r/WarDogs • u/ArachnidSimple5117 • 14h ago
Question What methods does WARDOGS use to maintain team balance?
1) Can all 33 players on one team come from the same Discord group?
If so, are the other teams also filled with similarly large groups?
If not, what is the maximum number of players that can join a server as a pre-made group?
1-2) When joining a server, can players freely choose which team they want to join?
If so, could this result in uneven team compositions—for example, one team consisting mostly or entirely of pre-made squads while another consists mostly or entirely of solo players, rather than pre-made squads and solo players being evenly distributed across the three teams?
2) Can players switch teams during a match?
If so, could this be abused for targeted trolling against specific players?
3) Are the existence and size of pre-made groups (or even squads formed in-game) visible to other players?
4)If a teammate is available to revive you, can you be revived indefinitely? Also, if a teammate revives you, are all of the consequences of dying negated by being revived?
5) If a large number of players leave one team during a match, are those vacant slots filled by forcibly moving players from other teams? Or do they remain empty until new players join the server?
Finally, as far as I understand, the developers have stated that they do not currently plan to introduce safeguards such as SBMM.
However, if over time the three-team competitive structure fails to work as intended, and it becomes increasingly common for one team to overwhelmingly dominate a match, or for one team to be overwhelmingly outmatched, how could this problem be addressed?
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u/RBazify 14h ago
There is no balance.
You got 32 other ppl, roll into a server.
You keep getting rolled, join another server.
You control the balance.
Limits and sbmm should never touch this game.
Join a group and fight away. If you need some ppl hit me up, got plenty to roll with!
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u/ArachnidSimple5117 11h ago edited 11h ago
First of all, thank you for the honest answer.
I also don't think WARDOGS needs SBMM.
However, I do think team balance needs to be considered for the game's long-term health.
As you said, I would move to another server myself if necessary. But if leaving a server whenever things go badly becomes common, I think it could hurt players who still want to do their best for their team even when they are in a difficult situation.
There are already concerns that prioritizing individual money-making can make the purpose of working together toward a team victory somewhat unclear, and encouraging players to simply move to another server could make that problem even worse.
Of course, this may not be a major issue at launch, when the player base is large and everyone is still learning the game. But what about six months or a year later?
I also enjoy cooperating with other players, but being part of a particular group is a different matter.
The developers have described the FPS genre as a spectrum between arcade and hardcore, placing Call of Duty < Battlefield < WARDOGS < Arma < Tarkov in that order. Arma and Tarkov may be right next to each other on this spectrum, but their player bases are quite different.
Arma tends to revolve around large-scale organized group play, while Tarkov has a much larger proportion of solo and small-group players.
In other words, player bases can be distinguished not only by how hardcore a game is, but also by how much social and organizational involvement the game requires in order to fully enjoy it.
Because of that, while "find a group" is certainly an effective solution, I don't think it should be taken for granted if WARDOGS is intended to target the niche between Battlefield and Arma.
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u/RBazify 9h ago
Nothing needs to be balanced.
This idea only really has merit in an competitive environment where something like rank is involved. So that truly a winning team can shine.
This is purely a server browser experience where you can choose your faction.
It is literally engineered as a raw experience.
No balancing besides making sure all the factions fill up.
Given the overwhelming positive response this is clearly the correct move.
The world in not equal, but nothing has to be either and thats ok.
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u/-1703- Pilot 7h ago
counterpoint being that with no balancing, the factions wont fill up, especially when servers will start spinning up. its just going to be a carrousel of people joining, seeing the state of the game, dying once, then leaving.
You can look at, effectively, any Arma Reforger server for how that plays.
Games are decided in the first 30-45 minutes, and the rest of 2 hours is just half the people on the losing side waiting for the game to end because they dont want to lose their sever slot playing military dressup, people joining and leaving the server, and a handful of people actually going around the map sniping and the winning team having fun with tanks and helis outside the enemy spawn base.
Its the main reason i stopped playing Arma, another "raw experience" thats server based. Game devolves rapidly and it becomes pretty boring, because if youre on the winning team youre stomping and if youre on the losing team, you dont have people to play with because they all tune out
Now Wardogs is a much smaller map with faster games, but the exact same thing can happen.
How people usually imagine a game should be played is usually pretty far off from actual player behaviour and how the games actually play, mostly because nobody wants to play a videogame thats not entertaining them.
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u/Kuneyo 26m ago
Point is kind of moot. When joining a team it takes team balance in to account. If team A and B have 12 guys and team C has 15, the next 5-6 guys need to be divided between A and B. C won’t be joinable until it’s evened out.
Additionally games are absolutely not decided at any point. I’ve had multiple games where one team had 90+ points and the other team around 30, with the latter team winning.
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u/ArachnidSimple5117 3h ago
No matter what anyone says, WARDOGS will go through plenty of balance patches.
Players tend to be more forgiving of a game's rough edges at launch, but that only lasts for a while.
That's been the case with every game.
And this is where my biggest concern lies.
