Autobalance out of balance

[BryndzoveHalusky2]

Hello, I wanted to post it here for adminless

viewtopic.php?f=14&t=256

but registration password is not coming.

You say that you haven't touched autobalance for months, so maybe the problem is somewhere else.
I'm quake noob and have no idea how it works on (especially) server side, but what I observe is
this phenomenon:

In some games I (with my noob objective performance) perform extremelly well,
e.g. finish on 1st-3rd place. In this "fortune from the server gods" (as I call it) I clearly sense,
how delayed other player's reactions are. In other games (with +/- same players) situation can change
dramatically. I suffer at the end of score table, often being hit before I actually see the opponent.
And the underdogs from last game (actually with similar performance as me) are sudden kings.

So, based on observation, I think that server has some table with randomly generated lags for players,
therefore perceived performance varies greatly, although people play as usual.
So good ping is nice, but actually server decides when it sends fresh packets to client.
This player lag table (if it exists, this is just speculation) seems to be recomputed on every
login/logout of players during game, together with autobalance.

Great players with high value of this server lag, like Zealot or BladeRunner, are also "looking" to be underperforming,
ending in middle of score table (or on top with reasonable score). With little or no server lag,
(or other players heavily lagged) they usually end first with huge score.

Maybe this is known and it's just some server side setting ping balancing, since fair environment
basically can not be achieved on internet, only on LAN. Or maybe custom policy made by you as server admin
for keeping players on server, so that everyone feels like king occasionally . I don't know.

Anyway, combination of this server lag with autobalance is imho not working ok.
Autobalance alone is probably working fine, but I think it does not account for this artificial server lag.
So, if good players on team are lag handicaped (and no login/logout happens for long time) the score
difference can be like 10:1, although teams look balanced.

To solve this is of course huge problem, since this is basically server induced "players performance" on the fly
and to account for it in players autobalance would mean to switch not 1, but 4-5 players on every login/logout,
which would mean chaos - or endless fun.

Anyway, if everything I wrote is total nonsense (as I said, this is based on observation and speculation),
then please just ignore this post. If there is a slight possibility to lower the influence of server,
intentionally introduced lag, please do it.

Thanks and sorry for my english.

Bryndzove halusky

[adminless]

hey hi there and please be welcome to the forum

as for the forum registration activation mail I think that it was at your spam/junk folder (I bold it as you're not the only who missed that) but anyways as I see it now you already got that.

as for the rest yes unfortunately you're totally wrong, I can guarantee you 100% sure that there's absolutely nothing server side delaying packets, adding lag and/or introducing any other kind of artificial game balancing by any other mean in general like for example but not only limited to bad spawns, different damages and similar. honestly it wouldn't even be worth the work and it would be pretty much lame to add any short of "balancing" (imo that's not "balancing", that's handicapping instead) like that so no rest assured that all packets are delivered as soon as possible and that all the game rulesets are the very same for everybody.

as for the differences between games and games and days and days, well, first of all zealot has a high ping not because of any short of lag induced handicap or simply server issue if not because he is not even connecting from this continent if not from several thousand of kilometers of distance from the server. as for BladeRunner I wouldn't say that he's particularly lagged and for the rest well I think that that's pretty much normal, I mean not everybody perform the same at all times, there're good moments and bad moments as in everything in this life. also keep in mind the differences on the client network connections that play a big part too that obviously they don't present the same load/congestion at all times as well as most importantly, the different settings and hardware the people is using that again don't always respond the same at all times (laptops gets "wasted" after some time modern operative systems run background processes etc etc).

and about the files plenty of people instead of using the recommended and well tested provided files from the latest ioq3v6-unfreeze-client-v20.5.zip package prefer to use their own files and settings "thinking" that they know better and in the long run obviously end up paying the price. with that I'm not saying that my files are absolute perfection and the absolute best option in every single aspect, of course they are not, but at least I'm pretty much confident that they're less likely to exhibit behavior like the one you described as well as many other things.

[BryndzoveHalusky]

Hello,

thanks for clarification.
As for bad spawns or different damages, that's clear, I never thought about these.
You're completelly right, there's no point in tinkering with that.

As for local pc performance, I guess its no problem too, since Q3 is 1999 game and todays machines are much better.
I switched from W10 to Linux Mint, which surprisingly lowered my (in game displayed) ping from around ~35 to ~15,
which imho is not realistic value (considering where I am), although I'm using same config (downloaded here from forum
(I guess from some Miroslav's post)) + ioquake3 (vs original Q3 on W10).

I completely agree with your point on network infrastructure part. Its definitelly unpredictable and has big influence.
My guess was based on (wrong) observation that "artificial lag" correlated with autobalance action
(people connecting/disconnecting), so it looked to me like some server setting was changed.
Nevertheless, artificial lag balancing surely is studied, just by short googling I found this article (not read it really) :

https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... _balancing

So its not so such unrealistic to think Q3 has it implementation.

Anyway, thanks for info and clarification.

Bye.

[adminless]

np mate and btw just for the record I just checked your ping server side now and it gives out 19 ms probably it doesn't exactly match you current in-game estimation of 16 ms on average but nevertheless that's a way more accurate estimation than that 35 ms for sure. check it for yourself by pinging the server from some real operative system level console and you should see that you get some value close to that. apparently you're coming from a solid local cable provider with direct connectivity to the server and from a distance bellow the thousand kilometer mark, that's consistent with a real ping value bellow the 20 ms mark.