TMM matching

The issue lies with how do you define a bad connection? Do you ban all Russians because they sometimes have poor connections to Australians (or vice versa)? Similarly how do you determine a bad cpu?

TMM is supposed to be the place where you can't be kicked for your flag, you can't be kicked for CPU and you can't be kicked for some arbitrary host made decision.

Using the foe system doesn't work because then people are capable of abusing the system by foeing opponents they don't want to fight because they know they'll lose.

@angelofd347h ok, that makes sense

I'm sorry, but I find it utterly despicable and out of touch that some people consider a 20x20 map to be fully playable in 4v4 scenario with someone running Athlon from 2009...

But as they say, road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Like ffs, you people even made a whole new benchmark that could be used for proper gauging of what is playable and yet you still ask inane questions like "what is bad cpu"?

@angelofd347h said in TMM matching:

The issue lies with how do you define a bad connection? Do you ban all Russians because they sometimes have poor connections to Australians (or vice versa)? Similarly how do you determine a bad cpu?

TMM is supposed to be the place where you can't be kicked for your flag, you can't be kicked for CPU and you can't be kicked for some arbitrary host made decision.

Using the foe system doesn't work because then people are capable of abusing the system by foeing opponents they don't want to fight because they know they'll lose.

I misunderstood the intention behind TMM I guess. I thought it was so that people could find a match somewhat fast and consistent and have multiple games in a relatively quick timeframe so as to make FAF more accessible.

I agree I have no idea how the stuff works under the hood of all this but I do think that TMM needs to be the controlled aspect of FAF whereas custom can be the wide open free for all and nobody should feel bad about it.

Minimum specifications are a very real thing in video games and implementing them in certain cases as a hard rule shouldnt be viewed as negative selfish gatekeeping. With CPU scores it is more cut and dry and feels like a no brainer to me. Anyone in a custom lobby who sees someone with a 300+cpu score know that dude is going to be a problem.

With networking/ping stuff it is way more of a grey area I get that. I live on the west coast of Canada, my condo sits directly above the main fiber line that runs down the western seaboard, I have a 1,5g symmetrical fiber connection with cat8 networking cable as my only copper run from the fiber router (or whatever its called) to my PC but even I can be the one guy who needs to be kicked from a lobby if I am matched with some aussies and russians in certain cases. Usually I have no issues but sometimes I do. I shouldn't be banned from TMM for this because networking can change day to day.

I often play with only aussies because I am night shift here in Canada so my schedule lines up with the other side of the world usually. I will join the same custom lobbies day in and day out with the same core group of players but on a random day for some reason it lags and those are the times I should be filtered out of tmm and matched with players I ping nicely with.

Easy to say I know but I guess my main point is that TMM shouldn't be the free for all it currently is and should be gate kept so its the bets experience possible.

Thanks for all your input everyone, I have reached the limit of what I am able to offer such a topic but glad it can at least be discussed openly, this is how problems are solved.

@Rezy-Noob

You cite potential technical hurdles. If the technical hurdles can't be solved, then maybe we should leave the system as-is, but if they can be solved, maybe we should change it.

Selfish is defined as showing or arising from an excessive concern with oneself and a lack of concern for others.

If one person makes the experience a lot worse for several other people for a slight personal benefit, does that not meet the definition of selfishness?

Is it not more selfish for that one person to significantly worsen the TMM experience for many others than for those many others to want that person to be limited to select TMM queues and custom games?

@Jip

I understand that you personally have not been experiencing much lag in TMM games, but you presumably get matched with higher rated players in general, who seem less likely to play games where they lag a lot on average. I believe this problem is more pronounced at lower ratings, as I have noticed disproportionately more lag in lower-rated games compared to higher-rated games on average. Either way, there are players who consistently lag a lot and significantly worsen the TMM experience for others, sometimes resulting in numerous people leaving the TMM queues or dealing with bad TMM experiences due to the lag.

I'm not suggesting limitations be applied to all queues, but it seems like there should be at least some queues with some minimum requirements if the technical side of that can be handled reasonably enough.

