Those are my ideas of a better one:
The balancer should let players switch to help the losing team. Therefore, it has to distinguish which team is currently the winning / losing one. Due to the fact that the winning score is just 1, there are no second rounds and the team score can't be the reference. Thus, distinguishing the winning/losing team could be done by taking the amount of captured nodes into account. E.g. the team holding more than 60% of the nodes is the winning one.
Furthermore, there should be two different balance methods: At first, the teams should be corrected just before the match starts. Here we'd need a skill balancer. This could be done e.g. with a players-pph-database (SQL?). But during the matches, players shouldn't be switched because most players hate that and sometimes rage quit. But with the 2nd method, letting players switch to help the losing team (as explained, the losing team would be the one holding less than 40% of the nodes), this should be sorted.
Now in conclusion, my idea of having a decent balancer would include following rules:
- The teams shall be corrected due to skills just before the match starts (the database thingie).
- doesn't switch human players but
- decides which team is the losing one by taking the amount of captured nodes into account.
- lets players switch to help the losing team (but there should be a maximum player difference).
- evens out the amount of players as soon as the former losing team has become stronger, by adding decently skilled bots to the team with less players (the former winning team).
- prohibits winning team switching.
- lets new players always join the losing team - as long as the maximum player difference hasn't been reached.
Of course, the server shall be kept whitelisted with this new balancer...;-)
I hope there's somebody out there willing to code this. It would really help improving the matches i.e. the whole gameplay on the server.
heinz