I've just switched off auto balance as a test to see if it helps keep teams a little more even skill wise.
Although it's now completely up to the players. Hopefully people will show enough sportsmanship to improve the fairly frequent problem of uneven teams.

If people will check the information listed on the hud ( scores & # of players per team ) a few times per map it should be more than enough to fix the problem.

Another issue which had been brought up several times is the auto-balance in COD2 sucks compared to COD, it kills you to switch teams in stead of waiting for a player to die.

I'm truly amazed IW couldn't come up with a simple option built into the game to auto balance based on something more relevant than number of players.

if youd like, i can try to enforce the evening of teams some when i play.
i thought cod1 just killed you too

instead of taking autobalance off, you could just make it the only option, then teams cant clanstack on purpose.

i dont know for sure, but one of our main arguments was that if we wanted to split up we couldnt cuz of auto balance. so now we can.

youre making us sound bad saying clans cant stack teams on purpose then

You may be right about autobalance killing you in cod also, I only played it a few times.

I don't like the idea of forcing auto-balance as the only option, since it doesn't do anything to address the problems of the huge variances between players skill. Plus it's easily bypasses to allow for stacking.
At tleast with auto-balance off there is the option available to the better players to show some sportsmanship and switch up teams if they are noticeably unfair.

The biggest problem is going to be players who will only play on one team because of weapon selelction.

i dont understand why people join a specific team for a weapon. there is bound to be someone using that weapon and youll be able to pick it up.

i dont know that a lot of newer players realize you can change out your pistol though. ive seen a lot of people trade their main weapon for another one on the ground.

People playing picking a team has it's good an bad side.
Bad...
Players who always go Russian for the PPSH
Good...
Players who pick a team for their prefered single action rifle.

I do agree, I think a lot of players don't know you can switch out the pistol for any weapon on the ground.
There are several servers running a mod to allow players to choose two main weapons when they start the map. It's kind of a cool idea but hate how many people would end up with a sniper and smg to start the map.

or worse, a shotty and a rifle heh

i think if u set the autobalance cvar to like 3 or 4.. it will not auto balance unless the teams are off by 3 or 4 people.. aka 12 v 8... this would prevent a complete miss match... only a few players are willing to change teams on their own

It seems like I read somewhere that wasn't availbe in COD2 like it was in COD after the 1.3 patch.

I'll test it out later to see if it works in COD2, if it does, it will probably be the best compromise all around.
Thanks for the tip.

so far the teams dont seem like theyve gotten too lopsided, that i've noticed atleast.

Just tested autobalance set to 3 and it works.

Thanks for the tip MAD