New Player Councilor Discussion + Removal Announcements

@Mize @Exselsior and everyone, in reply to Penguin's post about me wanting to get rid of global rating:

To make things clear, I do not really like the global rating system and think it has a lot less representation of skill than others at hand. A year ago and before, I did not know if TMM would actually exist and give a way for people to play competitively in scenarios where it was more than 1v1. We have 2v2 now, 3v3 soon, hopefully 4v4. To me, this is wonderful as it gives a way to compare team ratings when faced with being placed on a random map from a pool rather selecting one. We all know at this point that global rating can reach 2k+ by simply playing one map over and over, so there is no reason to argue its efficacy.

@Emperor_Penguin , thank you for writing your post on my stance as it now gives myself and others a reason to remember to read through our applications and - if you can actually do it well - the entire thread. I stated the following in my application:

Sure, that is more in regards to resets, not abolishment, but after seeing the disdain generated from resetting a rating that has only existed for 6 months, I would never dream of eliminating one that has existed for 8+ years.

The reason I supported any kind of removal is because the devs (specifically @BlackYps ) pointed out that a league / division system is being worked out. The trueskill rating system is not very easy to understand for many people, so this will help eliminate confusion and hopefully be accepted going forward.

Source: https://forum.faforever.com/topic/311/graphic-artist-wanted

And he also posted somewhere in this nearly 300+ response thread, but hell if I can find it easily again haha. Maybe BlackYps can just confirm that after I post this again.

So, no, I do not in current believe removing Global Rating is a good idea. I personally do not like it, but is enjoyed by many and would mean a crippling blow to my stance on supporting the player base.

I hope this clarifies things for everyone concerned and those who brought this post to my attention this morning.

@FtXCommando wrote:

Ethos:

Your ethos can be broken up to three central facets. First you point to your time as M&M Councillor as well as the time you have invested into the variety of these duties. I have no qualms with what you have said related to these details. However, none of it is relevant as this is the Player Councillor election and not the Creative Councillor election. All this facet of your ethos is good for is evidence that you have consistency on FAF and will not just peace out as soon as you meet the slightest level of pushback.

One of the main, top responsibilities of the Player Council is to make map pools, ensure they are good and in working order.

My experience in map making and working as M&M not only shows that I have thorough knowledge of how to work in the dev environment zulip, and process/request changes, but it also shows I know how to debug, fix, evaluate maps far better than yourself.

I could fix maps and edit the map pool, recognize version errors far better than yourself who has to outsource that to others. This would leave me more time to pay attention to other areas of need.

In defense of Gruntti not getting his map in the pool, you or arch had trouble figuring out which version of the map to use because he made a good 50+. Neither of you reached out to him to inform him why this is an issue, so I took the the message board to fight for his disappointment: https://forum.faforever.com/topic/1488/complaint-about-tmm-and-ladder-pool-rating-brackets/26

@Dragun101 in regards to your question about "what does it take to say 'No'"?

For you specifically, I was new at M&M modification usage allowance and wanted to set up some protocol, get to know you and others working on the mod. A good portion of people simply just take something and don't credit people, which I believe is a bad practice.

In general, though, it is a mix of experience/feeling and rationale. I could not tell you case by case why I said no without digging through all the archives, some of which are deleted and gone forever.

I hope this answers your question well enough.

@thomashiatt As I said, TMM is already nearly dead, and is effectively dead at most of the times I can play which is really unfortunate because I do like TMM. Adding more matchmaker queues is not a viable option. People are going to want their custom games.

This is my issue with removing global rating, the people wanting to do it are clearly out of touch and/or only get to play at peak times and are coming up with compromises that only work for a % of the player base.

