Balancing Systems in Multi-player Games

I've recently discussed the issue of balance in multi-player games with colleagues, and how important it is for the players to have a balanced gaming experience. I actually had a whole post on this that I saved as a draft this morning, but it appears it was lost to the blogger ether (blogger has been performing and acting fairly poor of late). So here's the re-hash...

To date, most multi-player games have done little to ensure a balanced playing experience when playing online. I'll focus on FPS games, since these are the games I have the most experience with.

Example 1: Counter-Strike:Source. I didn't get into CS until CS:S was released a few months ago. CS:S is extremely fun, and an extremely well designed mod (if you can even call it a mod anymore). But there aren't any mechanisms in place to ensure that teams are balanced in terms of skill. What CS:S does have is a system that balances players per team. Whenever the discrepancy between teams is >2, the server automatically moves players from the larger team to the smaller team to even things out. It appears the player(s) moved from one team to the other are picked at random, not based on skills. Some CS:S games I've been involved in end up with one team winning 15 rounds in a row...obviously the skilled players are on one team. CS:S doesn't have any mechanism in place to remedy situations like this, or even try and prevent the same thing from occurring on the next map.

Example 2: Unreal Tournament 2004. I really like the UT 2004 system. Upon entering a game, you are automatically placed on the team with smaller players. But once you finish out a match, when the next map loads, the server will try and create teams evenly based on the scores of the players from the past match. This usually works 75-80% of the time (NOTE: this is based on my experiences in Onslaught matches). The only problem with this system is nothing takes into account players leaving mid-game. If 3 people from your team bail in the middle of a match, you're pretty much hosed. The server won't dynamically shift players to the smaller team to even things out.

Example 3: Halo 2. So far, I haven't been overly impressed with Halo 2's match-making abilities. Bungie boasted that Halo 2's xbox live system would always be able to match you with other players of similar skill levels. From my limited experience with the game, this hasn't been the case. I'm hoping if I participate in more online games, the system will get a better feel for my skill level (not very good), and start making better decisions on who I should be playing against. At this point, the quick matches in Halo 2 take forever to load, so I've been playing primarily arranged/party games with friends, that only take 10 seconds to load.

So where is all this going? It's my opinion that if these types of games had a solid balancing system, ensuring that players are competing with people at a similar skill level, players would play much more often. These unbalanced games actually might present a barrier to entry for a lot of people. Getting into CS:S at this point, as many reviews noted, is very difficult and intimidating for newcomers. It took me about 3 weeks to be able to hold my own in that game, and come out even or on the positive side in terms of death/kill ratio. Many gamers, particularly older gamers who don't necessarily share the same mindset as younger gamers, just don't want to spend weeks getting pwned on every server. They want to be competitive within hours of the new experience. This problem of balancing is alienating a lot of gamers who would otherwise really enjoy competitive multi-player gaming. I also think a clean balancing system would keep players engaged with a game for longer periods of time.

Here's to hoping Halo 2's system begins to work like Bungie predicted it would.