Allow us to pick rating brackets for TMM

I would agree that it looks like the parameter changes you applied end up pretty significantly increasing the wait time for new players or people who may have lost their first few games. Which I think is a little bit against the idea of standing up the matchmaker in the first place since it was intended to be a play for new players to start and jump into the game without the politics of custom games.

So now changing that to give them a harder time of getting a match isn't great. Also this seems to just increase the wait times across the board so we will just get more complaints of why people aren't getting matched when there are enough people in queue.

But ultimately unless we want to build some very complicated logic to perform matching it basically just comes down to if we want to cater to allowing new players to get a game or cater to more experienced players getting the games they think are ideal.

Someone who wants to play witn his friendlist, can host a custom game. No need to make everybody else wait in average two times longer. Everybody else who are happy to play with random people. With big or small rating disparity. With lower or higer rated players.

I'm happy with random people. I'm not happy with animals in game. Isn't it that hard to understand?
Why join the TMM if all it's gonna give me is some dogshit games that I can as well get by hosting all welcome which is gonna be insanely more fun due to the fact I know what I'm getting into instead of realizing 5s into the match that I'm a fucking zoo keeper.

If LOL ain't pushing me into playing with Bronze players why the fuck FAF have to do it? I'd rather play no game and be grumpy in aeolus than have to babysit an effin zoo. Simple as that. Like I really don't understand why is it so hard to understand that putting Master players into Bronze/Silver matches is a retarded idea that ruins the idea of having a curated ranked mode...

No game > unbalanced game.

And yeah @BlackYps I'm totally onboard for those changes. I'd rather wait 40 minutes and have a normal game than wait 20 minutes and get a retarded no-game cuz yet again the game devolves into who got bigger 800 retard on the other flank. Or even better I'd rather not play at all if I'm gonna get more of low rated games. I'd rather sit in lobby sim.

@wikingest said in Allow us to pick rating brackets for TMM:

Someone who wants to play witn his friendlist, can host a custom game. No need to make everybody else wait in average two times longer. Everybody else who are happy to play with random people. With big or small rating disparity. With lower or higer rated players.

Me playing with my friendslist in a premade is the whole solution to the problem of me not wanting a game where teamwork is irrelevant in a 4v4 and where I need to find the optimal cheese solution to carry from my slot with an all in play.

Don't get the relevance of what LOL does when it has a massive player base. If FAF had a huge number of players then it'd be possible to have small rating differences and short wait times for games. It doesnt, and so we have to choose.

A change that causes the experience for new players to be worse is bad long term - it might make you feel better now because you get smaller rating differences in high ranked games, but if new players are turned off from playing FAF due to a long wait for a game ultimately it means fewer high ranked players playing long term (since some of those new players will end up as high ranked players) and hurts everyone.

That's why I'd prefer it being optional so those who would rather "play no game and be grumpy" can, while players who just want to play a game still get to find a game quickly. By allowing people to self select which category they'd prefer (unbalanced game > no game or no game > unbalanced game) it should benefit the most people on average. Any other solution means forcing people into one or the other category and will inevitably result in one group of people or the other being unhappy.

The player base is irrevelant. LOL still have long Q times to make the games balanced in high MMR instead of throwing you into random shittier game. 20-30 minute Q times are not unheard of. Hell even I sometimes get 15 minute Q times late night in high MMR arams. So no, the size of playerbase ain't really the problem here as much as you would think.

Well, then we can think about implementing it for high rating brackets if it's gonna be that detrimental to new player experience. Can't we? The whole point is that TMM is dogshit for 1.5k+ plus experience.

@ftxcommando said in Allow us to pick rating brackets for TMM:

Me playing with my friendslist in a premade is the whole solution to the problem of me not wanting a game where teamwork is irrelevant in a 4v4 and where I need to find the optimal cheese solution to carry from my slot with an all in play.

So two premade teams with high rated players sitting in matchmaker list, spending their day waiting to get matched one against another. Rather than hosting custom game... Time well spent

@casternumerouno said in Allow us to pick rating brackets for TMM:

I can as well get by hosting all welcome

You can host whatever rating bracket or balance you want in custom games.

I have no idea what your posts are trying to accomplish. I already began with the premise that if I want a good teamgame I’m going to play custom. That’s the whole point. To make the quality better to encourage more high level ppl to use the matchmaker.

Your point also makes zero sense because two high level premades queueing together will get a game quite easily, it’s functionally the only way to get a high level game on tmm. My whole point is that the only solution to the tension between no games and bad games is to be a premade with sufficiently high level that you force the system to go and do no games unless it’s a good game.

But this isn’t optimal either since a strong stack doesn’t get broken apart in the same way optimal balance can break stacks apart in custom games. So you would want to encourage solo queues at high level to allow that but for that to be viable you need some level of restriction to allow more weight for no games over bad games.

My posts are very clear. I try to accomplish that average waiting time would not get (two times) longer. And that new players in general would not get pushed out of FAF.