The issue is that there are competitive as well as casual global games. There’s a competitive Seton’s scene, and please don’t give me some bullshit about Seton’s bad because you don’t like it or whatever. There’s a more general competitive high level team game scene on various maps, and trying to replace that with a 4v4 TMM just sounds rough for tons of reasons. People aren’t as willing to sit in a queue for as long as they’ll sit in a lobby where they can talk to a specific subset of players for their game they’re waiting on for instance. They’ll want specific maps and we’ll have more map list drama like we have with Ladder. Manual balance to help incorporate larger rating differences in off hours isn’t possible.

We already have an unranked global scene. Any modded game. Any survival game. Maps like Thermo. We have plenty of players that only do that. We need something for those that don’t fall into those categories, the unranked global and the ladder warriors.

If people had actual ideas on how to replace it that fill the role of global rating without being global rating then I’d be less against it, but all the ideas I hear are, well, shit.

Let’s get the achievement page working and working consistently. Let’s get more stats about players available, like w/l and number of time played per map and similar stats for factions. Let’s get more avatars available for lower rated people to show off things they’ve done. Actually do some of these and then come talk about removing global rating. Stop with the “well make a queue for everything and it’ll be okay” bs, because it’s bs for many people.

@morax I completely agree global rating isn’t perfect and I am certainly apart of the people who thinks ladder rating means a lot more. Thanks for being reasonable on not removing global rating though

@exselsior You can queue for multiple queues as is now with 1v1 and 2v2. So at the very least it won't be worse, and if more people go to the matchmaker and multi queue it might get better.

@valki Yup that’s what I usually do

How is it dead? There’s bare minimum
double the 2v2 games on FAF now. Used to be 1k 2v2 games a month, now it’s 2k just from the matchmaker. Certainly far more since some custom 2v2s are still hosted.

Adjusting for population, 2v2 has moved up into either being the 3rd or 4th most popular game size.

You queue for it at 8pm PST and come back and talk to me about how dead it is. I’m glad it’s being more used now. I only have a short period of time when I’m off work where I can maybe get a game, and it’ll be likely to be with much lower rated people.

Things can’t operate off of magic; if you consider 2v2 dead you logically also consider 1v1 dead. They are both close to the same quantity of games per month when you adjust for the fact a 2v2 needs double the players. This leaves dual gap and sentons as the only two segments of pvp FAF not dead.

This doesn’t mean that 2v2 doesn’t suffer from high player count variance issues, but that’s generally what one has to expect as queues increase in size.

In a way that is sorta intentional, people that want to play really badly are softly encouraged to queue up as a smaller and smaller party to enter more and more queues. This then encourages more and more inoculation to smaller game sizes which often have the largest strategic variety. The hope is that this stops general “ladder anxiety” attached to feeling yourself more responsible for the game as less players exist. There will always be hardcore players that strictly prefer one game mode over another and the hope is that these players form the bedrock for a queue. 2v2 is still quite new and generally has had few people interested in it as a game mode. It would be the longest term project to build up of all the potential queues FAF has, I’d say.

@ftxcommando said in New Player Councilor Discussion + Removal Announcements:

Things can’t operate off of magic; if you consider 2v2 dead you logically also consider 1v1 dead.

1v1 Is close to dead for me unless I play weekends. At which point I have to decide if on that short period of time do I want to join the generally higher quality custom games or play ladder. This is my own issue, not FAFs problem and not super related to the discussion at hand, but yes to a large degree ladder is also dead for me.

Don't get me wrong, regardless of how much I personally get to enjoy TMM I love the idea and I love it's a thing. I am grateful to all the people who put their free time into making it happen. I'm glad it's starting to see more popularity, and hell maybe it'll be better for me now if its popularity has increased significantly in the past couple weeks - I've been traveling and not playing for a bit.

The problem is that all of this is tangential and you're ignoring every other argument against removing global rating. Yes, Gap and Seton's are behemoths when it comes to popularity, but they're far from the only maps played where removing global rating is a negative.

