the sky on the day I was born: 10,000 lives I ended before drawing first breath. Do not speak to me of guilt or regret, Jonathan.” - Brayan, The Keepers of the Fire

This is exactly how I see it as well. Most of the times a team is getting steamrolled, it's because they aren't playing like a..well..a team. The scramble script should have a message triggered for these cases: Get some MEDICS, you idiots!

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Comfortably Numb

No most of the time one team is getting steamrolled, because 99% of players on spa are regulars, so they know more or less which team to join to win. Since you cant force people to play medics ( not so long ago we won upward round with 4 snipers, 4 engis and a combat medic afair ). Just put scramble vote plugin with win ratio of 51% or sth.

LOL! Exactly. Maybe instead of a scramble we need to either berate the losing team for having bad class choices or just force 2 or so of them to play medic. There are definitely scripts for switching calsses on people after all!

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"Fire rained from the sky on the day I was born: 10,000 lives I ended before drawing first breath. Do not speak to me of guilt or regret, Jonathan.” - Brayan, The Keepers of the Fire

One Nazi plugin ( afk manager ) on the server is enough...

Any word on this yet

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-"You've really worked out your banter, haven't you?"
-"No, not really. This is a different thing, it's spontaneous and it's called wit."

You seriously believe it will be back ? Since a lot of players cant even stand being autobalance ( hi Frosty ) and just join specs/leave...

im all for it
but i still want the buddy option where you and ur buddy can get moved along side
at least for spamembers
and no switching engi with level 3 gear up etc
but besides that all for scramble
!!!

This!

I am worried that this is even a discussion. We NEED scramble - its a no-brainer - and a lot more besides. Until the SpA servers are up to speed with the other good servers out there we are just gonna keep having issues with getting them filled. Even SpA members, myself included, are spending more time on other servers now.

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"Fire rained from the sky on the day I was born: 10,000 lives I ended before drawing first breath. Do not speak to me of guilt or regret, Jonathan.” - Brayan, The Keepers of the Fire

Could it be possible to just have auto join only until we get a future proofed scramble plugin. Even if it's not perfect, its better than one sided games; its a struggle to manually do it most of the time (unless its just a case of swap Bam for a few minutes ^^)

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-"You've really worked out your banter, haven't you?"
-"No, not really. This is a different thing, it's spontaneous and it's called wit."

I agree with this.

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While this is a solution (and hey, let's take what we can get), it's a little too brute force. Forcing a random team selection (which is no guarantee of fair teams anyway) is little like saying "Hey - the door to my house is broken so I'm gonna tear off the entire wall until I get it fixed!".

Given how many other sites out there are running perfectly functional Scramble plug-ins I find it very hard to believe that we can't find one too

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"Fire rained from the sky on the day I was born: 10,000 lives I ended before drawing first breath. Do not speak to me of guilt or regret, Jonathan.” - Brayan, The Keepers of the Fire

Yeah I realise it's a bit of a forceful compromise (although i did say temporary) but the point im trying to get throw, isn't anything to do with fair teams; it is the knock on effect of scaring away new people from our servers because they cant get a fair game.

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-"You've really worked out your banter, haven't you?"
-"No, not really. This is a different thing, it's spontaneous and it's called wit."

Yeah I understand and I agree with you entirely, I was just trying to bolster the idea of this being a temporary fix.

Bottom line is we need to do something.

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"Fire rained from the sky on the day I was born: 10,000 lives I ended before drawing first breath. Do not speak to me of guilt or regret, Jonathan.” - Brayan, The Keepers of the Fire

I didn't think I will ever say this: BRING SCRAMBLE BACK!

I don't wanna switch team twice per map anymore.

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BAM!
"Player with nothing to live for" - PsychoStats

http://forums.alliedmods.net/showthread.php?t=98573 - Simple team manager: This one appears to have an option to scramble the teams

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Looks interesting. Not that I know a thing about plug-ins but on a purely non-technical basis this seems ok. Yes/no?

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"Fire rained from the sky on the day I was born: 10,000 lives I ended before drawing first breath. Do not speak to me of guilt or regret, Jonathan.” - Brayan, The Keepers of the Fire

That plugin adds nothing really. You can already balance the teams using the switch player option in the admin menu. The auto balance feature is pure based on player numers, so it will just keep the same numbers per team. Any scramble function is at random as well, which prolly means each scramble only makes it worse.

Yeah i feel bad for Bam, he never gets to gel and settle with his team mates because hes bouncing back and fourth between teams.

I don't like the idea of manual balancing though, i dont like the fact that the responsibility lies on someone to make judgement calls on skill etc, sure some can do it, but others cant and we end up with chaos. As you see with left4dead, us choosing people for teams most often ends up in disappointment and RAGE!

Howard did you find out what HH use for scramble?

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-"You've really worked out your banter, haven't you?"
-"No, not really. This is a different thing, it's spontaneous and it's called wit."

No - Keep meaning to ask. Oddly though their scramble (and UKCS for that matter) are disabled at the moment. Have they suffered our fate?

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"Fire rained from the sky on the day I was born: 10,000 lives I ended before drawing first breath. Do not speak to me of guilt or regret, Jonathan.” - Brayan, The Keepers of the Fire

I noticed on UKCS that the scramble didn't kick in for like 4 rounds of steamrollering ^^
But haven't seen it recently.

