Good point, the current all time win percentage isn't as useful as it could be. For instance, nearly everyone loses their first game, and probably lose most of the subsequent 20 or so games as they get used to all the Demigods. I also think win/loss rate for the Demigod they currently have selected would be helpful as well.

Other statistics that might be good or might just be useless "noise": Current win or loss streak, Demigod "Join date" of first game played, games played since last balance patch, games played in last 30 days, overall rank, rank with selected Demigod.

+1

I also disagree.  Prior to having the overlay, 90% of my time playing Demigod was wasted on totally imbalanced and boring games.  Since getting the overlay, I've enjoyed the game much more and have been playing it a lot more often.

Thanks to the stat overlay I've played a few extremely well balanced games that weren't decided until very late in the game.  In fact, I'm sorry to say that I may have lost a couple of them for my team since I wasn't very well versed in late game item and skill selection since most of the pre-overlay games I played were feed-fests that were won or lost before we all reached level 5.

The problem comes from whiney little girls who don't understand that you don't know who the better player is just because of win percentage.  Some people only play on teams that they think they are sure to win with, and other people don't mind playing against an elite premade to see how the pros play.  You'd have a better chance with the latter on your team even thought their win percentage would be worse.

1) Only Show Experience

2) Make the Experience of your team as a whole matter when it comes to how it changes at end of game.

3) Now players will be less annoyed at having a weaker team because they will know that losing with a bad team will not impact their 'experience' stat much.

A nice idea, but I've played too many games where the worst player on the losing side gets a better favor score than other losing players.  Might work pretty good though...

A lot of the problems arise from how unwieldly it is to try and shift around the teams because opening and closing slots and getting people to move into them before someone joins the game and takes them up is a pain in the ass... lots of times people quit during this process:

"Buttskin385 please move to light team.  Buttskin385 we need you to move up.  Hello Buttskin385, do you copy?  Buttskin385, do you speak English?  BUTTSKIN385!!!  Screw this, I'm gonna find another game."

Would it be difficult to give the host the ability to switch the teams around himself?  That would solve to problem of requiring more teamwork and cooperation to start the game than to play it.

QFT

I'll be applying the "if you see a good idea, see if you can make it work for you" principle here.

In this case, This idea is very similar to what Zechnophobe described earlier.

My housemate plays Heroes of Newarth (HoN), and they seem to have developed a semi-decent automatic team balancer which people trust enough to use. I'm going to describe it briefly, list out the (IMHO) important ideas, and then talk about how we can apply some of these ideas to Demigod.

A Brief Description of the HoN System:

1) It's not perfect, and it's algorithm has some funny edge case behavior (equating 3 strong players and 2 weak players as being only slightly more powerful than 5 medium players)

2) It uses a player's "skill ranking" which seems to be derived from the 1600 "chess" point system (I say that b/c that's where I've seen it before, I don't know if the chess meisters developed the system or if it predates them).  The system is transparent, and lets the players know their potential gains/losses from a match based on the team balance before the match starts.

3) The amount of points each player stands to gain or lose is modified by the percieved balance of the teams (the Automatcher is used to create this balance and predict odds, the odds then modify the points gained/lost from the match)

Some ideas from this:

1) A numerical, and therefore amenable to a auto-balancer algorithm, way of measuring player strength is the end-goal.

2) HoN does this by using chess-like player skill rating algorithm, and it seems to be working out alright for them, though their autobalancer doesn't handle some specific edge cases very well.  This algorithm takes *only* the results of games played into account based on the relative difficulty of the opposition, using some forumula to formulate a "team strength".  This player skill rank is independent of hero played.

Great, I'm done talking about HoN lets talk about Demigod!

Now HoN is not Demigod, so you can't just port the system over wholesale.  For one thing, they choose their heros/demigods *after* team selection is finalized, in a draft-pick manner -- we don't do that in Demigod.  To adapt a point based system to Demigod, I think it would be important to have that number represent that player's *skill with the Demigod they have currently chosen*.

1) We should be able to differentiate between a player who is awesome with Oak but dabbling with QoT today, and the player who is awesome with QoT, and is playing QoT today.

Win/Loss ratio doesn't seem to be working out that well right now, and dividing it out onto the various demigods alone won't fix that. This is primarily (IMHO) b/c Win/Loss ratios would not reflect the difficulty/level of the games played.

Avg Favor Points Earned is another possibility, but I don't think it will be able to reflect, the same as Win/Loss ratios, the relative difficulties of the match; eg. do you avg. awesome favor with Unclean Beast b/c you're slaughtering a bunch of newbies with him, or are you actually that awesome?

2) A Player's number, which is used to balance teams, should reflect not only the matches they play, but the relative skill level / difficulty of those matches as well.

Both of these ideas keep bringing my thought process back to the chess system that HoN/Chess/WoTC (Wizards of the Coast) use to rank their players.  For a competitive ladder, that's the sort of thing we're looking for I think, with casual play as the bottom of the ladder and with all the hypercompetitve players duking it out at the top of the ladder.

Now, if you're really set on using avg. favor or something like it, I think there's a good way to deal with Colonel_Jessup's point:

that being to normalize favor earned based on demigod, and present this "normalized" score.  If you do use that idea though, please make it completely transparent eg. make it so that a Sedna who averages 67, an UB who averages 80, and an Erebus who averages 84 all present a "Normalized Average Favor Per Game" of 75.  Or, grab a academic grading system from somewhere that uses a letter system, and rate each of those players as a "C Sedna, or a C UB, etc.", and then publish the normalization scales somewhere (or automate the whole system to map to the "average" score of each demigod over all games played).

If we can develop a good player-strength number, an auto-team-balancing button would probably help out with this problem.

Just my 2 cents, volumnious as they be.

Perhaps the value could be simply how far off of the average you are for that particular Demigod.

Example: I pick QoT in a game.  The overlay displays that I have an average of 65 favor points for all of my QoT games, vs 56 for the overall QoT average.  Would this be considered an acurate view of how well I use QoT?  I'm sure it could be adapted for 'Random Demigod" as well.