I think banner balance has a place but on the more public servers, it tends to lend itself more towards "guild groups" farming pugs for hours. When this occurs (and it does quite often), I just stop playing rather than switch my banner so I can get some decent XP. GvG servers would be a much more appropriate place for this kind of mechanic.
nah the only problem is that banner balance has a bad algorithm - it quite often separates for no reason people with the same banner while at the same time it doesn't really balance the roster.imo the formula should be something like this:
TEAM1 - players with 1st most popular banner
balanced according to
TEAM2 - players with single banners (but more of them until they match in strength the TEAM1)
+
TEAM 2 - players with 2nd most popular banner
balanced according to
TEAM 1 - remaining players with single banners or those 2 of a kind etc...
etc...
- this would guarantee that 2 biggest groups will be in different teams which is very important.
- teams would be balanced (sometimes meaning that there will be way more players on one side - but hell what who cares, its a nice variety)
- players not in big banner groups would be switched from att/def side quite often so they wouldn't bitch that they kept loosing 5 consequetive rounds while attacking
- people with the same banner would be almost always together.
- this balance should be done after each round (i feel that the balance sometimes only "fine tunes" a few people, but when it distributes them wrong in the begining like often happens than its all just fucked)
- after the balance would be done a special recount would compare the strength of teams, if it would be within limits the game would go on, if it wouldn't than only under this consequence people with the same banner could be switched to other teams - this would often happen in small servers with like 20 people where 8 people would be clan players - and yeah this is exactly the case when we can talk about clan stacking when there are somewhere close to 50 percents of players from 1 clan.