Allow us to pick rating brackets for TMM

At risk of rocking the boat too much, I think the matchmaking algorithm is more or less fine. In my experience reading discord and aeolus, there are a pretty similar number of people complaining about the balance of matches as there are complaining about the matchmaking times.

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

At risk of rocking the boat too much, I think the matchmaking algorithm is more or less fine. In my experience reading discord and aeolus, there are a pretty similar number of people complaining about the balance of matches as there are complaining about the matchmaking times.

Different people. 1500s are complaining about balance and 2000s complaining about matchmaking times (or more realistically just sucking it up and hosting custom, completely ignoring the existence of tmm).

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

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.

All those games were balanced. Quite well balanced. Whoever made the algorithm, did a great job balancing games. Just look at the small rating difference between affronting teams.

The discussion is about one(two) person who do not like playing with lower rated players. Not about bad balance. While there is probably many players who like playing with lower rated players, and who could leave the matchmaker when things get changed. But it seems that we do not have exact statistic about that at this moment. And it is in the point where "who is more toxic and screams stronger gets heard".

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

Then what the fuck is the point of TMM?

The point of TMM, is that people who do not have friendlist in FAF can just join games, and play with random people(without getting thrown out, insulted etc.).

switch option

Let me put it this way: This feature would be complicated to implement and I personally don't think it would be too useful, so I won't work on this. Maybe you can find somebody else that is willing to do it, but I don't think this will be implemented in the foreseeable future.

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

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.

Uhh, so what is the absurd risk here? Not getting matched? That doesn't sound too severe. Am I missing something?

match time

I thought about this some more and I don't think we need to be as fast as possible. We just need to be faster or about as fast as custom lobbies filling up. Does anyone know how long e.g. astro or an all welcome map gen game takes to fill? I don't play custom games.

Everybody knows this community is not huge, so people should be able to understand that one minute match times are not realistic. A system that throughs you in games fast is appealing at first, but if it turns out that these games are too unbalanced (and balanced in this context also means that the rating ranges of the players are reasonably close) to be enjoyable then people will stop queueing after some games. I think it is much better for long term player retention in the matchmaker if you can get nice games with wait times that are in the range of reasonably fast filling custom lobbies.

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

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

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.

Uhh, so what is the absurd risk here? Not getting matched? That doesn't sound too severe. Am I missing something?

By absurd risk I mean that I personally would rather have no game over getting dumped into a game where I am 1800 with an 1800 enemy and then everyone else in the game is 1000-1200. Some people are fine with it, others aren’t. But that possibility is what stops me from queueing alone. I want a game where I feel like I can actually coordinate with my allies to accomplish something.

This post is deleted!

I played around a bit more and gave people at the edge of the distribution an additional bonus. With this we can improve the situation at the very high level spectrum, by getting more high level games and we can drastically improve the situation in the mid-range where we have the playerbase to be more strict with matching.
I looked up the actual queue activity and noticed that I estimated it way too low in my previous runs. So I include the graphs for the current situation again.

Let me say that yes, the wait times still increase a bit, but if you look at the absolute numbers in the bottom left, you notice that the situation is not too bad. At the moment almost half the people get matched instantly. By increasing the average wait time by less than even one queue pop, we can drastically improve the game quality.
Waiting three minutes more to get an actual high quality game seems like a good tradeoff to me.

Current:
current settings 0-10.png

New:
new config settings.png

The new system might be worthwhile for 1k+ players, but I suggest you do something closer to the current system's wait times for new players (who are generally <1k).

pfp credit to gieb

Please elaborate why you think that. And don't just look at the wait time charts. The current matchmaker is able to create games with 1800 rating difference. What do you think about that?

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

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

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

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.

Uhh, so what is the absurd risk here? Not getting matched? That doesn't sound too severe. Am I missing something?

By absurd risk I mean that I personally would rather have no game over getting dumped into a game where I am 1800 with an 1800 enemy and then everyone else in the game is 1000-1200. Some people are fine with it, others aren’t. But that possibility is what stops me from queueing alone. I want a game where I feel like I can actually coordinate with my allies to accomplish something.

^this

Or at least knowing you competent teammates you don't need to worry about.

Please, if you have something that can fix current situation, why we not test it on real scenario? Lets test each config every 2-3 days. Server must be restarted to use new config values?

Sheikah told me that changing the config values is not as easy as I hoped, so testing of a lot of configs is probably not feasible. We need a server release first to add the priorization of the people at the edge of the bell curve anyway.

Just my quick little take: I'm 2500 in 4v4 tmm right now. In the last few days i've been searching together with ftx who's 1800 and we found 0 games in 3 days of searching for a total of around 4/5 hours. Right now i've been searching for 30+ min and i'm not getting any games, while people around my rating but a little lower do find games:

faf-client_07yiGJ90is.png

With how it currently does the matching tmm is basically dead to me. I want to play it, but i literally cannot match because it favors adding a 1400 to a lobby like this (probably because he was searching for longer?) which means i have to wait until they finished this game until i can potentially match again.

This combined with the fact that you cannot play anything else while searching since it will crash the game on launch makes it almost impossible.

Don't want to complain to much, but i'm pretty sadboy about this

Edit: 1 hour in progressStreamlabs_OBS_UzvD8B4cRw.png

Searching with 1800 rated congreve which means average rating is 2150. Both got skipped for 2 1600's instead.

faf-client_zuEPYd6E2k.png

1.5 hours in the journey. 2 2.2k's got matched with 1.1k and 1.4k instead of me and congreve who average 2.1k

(Short note just for record: Gorthaur and I invited Thunder (the 1100) to the party in the last one. Not sure if it made a difference if we didn't invite him - no idea how the system handles that 4head)

Required rating for participation in balance talks when?

I guess another problem is that people queue together, so the algorithm is limited in how it can make teams. For example a 3 people queuing team can only have a solo queuer in their team; that severly limits the possibilities. If everyone queued solo it would be a lot easier to match people.

@femtozetta force minimum and maximum rating that allowed to be invited based on party owner rating. -200 and +200

Just wanted to say that @BlackYps proposed changes look great (even though as a vaguely average player it mostly means slightly longer wait times).

Pull request is up: https://github.com/FAForever/server/pull/926

If anyone knows python and could do a review, that would certainly accelerate things, as we are currenty a bit starved for manpower on the server project.