To be blunt, and this I think is the crux of my issue: I've yet to hear a single argument that wasn't either entirely bs or true but not really an actual reason for removing visible global rating

If you think Global rating is useless, then ignore it and enjoy your life. If you think it's inaccurate in certain situations, like I do, then take literally 30s to look at their ladder rating and a quick overview of their replays. There you go. All you have to do. If I'm hosting a Seton's and see a 1900 rated global player that I don't really recognize and I look at their replays and see Dual Gap the entire time, it doesn't take a genius to realize that that 1900 will get crushed by a 1500 rated Setoner on Seton's. Seriously, what actual harm is global rating being visible doing outside of certain people being mad that someone they perceive as being worse than them having a higher rating than them? I've already given several reasons why having it visible makes sense.

And no, I don't want a Seton's queue or a map specific queue, that's a downgrade in every possible way. I would much, much rather the lobby sim than deal with sitting in a queue for the same amount of time. Not to mention having a queue for every scenario is just silly.

@noundedelkwoob next our tournament will be sponsered by morax. Also he are going to sponsor tournament from Apofenas. This tournaments will be organised on summer

Your arguments rest on the assumption of me just randomly removing global rating now, which as mentioned before was never part of any game plan. I ignored it because there’s nothing for me to argue about, I don’t plan on removing global because 2v2 matchmaker exists and while having zero information about the theoretical popularity of other game modes.

@ftxcommando said in New Player Councilor Discussion + Removal Announcements:

Your arguments rest on the assumption of me just randomly removing global rating now, which as mentioned before was never part of any game plan. I ignored it because there’s nothing for me to argue about, I don’t plan on removing global because 2v2 matchmaker exists and while having zero information about the theoretical popularity of other game modes.

No; even if/when TMM is in great shape with very active 2v2/3v3/4v4 options, Global Rating would still be useful for a lot of people, and hiding or removing it then would still cause a lot of problems.

(Above Image's Forum Context)

@emperor_penguin said in New Player Councilor Discussion + Removal Announcements:

I want to play competitive FAF games besides what will be on TMM; so do thousands to tens of thousands of others.
TMM doesn't work for balancing things that are more global-specific and won't be on the TMM.
Map-specific rating, slot-specific rating, rating for 5v5/6v6/7v7/8v8, etc (and more) are all things that are covered somewhat (with flaws) by global, but would not be covered by FTX's TMM rating.

You cannot speak about the relationship between the environment of global and the environment of tmm without knowing what the current state and then the end state is. I say there is a scenario in the future where I see global rating having lost its original purpose. As my intent is to maximize usage of matchmaker and make that the default game environment of FAF, I will end up working towards a future that results in less utility for global rating.

"it's useful, it has a lot of people that want it, it will cause a lot of problems to remove it"

These are all things you hold exogeneous by the way you structure this attempt to rile people up over something that isn't even anywhere near developer cards right now. I consider them endogenous and a viable direction depending on the circumstances FAF finds itself in at the future. I plan on making an environment that does result in circumstances that favor the obsoleting of global rating as it currently exists.

@ftxcommando Honestly I apologize, it seemed like people were just wanting to get rid of it off hand while implementing more matchmaker queues but I should have clarified better. I also think I somehow missed one of your posts about it when you said something to that effect. I've been annoyed with some conversations in the past about global rating being incredibly unreasonable and that carried into what I was saying here. There are reasonable ways we can either make global rating better or sunset it eventually with the right data showing it'll be fine, so if that's the approach taken I am more okay with that. Though you'd also have to be willing to accept that there might not ever be a state for FAF in which getting rid of global rating actually makes sense.