Regarding how to handle the technical limitations, why not use the new metric that has been created for calculating players' lagginess across games? Even if people can find workarounds to spoof their scores, I imagine the vast majority of the severe laggers won't do that, and the ones who do could be moderated against. That would presumably require a lower level of moderation than if we moderated as you suggested but didn't use the new metric to filter out most of the severe laggers.

Alternatively, perhaps a system could be created that takes the extant in-game measurements for lagginess (for both connection and sim speed) and logs roughly how much each player contributes to lag in each game, and then have that data automatically reported back to the server at the end of each game.

Altenratively or additionally, perhaps stuff related to ICE could be utilized in some way to provide some additional data on which combinations of players are too likely to lag too much and or who tends to lag a lot from a connectivity perspective.

Also, as a side note, I think a lot of the severe laggers are not intentionally trying to ruin the games with their lag, but just trying to play. So, the rule you quoted doesn't seem like it would apply to most of them anyway... perhaps the rules could be changed to address this issue though...

Wonder if you can use CPU model instead of CPU score
and have something like, "if CPU performance lower than 1000 display a warning" (according to this chart for example https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html#desktop-thread)

maybe have an option for players with good CPU to not get trown in games with people with bad CPU

@Penguin_ I feel like you've skipped my argumentation. All the checks would run through the client. Due to the open source nature of the client it is trivial to bypass. Any reading from the preference file is even easier to manipulate. None of what you mentioned addresses this, except maybe for this paragraph:

Regarding how to handle the technical limitations, why not use the new metric that has been created for calculating players' lagginess across games? Even if people can find workarounds to spoof their scores, I imagine the vast majority of the severe laggers won't do that, and the ones who do could be moderated against. That would presumably require a lower level of moderation than if we moderated as you suggested but didn't use the new metric to filter out most of the severe laggers.

Which is based on assumptions and not on facts. People spoof their names, their ratings and there are certainly people that spoof their CPU rating.

Also, as a side note, I think a lot of the severe laggers are not intentionally trying to ruin the games with their lag, but just trying to play. So, the rule you quoted doesn't seem like it would apply to most of them anyway... perhaps the rules could be changed to address this issue though...

It may not be their intention but it can be the result of their actions. Usually that is what matters in the end, but I can't talk for the moderators.

I'm not against the idea of enforcing minimal requirements. It is just that it would be difficult to actually enforce as the client itself or the data it reads from can be manipulated. It is important that you and other people that read this understand that. Let alone when we start talking about false negatives, where we accidentally keep people out that would be able to play the game just fine.

What about a warning message based on someone's CPU score, e.g. if they try joining 3v3 or 4v4 matchmaker and are below a certain threshold (which is lower for 4v4) then they get a popup warning them they are likely to slow down the game and should consider playing on smaller maps with fewer players? There's nothing to bypass or spoof as they can still join the queue, but at least they are less likely to.

@jip

I do think it's a reasonable assumption that most of the severe laggers would not figure out and go through the technical hassles and rule breaking that it would take to spoof their data for this.

Also, I think you might've missed or misunderstood part of what I meant when I said:

Alternatively, perhaps a system could be created that takes the extant in-game measurements for lagginess (for both connection and sim speed) and logs roughly how much each player contributes to lag in each game, and then have that data automatically reported back to the server at the end of each game.

Altenratively or additionally, perhaps stuff related to ICE could be utilized in some way to provide some additional data on which combinations of players are too likely to lag too much and or who tends to lag a lot from a connectivity perspective.

If the relevant data would be autoamatically reported to the server by everyone in a match (or at least by multiple people) comparably to how win/loss is reported, then that should offer some resilience against individual tampering. I'm not saying it would be perfect, but hey, if that sort of system is good enough that we already use it for reporting wins and losses, it seems like it should be good enough for this as well.

I would say the biggest hurdles would be the technical issues. If it were easy to detect laggers and prevent them from playing matchmaker I think we’d be happy to add that. There are some GPGNet messages called Bottleneck and BottleneckCleared that the server can see. I don’t know what they do but judging by their names they sound like they could possibly be used to detect at least when a game is lagging, and maybe that could be correlated to a particular player? I don’t really have the time to investigate that sort of thing at the moment though.