Team Balancing Flaw

[Michael]

   Hello this is my first post... (I'm not sure if this is the right area to post this under)

 First of all I'd like to say this is an excellent mod and I've just played my first few matches however initially I realized something about the game-play. More players wish to play as Space Marines and only 1 or 2 play as Tyranids (In a small match at-least) Now that can lead to some major problems however I believe if some ratio was implemented it could be fixed. Like automatically more people can be on the Tyranid team than Space Marine team.

  I'm not sure if this is actually some flaw or something is already in place to fix this but this was my first thought during game-play.

Thanks
-Michael

[ChromeAngel]

Hi Michael, welcome to the EX forum.  This is indeed the right place to discuss this.

First some background on the subject of balance.  The EX auto-balancing feature is rather basic as it was added hurriedly after the initial public beta when I suddenly discovered 90% of players would rather be marines.  It works by placing players on the team with the least players as  they connect.  In the case of both teams being equal sizes it puts the joining player on a random team (it used to put them on the less popular Tyranid team by default, but players complained).

Allowing extra players on one team or the other presents particular problems in small games where an extra player gives a greater advantage.

Of course none of this takes into account the experience or skill of players on the teams or bias of the maps.

Personally I prefer to let players balance themselves out, so I run my server with auto-balancing off.  This lets players see how many people are on each team and decide which team to join.