I have no idea what your posts are trying to accomplish. You say, that "Me playing with my friendslist in a premade is the whole solution". And then you say, that "if I want a good teamgame I’m going to play custom. " And then you say that "But this isn’t optimal either" etc.

This is not your post, and my first comment was nothing to do with you. @CasterNumeroUno has raised a problem, and people are talking to him, and others about that.

Give me something to work with instead of just ranting on the forum Endranii. As a 1.6k player, what is the smallest rating you are willing to accept?

And can we please in general discuss with a bit more detail? I think everybody is on the same page that we want to have wait times as small as possible and reasonably well balanced games. If the games are shit this will kill the matchmaker in no time. I believe the audience of "give me any game, no matter who is in it" is rather small. If we deem any wait time increase unacceptable then this whole discussion is pointless. And it would be pretty arbitrary too. The wait time is already greater than zero, so why is that the absolute maximum of acceptably wait time?

I think it is acceptable to have wait times for new people as long as we communicate that properly. I see two problems with the current UX: 1. It's very hard to gauge the general queue activity, because people get matched and are then basically invisible. 2. The queue can reach over 8 people without matching and the reason is not apparent.
Increasing game quality and thus wait time could partially fix this, as the queue will basically constantly be over 8 people during active hours, so it will be more obvious that this is intentional. The general activity could then be gauged by the queue size.
However, this is still a very crude fix as the reason for this is still not obvious and it will even more regularly than now lead to people not getting matched repeatedly while seeing other people getting matched.
Any ideas how to improve this?

I don't think a user selectable switch like that is viable, because we can't guarantee that it will actually do anything. If seven people in queue selected they want a fast game, but the rest has not, then we still can't match them without dragging someone in that potentially bad game that has specifically selected that they don't want an unbalanced game.

Another thing that we should probably do regardless of touching the main parameters, is to find a solution for the people at the outer ends of the bell curve. The wait times increase drastically. For the left side is probably acceptable to match a bit more leniently, as there will be many people with high deviation that we can't accurately match anyway. It would also automatically improve wait times for new people, as new people are low rated.
An open question is: Do we also want that for the high rated end?

And a little bit more technical question. When determining where the top of the bell curve is and how wide it is, do we deem it acceptable to just hardcode a value, or do we try to recalculate the bell curve regularly. If yes, based on what data do we want to do that?

@blackyps In terms of the switch option, I'd expect it to be relevant if at least 8 people in the queue hadn't checked the option to restrict games they join to those within a smaller rating range, so it'd be limited in effect, but still relevant (whether or not it'd be enough of an impact to justify the additional time to create I don't know though). If only 7 people had chosen 'unbalanced game > no game' then it'd have no impact (since as you say the alternative would mean forcing someone who would rather have no game to play).

In terms of UI improvements regarding the wait, one option could be an 'average wait time' figure, although quite how you would come up with it I dont know. E.g. if it's possible (and not lots of extra work) you'd track the average time each person that joined the last 5 games had to wait before the game was formed, and then present that as the average figure (with an average of more than a certain amount, say 10m, just displayed as '10m+' (to avoid discouraging people too much if no games have formed for a long time due to it being an off-peak time). An alternative to coming up with the average wait time could be to track the average time to form a game based on the number of players in the queue (and potentially the rating range of those players) in aggregate (e.g. over a month) and use this to come up with a formula to approximate the number.

Another UI improvement could be to highlight the rating range currently being considered for you to be matched into a game, since I understand this increases with each queue cycle where you aren't matched (although I dont know if it is quite that simple). This could also be used as an alternative to a 'checkbox' selection approach, in that it would allow people to leave the queue and rejoin it to reset the rating range being considered for them to be matched into a game (thus achieving a similar effect to the 'checkbox' option without any extra coding being required). It'd also help newer players since they might think 'ah there are 8 players in the queue but I have a rating range so those other players can't be in a similar enough range to me, and my rating range has now increased so if I hang around a few more minutes maybe I'll get a game'.

However I wouldn't favour actually displaying the rating ranges of the other people in the queue since this risks disincentivising people from joining or staying in the queue if they see that all the people in the queue are a different range from them (as it is, I find if a few people join the queue there might quickly be an influx of more people who think the chances of a game have increased, which then becomes a self fulfilling prophecy)

For the distribution I would advise just taking n-standard deviations away to make it robust to change in the future. Hard coding just will cause problems going forward. Also considering the fact that it would technically be different for each rating.

@sheikah said in Allow us to pick rating brackets for TMM:

For the distribution I would advise just taking n-standard deviations away to make it robust to change in the future.

I don't understand what this is supposed to mean

@blackyps said in Allow us to pick rating brackets for TMM:

@sheikah said in Allow us to pick rating brackets for TMM:

For the distribution I would advise just taking n-standard deviations away to make it robust to change in the future.

I don't understand what this is supposed to mean

We should calculate the mean and standard deviation for each rating and then set the threshold so that the top and bottom x% of people are treated differently if you want to try something to squash the tail wait times.

