Suggestion: Remove game count
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Hi all, I recently got back into sup com after a long time. It is really great to see such an active community for this game after so much time.
I used to be a top 1v1 player back in the day when I had much more time on my hands, but nowadays I prefer to relax and have fun a bit more with large team games.
I'm up to ~15 team games now but I find that maybe 2/3 times I join a game I get kicked at the last moment before starting because I'm grey, sometimes after waiting 20 mins or so for all to join. Note that many of these games are named "all welcome". I'm always within the rating range, my CPU is good, and the games never specify a minimum game count.
Obviously I can understand why people would do this: grey essentially means your rating is uncertain and I can understand why people would not want "unknowns" in their game since it might tip balance.
However, this is a flip side to this: it's incredibly frustrating to be a new player in FAF. It's getting to the point where I'm not sure I want to be bothered investing the time waiting in lobbies trying to get a game.
There's no clear solution to this that benefits everyone, but I'd like to propose that game counts should be hidden and be no such thing as "grey". There should be rating and that's it. My rationale here is that (a) I think it's very important that relatively small communities like this are welcoming to new players, and (b) I think the balance argument is overemphasized. It really only takes a handful of games to reach a relatively stable level and I think the overall risk of a misrated player wrecking a game are overrated. I do admit it might happen every now and then, but I believe it would be a worthwhile risk relative to losing new players.
Happy to discuss and find alternative solutions if people agree this is a problem worth solving.
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If you want to get some games in and quickly get your rating up, the fastest way is to host custom 1v1s. The system "learns" your rating faster from 1v1s because there's no chance you won because you were carried by teammates. In my experience, for lower-rated players it's fast to get custom 1v1 games. Not a lot of waiting. Maybe it's just that higher-rated players think they can grab a quick win. So you should have no problem getting rid of the gray, and if you win a bunch of them, you can boost your rating in the process. Both of those things will help you to be accepted into team games.
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Yea this is a known issue and solutions have been discussed at length. The main problem is that global rating is a terrible indicator of skill so we can’t really set up any matchmakers right now that use it. I think once we finally get around to releasing the 3v3+ matchmaker (soon
️) we might be able to make a queue that uses global, but I guess ultimately @Morax gets to decide what to do there. -
I think removing game count along with "greyness" might actually be reasonable. There's still rating to determine skill and opti balance will properly infer the uncertainty in new player's ratings.
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I don't think it's a good idea, you can guess more things about a player with a rating and a game count
Ie a 1200 with 7 games, probably a smuf
A better option is to start banning people that kick players in all welcomes
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Eventually we are going to move to a "League" system so this will be resolved:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1U60RylfoWdKADorXZmiXs3pq7MYn9cCXy1UMp-js4U0/edit
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@morax Very interesting! Thanks for the context and glad that there's a plan in place.
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I think until the league system is implemented it's best to keep it as is. I am a level 1000 ranked player with 850 games and will get kicked too after waiting in lobbies for a while. The sub-1000, non-grey crowd kicks me because they fear my games played and think I'm going to be better than my rank suggests and the semi-pro to pro crowd will kick me because I'm a noob who can't get my rank up after so many games and don't want their team dragged down lol. To me, it's part of it and I don't let it bother me anymore. I take it as a challenge to rank up the right way and play well when I do get in the 1200+ games. My advice is play with people in your own "league" so to speak until your rank and games count is more palatable for the higher level lobbies. Keep playing and you'll have 100+ games soon enough and will be enjoying it more the way you want. Welcome back btw.
