By Pentadact

One of my only criticisms of Team Fortress 2 was that the Medic isn’t as fun to play as the other classes – a particular shame when he’s so critical to success. Some people objected to this, because they really enjoy the Medic, so I’d just like to make sure these people don’t miss the Team Fortress 2 stats: cold, hard evidence that I am right and they are wrong. The Medic, for anyone not motivated to click the link, is the least-played class by a head.

Obviously the THIRTY-SIX achievements they’re adding just for Medics is an attempt to redress that imbalance, but I wonder if that’s the way to fix this.

You never had to bribe people to play Medic in Battlefield 2, partly because they were effective combatants, but I think mostly because the medicking part of their job was extraordinary fun. When I’m holding my healing ray on a Heavy while he mows people down in TF2, I feel like I’m serving him. When I sprint through thwacking gunfire and dive defibrillators-first onto the unconscious body of my squad leader in BF2, I feel like I’m saving him.

What’s surprising about those stats- well, okay, there are lots of surprising things about those stats.

1. The first surprising thing is the very first fact: the Scout is the most-played class? He’s the only class which, for the majority of any given round, is almost entirely useless. The second the enemy have a single sentry up in any sensible location, he has no way of getting to their objective and is too weak to effectively defend his own. It must just be that, like me, a lot of people always play him for their first life on 2fort, well and granary. But when I do, can I persuade the rest of my team to get a decent Scout rush going? Can I testicles.

2. Speaking of those three maps – the three perfectly symmetrical ones – here’s the most remarkable stat of the lot: the Blue team is almost twice as likely to win on any of these. Even 2fort. These are maps in which each team’s base is a mirror of their enemy’s, and the game’s teams have no inherent differences. If you played in black and white, you wouldn’t even be able to tell which team you were playing on.

I can think of only two explanations for this, and the first one is stupid. Perhaps the Red team are just slightly easier to see? This would be a perfectly reasonable theory in a game with large maps or camouflaged players, but Team Fortress 2 is depicted with unprecedented clarity. It’s the one game in which you can always spot enemies and even tell which class they are, at any range. Perhaps Snipers, through the smallest and darkest of windows, sometimes go unnoticed for a moment, but you’d think Blue Snipers would stand out more strikingly against the warm wood buildings of well, and that’s the map with the the strongest pro-Blue bias of all.

The other possibility is that for whatever reason, better players pick Blue. It’s not often you get to choose your team, since one usually outnumbers the other when you join, but the times when you do could account for this difference. It would have to be an overwhelming trend, to show through the auto-balance and playercount restrictions, but it’s possible. I pick Blue when I can – maybe I’m just that good.

The real answer is probably the counterpart to this: it seems possible that new or inexperienced players might automatically pick Red, since it’s first on the team-choice menu.

3. My other criticism of TF2 was that hydro didn’t quite work. It’s the map that changes shape every round, in complicated ways, in order to keep it fresh for years. As far as I’d played when I reviewed it, this just seemed to keep it confusing for years, but I said I was prepared to bear with Valve’s experiment to see how it played out.

Three months later, I have a more conclusive answer: sucks! hydro is awful. But looking at the stats, Valve must be delighted: apparently hydro sees the longest rounds of any map, and never results in a stalemate. That’s funny, because around fifty percent of all stalemates I’ve ever had and my ten shortest rounds have all been on that very map.

The problem is that they don’t count the fight over two control points – before the map reconfigulates – as a round. They count the entire, tedious push through each arbitrary mess of blocked-off routes towards the enemy’s final base – at least four separate games – as one round. This cleverly conceals the two main ways in which hydro sucks: if one team is even slightly better than they other, they utterly storm the enemy control point in a matter of seconds, and no-one has any hope of mounting a comeback or even having an influence on the battle. And if the teams are even in skill, every damn game ends with two nests of Sentry Guns sitting vigilantly at their own bases, waiting for the Sudden Death timer to run out.

4. As you can see from the ugly grey lumps in that graph, Stalemates are all too common on the maps where they can occur. Amazingly the solution to this is so simple the community have already implimented it in places: a fantastic server-side mod causes everyone to spawn as the same class when entering Sudden Death, and restricts them to melee. When I last played on such a server, this meant twenty-four Heavy Weapons guys punching each other to death, but pretty much any class is as funny.

It completely transforms the dark, paranoid, defensive atmosphere of Sudden Death into a glorious burst of humour and madness at the end of the round. Instead of saying “You’ve failed to complete a game of Team Fortress 2, now you must play Counter-Strike until everyone gets bored and leaves or the game tells everyone they suck”, it says “Eh, you guys are about as good as each other. Fist fight! Woo!” Then it spins around with its arms out until it falls over from the giddiness. In other words, it’s silly and friendly and hilarious in just the way TF2 is everywhere else. You actually come away from it feeling almost like friends, instead of hating the enemy team’s stupid camping guts and your own team’s stupid non-Medic faces.

But if I were Valve, I wouldn’t be working on any of these issues yet. In fact, I’d be doing absolutely nothing to the game until I’d come up with the perfect auto-balancing/team-reshuffling algorithm. I think they ended up maximising almost every other factor that positively contributes to the percentage of time you spend enjoying a multiplayer game, but left alone the biggest one: engineering a fair fight.

If it were up to me, no-one would get to pick a team. Everyone’s auto-assigned according to their skill level, keeping Friends together and players who prefer the same class apart, in that order of priority. After every round, the highest-scoring player from the winning team, along with the third best, fifth best, seventh, etc, are switched with the second best from the losing team, and the fourth, and sixth, respectively. In other words, maximum rejiggling with a slight bias towards the losing team, giving the best players a challenge and the worst players a break.

The reason you couldn’t do most of this stuff in older games, like the original Team Fortress, was that the game simply didn’t have access to that sort of information about players. Steam now has all this and more, and if they’re only using that for playtesting, they’re missing the real value of this kind of data. They’ve got everything they need here to rig a multiplayer game to be fun every time, and that could be a hell of a thing.