Fietta said:
That's a bad idea, the good thing about different factions is you can easily identify who's in your team and who's not. If teams are playing both sides then it's still even when it comes to faction imbalances as both teams will be playing as that faction in one side.
Firunien said:
Because of faction inbalance we switch spawn/faction. It´s a non issue. Some balancing could always be done, but i dont see anything significant besides removing lawl for cav.
This is flawed logic, and the reason we see matches like
this. That is an example where both teams were good enough to win almost every round as the stronger faction, resulting in 3 out of 4 sets ending 3-0 and the final set ending 3-1. The stronger faction (Nords over Rhodoks on the first map, and Swadians over Sarranids on the second) won decisively in every set, with a single dropped round deciding the outcome of what--at a glance--appeared to be a very close match. It's a cherry-picked case, admittedly, because it's an extreme. That's not to say that faction imbalance is a non-issue, because while this may be an extreme case the trend is present to some degree for all teams which are closely matched. I haven't run the numbers, but I would hazard to guess that Nords won more sets in BCM than any other faction, followed by Swadians or Vaegirs. If this is the case, then it's indicative of faction imbalance actually impacting match results in a meaningful way, even if that impact just drives overall match scores closer together because both teams win as the stronger faction.
If anyone is genuinely curious, I can compile the data from BCM and get actual numbers to see how this plays out. I do feel like this particular tangent is better suited to a different thread, though, 'cause I don't think faction mirroring is a good idea for matchmaking. It would be too boring for sure. I'm only interested in the concept for tournaments.