For some reason, my mind went to the old Wintergrasp from World of Warcraft.
Back when Wintergrasp first came out, it had a system that was intended to balance matches that were uneven numerically. It basically worked like this:
Alliance has 45 players in Wintergrasp.
Horde has 56 players in Wintergrasp.
56/45 = 1.24, so Horde is 1.24x stronger (assuming same average player gear score, which the system did as to not penalize people for having better gear). So the Alliance got a buff (can't remember the name of it) that increased their max health, damage and healing by 1.24x. This was to effectively make the 45 Alliance players effectively equal to the 56 Horde players.