Anything else will just be a headache to maintain.

We probably should strive for making the Matchmaker match new people as fast as possible while not sacrificing the smaller but still important segment of 1.2k+. For that, you need to decrease the max deviation and imbalance in the 1k-1.8k range but then increase that again above 1.8k since at that point people are so far apart that otherwise it's impossible to get games and it's commonly accepted that high-rated lobbies usually start at around 1.6k-1.8k and 2k+ ones are a rarity

Could you simply display the league divisions that are currently searching if you hover over the In Queue? You can make that information specific in terms of Diamond I/Diamond III or it could just be
Silver: 1
Gold: 4
Diamond: 2

The main issue is that solo queueing as an 1800+ is just absurdly risky because if 6 Masters/GMs are in queue solo, it is still highly possible the system wants to make a game with only 2 of those depending on the rest of the queue. But at least seeing who is in queue might encourage some loose players at those ratings to queue up if they know a decent game is conceivable.

You can even combine that with new IRC chat rooms that autojoin you based on matchmaker ratings that you can opt-out of through the autojoin setting in settings. Or people could actually starting using the Discord rating channels 4head.

@wikingest said in Allow us to pick rating brackets for TMM:

@casternumerouno said in Allow us to pick rating brackets for TMM:

I can as well get by hosting all welcome

You can host whatever rating bracket or balance you want in custom games.

Then what the fuck is the point of TMM? Isn't it supposed to make a balanced game? If it ends up making games that are no different from random ass all welcome lobbies then what is the point of it? Just make the whole Q unranked and call it a day then.

@blackyps said in Allow us to pick rating brackets for TMM:

Give me something to work with instead of just ranting on the forum Endranii. As a 1.6k player, what is the smallest rating you are willing to accept?

It might have been lost in the discussion but I already said that we should most likely try by limiting it by brackets.
For example Gold V can match with Silver V and Diamond V which looks decent at first sight.

As for the bigger outliers like masters and wood V you could give them 1.5 bracket leeway to make it easier for them to get games without making the games too imbalanced? Though looking at it now the 1.5 bracket might still be too high for the GM as D3 is around 1.4k rating while Blodir is 2.3k or so.

Also moving to brackets/divisions could be a positive move as it's way easier to understand what D4 stands for rather than 1.3k True skill rating.

@blackyps said in Allow us to pick rating brackets for TMM:

I think it is acceptable to have wait times for new people as long as we communicate that properly. I see two problems with the current UX: 1. It's very hard to gauge the general queue activity, because people get matched and are then basically invisible. 2. The queue can reach over 8 people without matching and the reason is not apparent.
Increasing game quality and thus wait time could partially fix this, as the queue will basically constantly be over 8 people during active hours, so it will be more obvious that this is intentional. The general activity could then be gauged by the queue size.
However, this is still a very crude fix as the reason for this is still not obvious and it will even more regularly than now lead to people not getting matched repeatedly while seeing other people getting matched.
Any ideas how to improve this?

https://forum.faforever.com/topic/3561/show-amount-of-players-in-game-in-the-tmm-play-tab?_=1665430587911

Could also add additional split of players in Q by their rating bracket, near the people searching number, same as it is done in world of tanks matchmaking where you can/could see the amount of players in the Q per tier/tank type.

@blackyps said in Allow us to pick rating brackets for TMM:

I think it is acceptable to have wait times for new people as long as we communicate that properly. I see two problems with the current UX: 1. It's very hard to gauge the general queue activity, because people get matched and are then basically invisible. 2. The queue can reach over 8 people without matching and the reason is not apparent.
Increasing game quality and thus wait time could partially fix this, as the queue will basically constantly be over 8 people during active hours, so it will be more obvious that this is intentional. The general activity could then be gauged by the queue size.
However, this is still a very crude fix as the reason for this is still not obvious and it will even more regularly than now lead to people not getting matched repeatedly while seeing other people getting matched.
Any ideas how to improve this?

For each queue, you could list the number of matches played (from that queue) in the last hour (preferably only counting matches that last >5 min or smth).

Also, in addition to displaying the total number of users in queue, you could also display the number of users in queue that the player is within a compatible rating range with, ie:
15 in queue (10 compatible)
or
15 in queue (10 near your rating)
or
15 in queue (10 you can match with)

I will reply to other things mentioned in the thread later.

I like the idea of displaying the division brackets of other players, but it might be technically complicated to implement, because the league service and the rest of the server is very separated. They don't even use the same database.

We can't accurately display how many people are compatible to match due to how the matchmaker works. The rating difference is not the only metric, wait time and how balanced the resulting game will be are also factors. And even if you have sufficient people to match, the matchmaker might choose a different game that doesn't have you in it.

Restricting the match range to +- one brackets is not feasible I think. That is 340 rating. There is already a noticable uptick in wait times to restrict games to about 700 rating difference as you can see in the graphs.