Something that I think is an important precursor that's in my opinion a more sure "win" so to say than more matchmaking queues is better stats available, e.g. overall w/l and breakdowns of w/l like per faction and per map, similar breakdowns for number of games played, your average K/D for your units, apm, etc. There are a lot of possibilities here. That coupled with working achievements, unless they're already working again, are things that'll be nice to have for new and experienced players alike. These are also the kinds of non gameplay related things that can get people playing more and get them more invested in the game even if they're not competitive. Not sure I've really seen this talked about much in this thread; it's possible I just missed it in this mess. I know this takes development work and time, but so does a ton of what else has been talked about in here. Better stats and achievements are things I'd love to see considered and talked about more

So FtX am I right in understanding you'd favour the following approach:
-Introduce a 4v4 (and possibly 3v3) team matchmaker (in addition to the current 1v1 and 2v2)
-Have these work a similar way to current where it's preset options, with no customisation, and a set map pool (randomly chosen), as opposed to the option suggested by someone (was it Penguin? I cant remember now it was so long ago in this mess of a thread) of a single matchmaker where you select the various options you'd be happy with (1v1, 2v2 etc.; type of map; full share, etc. etc.) and see if anyone else has selected those same options
-Once this is in place and people have ratings for these game modes, remove the global rating for custom games

That is, if you see global rating as a bad thing, but don't think it should be removed yet, what is your future scenario you want to encourage that results in global rating being removed?

Morax and Penguin - Prior to this thread I'd seen FtX contribute to many posts on the forum but I didn't really notice many contributions from either of you or recognise either of you when you first posted to this thread (I'm a relative newcomer to FAF hence wouldn't know about historic things done such as the tournaments that have been referred to for Morax). While FtX has been criticised for an abrasive communication style, he has at least communicted, and has 780 posts (vs 169 for Morax and 86 for Penguin, and I expect a significant number of those are from just this thread!). Why haven't you been as active in the forums, and how would that change if you were voted PC?

@ftxcommando said in New Player Councilor Discussion + Removal Announcements:

I plan on making an environment that does result in circumstances that favor the obsoleting of global rating as it currently exists.

As I said earlier, if you achieve this I'd be perfectly okay with global rating going away.

Something I'd like to know is if there are dev plans of adding features to the queue that allows you to A. see the people currently in the queue, B. talk to the people in the queue, and C. once the queue is ready there's say a minute or two delay for you to ready up before the game starts the game starts as soon as everyone readies up or kicks you if you miss the delay. Currently in larger games I'd take a lobby sim 10 times out of 10 over sitting in a queue for the same amount of time for those reasons. To me these features would be kind of nice in 1v1, nice in 2v2, and almost essential in 4v4 queues.

Hi @maudlin27,

Yes, I am the candidate who plans a major revamp to the TMM experience, involving a universal queue with various options (including different map pools, player counts, casual options, etc). My TMM plan offers a strong contrast to the plan of a few static queues (like the two we have now) that don't give customization/options/map pool-choice/etc.

Also, if FTX does eventually remove Global Rating and remains PC, he/his team would theoretically have full control over which maps count as rated (since he/his team would be in charge of the map pools with his plan). So, with such a system, any maps that FTX rejects from his pools would presumably be banished to the land of unrated maps without a Global Rating... hmmm, an elitist power-hungry candidate trying to consolidate even more power..... wonderful....

Also, the toxicity of much of the atmosphere on the forums contributes to an echo-chamber-like effect that sort of pounces on ideas that conflict with those of the echo chamber, and that drives a lot of people with different ideas away from using the forums much (or, in many cases, entirely). So, if I am elected PC, I will be active on the forums and will make a major effort to significantly change the atmosphere to be more friendly and more conducive to additional viewpoints being expressed without people being treated with such toxicity/dismissiveness/condescension/etc, as well as increasing transparency and user-involvement in FAF-related decision-making.

@emperor_penguin said in New Player Councilor Discussion + Removal Announcements:

Hi @maudlin27,

Also, if FTX does eventually remove Global Rating and remains PC, he/his team would theoretically have full control over which maps count as rated (since he/his team would be in charge of the map pools with his plan). So, with such a system, any maps that FTX rejects from his pools would presumably be banished to the land of unrated maps without a Global Rating... hmmm, an elitist power-hungry candidate trying to consolidate even more power..... wonderful....

Yes this is a concern. There would have to be a very convincing set up before global rating goes away.