May 12, 2003 23:44
Something like automated IBL to make good teams
A couple nights ago I was bouncing ideas off Min about how to come up with an automated way to make teams that would be fair and fun.
My impression, from the conversation, was that this might actually be pretty challenging. My initial suggestion was to somehow program in a feature that takes the ranking of each player looking to join a game, does all the permutations needed to generate average ranks for teams made up of equal numbers of players, then finds the combinations of players that gave equal average rank for each team. Players get assigned in an ubiased, non-arbitrary way so as to even out ability levels on each team.
Min pointed out that in practice (back when ibl was operational), something like this was tried, and the method actually didn't work so well. For instance, a pair of average players were likely to beat a team composed of an expert and a newb, even though both teams would have comparable average rank. Min also pointed out some quirks in the current ranking system that allowed relatively poor players to achieve high rank by simply pounding on newbs all the time and avoiding defeat at the hands of the true bolo-masters.
Often, though, when things are working well and some jackass doesn't start before teams are picked, we have a little discussion about what the best teams would be. We size everybody up, and if all the players are interested in fair teams, we do our what we can to not put the best and the worst all on one team or the other. We do a little mental ranking, based on our experience seeing that player in action, and then we essentially do the little average rank thing I suggested above. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Really, though, all we're doing is calculations. Computers are good at that.
So I figure there must be SOME way to rank players accurately, and yet another way to automatically generate teams that would at least have the potential to be fair and fun. If something like that could be built into winbolo.net, it might save a lot of time and aggravation. Maybe just a little applet: Someone enters the names of all the players who wish to join, and it spits out some suggestions for fair teams. I wouldn't have to be perfect, it would just have to save time and give people confidence that some of the participants weren't trying to create wildly uneven teams.
What do you all think?
My impression, from the conversation, was that this might actually be pretty challenging. My initial suggestion was to somehow program in a feature that takes the ranking of each player looking to join a game, does all the permutations needed to generate average ranks for teams made up of equal numbers of players, then finds the combinations of players that gave equal average rank for each team. Players get assigned in an ubiased, non-arbitrary way so as to even out ability levels on each team.
Min pointed out that in practice (back when ibl was operational), something like this was tried, and the method actually didn't work so well. For instance, a pair of average players were likely to beat a team composed of an expert and a newb, even though both teams would have comparable average rank. Min also pointed out some quirks in the current ranking system that allowed relatively poor players to achieve high rank by simply pounding on newbs all the time and avoiding defeat at the hands of the true bolo-masters.
Often, though, when things are working well and some jackass doesn't start before teams are picked, we have a little discussion about what the best teams would be. We size everybody up, and if all the players are interested in fair teams, we do our what we can to not put the best and the worst all on one team or the other. We do a little mental ranking, based on our experience seeing that player in action, and then we essentially do the little average rank thing I suggested above. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Really, though, all we're doing is calculations. Computers are good at that.
So I figure there must be SOME way to rank players accurately, and yet another way to automatically generate teams that would at least have the potential to be fair and fun. If something like that could be built into winbolo.net, it might save a lot of time and aggravation. Maybe just a little applet: Someone enters the names of all the players who wish to join, and it spits out some suggestions for fair teams. I wouldn't have to be perfect, it would just have to save time and give people confidence that some of the participants weren't trying to create wildly uneven teams.
What do you all think?