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-"You've really worked out your banter, haven't you?"
-"No, not really. This is a different thing, it's spontaneous and it's called wit."

UKCS is a bit more lackadaisical about balancing tbh but they suffer from it less in my experience.

Anyway - let's change the discussion around. How about this proposition:

Unbalanced teams are happening a LOT at the moment, agreed? The cause? People joining a server that they recognise the players of or that has their friends in and then wanting a) to play on the same team as their mates / people they know b) (more prolifically) people wanting to be on the winning side so their precious fucking stats don't get a beating. (Again I cry: for the love of everything sacred, please lose the stats! /rant. )

A solution. It seems to me that this level of extreme unbalance comes when there are lots of SpA or at least SpA server regulars on. A simple solution is to start splitting us up. We have 2 servers and as it stands one of them is pretty much always empty.
Last night was a great example. There were, what? - 10 SpA members on one server? - and as a result the game was pretty shocking. If half of us had buggered off to server 2 (though I forget which server we were on - you get my point) and taken a couple of community with us (just ask 'em - most of them are good guys - I know I could have moved a few with ease) I am confident that BOTH servers would have filled up and as the regulars/SpA members (AKA: the talent) would be spread around, the games would be better. More over all the regulars who will have been blocked out by the influx of SpA members could have joined us as well to bump up the numbers

Now I know already that people will whine about this idea because - flatly - it involves you actually DOING something but - again, flatly - tough shit. I want us to go back to having good games on both servers as often as possible and if that takes a little, tiny effort from us I really do not see that nay-sayers would have a leg to stand on.

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"Fire rained from the sky on the day I was born: 10,000 lives I ended before drawing first breath. Do not speak to me of guilt or regret, Jonathan.” - Brayan, The Keepers of the Fire

Hear hear, that's what I've been doing lately, I saw braaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaains sitting on one of the servers on his own and so I joined him, but then he left as he was in spectate mode, so I sat there on my own and looking at the other server it was indeed full of SpA. But with a little patience the server did start to fill up so it was a success, but it will only be a success if everyone does it and is bothered to do it. I know it's tempting to play on the server with all your friends but it's also fun to make more friends making the servers even more popular because we care.

Oh and it was server 2 that everyone was on last night

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Classy is when a woman has everything to flaunt, but chooses not to show it!

Yeah, i lost my rag last night on cp_Well (sorry about that but i was really really fucked off as team fortress became headless chicken racing) but pretty much for reasons howard said... and, well there was a tele under the third point that no one gave a fuck about, ("hey whats all that blue stuff trailing off their bodies" ) besides the point; its beginning to irritate, and that is not why i play games...

Perhaps if people see that server 1 has 27 people on it (the server is normally 24) then maybe they should grab some people from server 1 and go to server 2 and get that one going rather than joining the full-to-fuck-one and causing more harm than good; im not gonna name names, but they wouldn't give a fuck anyway (which is the point).

moan moan moan moan - yeah i know its sad of me, but i just want to have good team orientated games that are balanced as humanly possible - dont ask... dont get...

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-"You've really worked out your banter, haven't you?"
-"No, not really. This is a different thing, it's spontaneous and it's called wit."

Meh - server 1, server 2 - all the same. Just oh so much whining for medic with 20 talentless snipers and a bunch of spawn camping spies

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"Fire rained from the sky on the day I was born: 10,000 lives I ended before drawing first breath. Do not speak to me of guilt or regret, Jonathan.” - Brayan, The Keepers of the Fire

LOL - I lose my rag just about every bloody match of TF2. It is a game that seems to attract the utterly talentless for some reason

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"Fire rained from the sky on the day I was born: 10,000 lives I ended before drawing first breath. Do not speak to me of guilt or regret, Jonathan.” - Brayan, The Keepers of the Fire

So considering the server is mostly filled with SpA............

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Classy is when a woman has everything to flaunt, but chooses not to show it!

Hehe, i don't often, but that was just bad last night, and its not like Well is a complicated map at all.... its like granary, a straight fucking line... It attracts a lot that don't understand even the title of the game... TEAM! Seriously, i know skill levels vary, and thats fine, everyone has to be a noob at some point in a game but you learn as u play etc, but FUCK ME, i saw reds running past blues and both not doing anything, not even seeing each other, and people going the wrong way on a one way map, it's basic design like team colours and a 2 sided environment that gets lost and thrown out the window.

some may think that makes me sound like a narcissist or arrogant or whatever... i don't give a fuck, that isn't my problem and it is not my view.

anyway... back to scrambled eggs...

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-"You've really worked out your banter, haven't you?"
-"No, not really. This is a different thing, it's spontaneous and it's called wit."

I'll be honest, that isn't a good thing. SpA should spread out and not all pack into one. The community can only grow with new pubbies that become regulars then members, but the new people cant join the server because SpA have taken up all the slots, and their only alternative is the other server.... the empty one...

or they get minecraft i guess...

_________________
-"You've really worked out your banter, haven't you?"
-"No, not really. This is a different thing, it's spontaneous and it's called wit."