The autobalancing in the last patch is definitely a step in the right direction, but there's still a few problems that need to be adressed imo, and a bit of work on the lobby would probably help fix a lot of things: - First of all the rounds start a tad fast to my taste, you don't even have the time to chat a bit after the match, if at least it could be configurable, or use a "ready button" system it would probably make the whole experience much better. It could also allow people to balance the teams by themselves. - Class selection in the lobby would be a nice thing too, so people can take the time to make balanced team setups. - Also the game shouldn't start with numbers like 1 vs 2 or 2 vs 3, one person can already have a quite big impact in a 6 people team but when a game starts like that it's just an almost assured frustrating match, and lots of people on the outnumbered team will just ragequit. - That brings me to another thing that could make the matchs' quality a lot better: a leaver protection system. It would probably be better on a server basis, so people who leave a server because they have bad ping for example just penalizes themselves on that server instead of getting a global stat. As there is join/leave and round start/end messages in the log file maybe that could even be done by a 3rd party software like MyMNCServer?
I agree with all your points. It is a little BS that there is no good lobby in a team based game. Another thing, if i am host, I want to be able to start the game when I feel like there are enough people in the lobby, not when the timer runs out.
I agree with all points but *leaver protection*. If you force people to sit out games they don't want to play it will do no good imo. They will either just camp in the spawn room or go afk. I can think of no way to motivate a player to keep fighting a lost battle if doesn't want to.
That's why I precised on a server basis, so hosts can have the choice to minimize ragequitters or careless people on their server. Even when it's not a lost match you get some people who just leave in the middle of a round and it can turn a fun moment into a steamroll, or trigger a balancing and make it very frustrating for the person who gets thrown into the loosing team. At least from my point of view people who leave in the middle of a round for whatever reason are quite a big cause of bad and frustrating matchs. But in fact, the other way around works, people joining in the middle of a game can tip the balance too. Ideally there should be a way to try to make the teams remain the same from the start of a match until the end as much as possible to minimize the "random pug" feeling and give more reasons to feel like playing in a team. When you can have most of the team changing during a round I'm sorry but it's total BS for a team game. (emphasizing because it's the main idea behind that) As I said the leaver protection could probably be handled by a third party software analyzing the server log, and I think there's a AllowJoinInProgress or something like that server option in the command line but I don't even know if it's functional. This is why I have put this suggestion the last in my list, but also because if the changes proposed before were implemented it would totally make sense.