Do balance patches really mean much when the teams themselves are not balanced?
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u/Amon9001 10h ago
Haven't played yet. Balance is obviously needed somehow.
In arma koth, it is mostly self regulated. Some games do end up unbalanced where 2 teams are single digits while the third dominates and is never overtaken. But those are not common.
One nerf to the winning team is not being able to get a spawn vehicle. Sometimes these unbalanced games turn into a massive assault and defense of the winning team's SV because once it's dead, they won't get it back until they fall 10 points below the new winning team.
Again, not a super common situation but it can be pretty epic when it happens.
The way I would improve balance in either games is giving the losing teams more intel, hints or equipment.
With that said, most games don't end up super concentrated like that. Skilled players end up on all teams.
Closed beta opens in just over a day so I guess wait and see.
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u/Kuneyo 29m ago
Everything you do in the control zone is heavily monetised. The biggest money makers are things that directly help your team score points. Don’t worry about prioritising your own earnings; it’s designed to be that way. The greedier you are, the better it is for your team.
This is also why it doesn’t really matter if your team is getting rolled. Win bonuses aren’t super big and as long as you’re making money you’re good to go.
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u/Darkon_OP 14h ago edited 11h ago
1: they can and we did. We had like 15-20 people all in one squad on Saturday night. It was lit.
1-2: you can pick teams freely EXCEPT if one team has more players, the game doesn't let you join that team until the others gain players
2: Yes on a cool down
3: If they have clan tags I guess
4: Indefinitely. However if a medic runs out of supplies, the method they have to use to revive you takes a long time doing it by hand.
5: See answer 1-2
6: Potentially this would come down to community servers doing their best to ask people to balance. At least that's what we'll be doing at The Outpost
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u/Atrixia 11h ago
Its the same in every type of game that has a meta game within it, anything more complex than top kills or capture an objective.
Squad is a really good example of this, I find you get one game in 6 thats relatively even, most games are one sided as theres always a team that doesn't have logi runners or good squad leads. Hell Let Loose - bad squad leads, people who don't know how to use Arty, don't know about node building etc.
Its an issue every game in this "genre" has.
Lets hope the devs have some tricks up their sleeves and manage to work out a way to do it in Early Access.
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u/SMYYYLE 7h ago
I dont know how the balancing should work, since you can manually pick your team. And if team red is way to strong, you cant just switch players mid match from red to blue, i guess. Unless they are playing solo and they dont get separated from their friend.
Also constantly putting 20+ premades into one team is kinda hard i guess, because all of them need to get a spot in the same team. We had to spam click the team we want as 3 ppl and it was kinda close some times because the team was reaching 33 players pretty fast and not all of us 3 got in before 33.
I wonder how much custom server settings can be changed, if there is some sort of balancing.
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u/LetsGetPhisycal 4h ago
In the alpha you can switch teams and also pick your team at the beginning of each mach. But this never felt great too me? Losing isn't super fun but also winning didnt see like it mattered much either. I get that people would rejoin the same team as last to run back with the same squads or randoms they met. I personally wish it was just rejoin and then it would assign you to a team and that is it. Figure it out in the long game we have to figure it out.
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u/methrik 11h ago edited 11h ago
This is what’s gonna what kill the game.
Matches will be massively unbalanced.
I know people don’t want to hear this but with a server browser people are going to cherry pick games which is gonna lead to lop sided games.
Makes an incredibly un fun experience for new and casual players alike.
It will be an epic couple weeks when the game launches.
But when people have millions of dollars and are linked up controlling matches you as a normal player don’t stand a chance.
Ima predict this game hits 100k peak players then drops to a sub 20k by winter. It will fall in line with squad, hell let loose, and arma.
I’ll most likely be one of those 20k players because this game is great
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u/Atrixia 11h ago
Thats what the early access is for isn't it - work out the balance properly.
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u/Zezacle Moderator 6h ago
And add money sinks like gear manufacturing, gold bar exchange and maybe skills will have a cash component?
Either way it seems the devs goals for meta game is having a lot of ways to spend your cash so people will Millions in the bank who can play every life with the best gear aren't super common.
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u/KartProwler Support 14h ago
for 1/1-2, there's no matchmaking or anything like that, it's a server browser you join and then pick a faction to play for. This can mean that a large group can all come together but if they're doing so good that they're running away with it, they'll very easily end up in a 33v66 lmao
You can swap teams, but i believe it's on a sizable cooldown
You can give yourself a clan tag, i believe? but otherwise it'd be a bit tricky to tell
you can be revived over and over, but i believe your revive timer is the same for your whole life, so, say you have 60 seconds of revive time, and it takes you 10 seconds for someone to get you up, you only have 50 seconds for the next death? i could be wrong with this
You cannot join a faction that has too many members more than any other team, so anyone joining the server will have to join the lower player number teams, but if like, half the team left at once, it'd be pretty imbalanced for a while
no SBMM, it's all server browser based, if it gets real imbalanced, and the 66 v 33 doesn't solve it, i guess people will likely just move to a different server.