After a long and careful look at past balance issues, I have come to a realization:
A difference between player counts between the two teams within one campaign have an high impact on win rates between said two teams.
This thread offers a potential solution for this, as well as an explanation as to why this occurs. All of the explanation will be done with Squad mode as context, as I am the most familiar with it, but this also applies to the Lone Soldier mode. You can skip to the images for my proposed solution, if you so wish.
What is the current situation?
Currently the Americans have a higher winrate in Normandy, while Germany has a higher winrate in Moscow.
Why does this happen?
The current matchmaker takes ~5 players on either team as the minimum required players to start a match. However, the maximum amount of players per team can go as high as 14, depending on whether there are grouped up players. The matchmaker will take a minute or two to pick up more players inside of the queue to fill the rest of the slots, before making a new match.
The issue comes into play when one side is able to fully fill up their team’s player capacity within those one to two minutes, while the other side cannot.
The result is that one side will have less players than the other. The matchmaker “fixes” this by spawning bots that take up those remaining slots. And those bots, of course, are inferior to normal players. At that point, the actual balance between the two nations matters very little, as if your team has less players, that is next to impossible to make up for. The result is that the nation with the larger playerbase will have a higher winrate.
Do you have any proof for this?
Only indirect proof, which is divided in multiple steps:
CBT start
- At the start of CBT, the winrates for Germany were better than that of the Soviets. This can be caused by one of few reasons: The German premium squad is arguably better than the Soviet one. More players are interested in playing Germany than Soviets, etc etc. Another factor could be that the players interested in playing USA, Brittan, etc, but not Soviets, had no other options. Bottom line: Germany won more.
What did the devs do about this?
- The developers decided to buff Soviet weapon damage by ~20% across the board, giving them a massive advantage in 1v1 combat. However, this did not attract more players to the Soviet side. Instead, it drove away a small portion of the German playerbase. This was not enough to equalize the difference between the two playerbases however, and this change was soon reverted after the developers realized it wasn’t working.
Normandy
- The developers instead decided to introduce the Normandy campaign. This lead to a massive drop in the German playerbase for Moscow, as they all went to try to play Germany on Normandy, although a significant proportion of former German mains swapped over to America, in addition to new players joining the game specifically for America. The result was a larger American playerbase than German playerbase in Normandy, leading to higher winrates for the USA. Meanwhile in Moscow, due to the large drop in players playing Germany, the Soviets actually held the advantage and saw a massive increase in winrates.
LMG Premiums
- After noticing the worse winrates in Normandy, a lot of German mains decided to go back to Moscow, balancing the winrates there for the most part. However, after the introduction of the LMG premiums, most of the remaining German mains in Normandy decided to return to Moscow as well to try out these new squads, leading to the current situation.
How can this be fixed?
The core issue of dividing the playerbase across multiple campaigns cannot be fixed. We cannot force players to play things they do not want to play. If someone likes USA, they will never try Moscow because there is no USA there. However, we can give the players more freedom towards choosing what they want to play, in addition to giving players the option to play multiple things at the same time:
Full mode selector for matchmaker:
Currently, we have a minor amount of control towards what nation, campaign, mode and server we play on, but all options are spread out and may be confusing:
Red is nation selection. Blue is campaign selection (which is not shown in the CAMPAIGN TAB btw, another flaw in the user-friendliness of the current UI), green is mode selection, yellow is server selection, pink is the option to queue for both teams.
Instead, I propose an entirely separate screen with all of these kinds of options:
Visual example:
(Sorry for the meh at best picture, I do not have access to any good image editing software rn)
Campaign selection:
Allow players to select any combination of campaigns and nations to play on, instead of only “one or both nations of one campaign”. This way, players who simply want to play Axis on any campaign, can do so, or filter out the ONE campaign/nation they do not want to play. Additionally, adding quick-swap buttons with symbols in the campaign tab to quickly check your progression between different campaigns would be a huge quality of life improvement, but that should be reserved to a thread of its own.
Mode selection:
Some players do not care what mode they play. Letting players queue for both at the same time lets the game balance out matches better. The “long queue” filter, explained down below, may also be used here.
Gamemode selection:
Some players simply do not enjoy the duration of an assault or invasion game, while other players enjoy the depth of those modes and think conquest is boring. As such, letting players select what they want to play is a must. It also has a “long” option, referring to queue time. These are automatically enabled for the modes where “short” is selected, while staying optional for modes that were not selected. If the matchmaker fails to find a match with the given filters within a minute, it will use the “long” queue filter to help find matches more easily.
Server selection:
Plain and simple. Also make it 100% impossible for players to get matches outside their selected servers, as that is known to currently be a thing in case of longer queue times. Instead, let players choose their own “backup” servers to queue for with another “long queue” filter.
Map selection?
I personally think map selection is not required as long as gamemode selection is a thing. Alternatively, map banning could be a premium time feature similar to in War Thunder. Additionally, if the developers have to monetize this, force all “long queue” options to be enabled unless you have premium time. However, that requires the “long queue” filter to only kick in after a whole minute of queuing.
Why will this (partially) fix the issue at hand?
Currently, players can only queue for up to 2 “teams” at once: Axis and Allies of the same campaign. This system will at least let players queue for multiple teams across different campaigns, which I imagine a lot of players will do, at least for their nation of choice.
Letting players choose what gamemode to play will stop players that don’t want to play conquest / whatever from leaving a match if they get an undesired gamemode and as a result, not leave a gap in that match that has to be filled by a bot.
Mode selection is only a + as every player that decides to queue for both will benefit both modes, instead of only one. This is needed as Lone Soldiers mode isn’t very popular right now.
Proper server selection is just a big must. 99% of players will not care about 10 seconds longer queue time if it means they can actually play the game properly, as their ping may reach unacceptable levels if they get forced into servers they did not select. Players deselect servers for a reason and that choice should be respected.