What I think about the timer in the Ladder/TMM?
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I actually like the 3-minute interval between games, it's a good moment to take a break, fill up my water bottle, watch the replay, or discuss SupCom Lore.
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Well I think it would be much nicer if it gave you the feedback before the 3 minutes expires.
If you are one of the players that will play when the timer is up, it could say "Matching soon" or "GATING IN". I understand that sometimes it would change its mind, like it would be "matching soon" for 2 mins then just before the expiration it would change its mind. I think thats acceptable and better than the current system.Speaking as somoene who has stared at the FAF client for hours waiting to be matched on ladder.
If you could have immediate feedback that you are probably going to play, I would play ladder heaps.
Also maybe a notification like "If you joined right now you would probably get a match"
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I don't get it, you get a pop up message and your client glows when you match up for a game do you not? Why can't you just go do whatever like surf the internet until you get a match? It kind of sounds like you want to be able to be a bystander in the queue and gauge whether you can get a game in the next 20 seconds by whether someone around you is searching. However, you can extrapolate that behavior to everyone and now there is a potential player caused lock with no one searching even though there are enough people that want to play a game.
Like regardless of the "gating in" stuff, if you go away from your pc, you aren't going to see it. So I don't really see how it helps anyone here in being able to be "more afk" while the game is getting ready to launch.
This would also require the server to be constantly checking for match quality. As far as I know, it only checks for these things at game initialization.
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@nine2 said in What I think about the timer in the Ladder/TMM?:
Well I think it would be much nicer if it gave you the feedback before the 3 minutes expires.
If you are one of the players that will play when the timer is up, it could say "Matching soon" or "GATING IN". I understand that sometimes it would change its mind, like it would be "matching soon" for 2 mins then just before the expiration it would change its mind. I think thats acceptable and better than the current system.Speaking as somoene who has stared at the FAF client for hours waiting to be matched on ladder.
If you could have immediate feedback that you are probably going to play, I would play ladder heaps.
Also maybe a notification like "If you joined right now you would probably get a match"
The thing is, detailed queue information creates a self propelling spiral. If people are already in the rating bracket, more will join, if nobody is in there, people will leave and not consider joining, so it wont even start to fill. For now, if you notice the timer popping multiple times without you getting matched, you can assume that there is nobody and try at a different time.
And giving early notice would require the matchmaker to run early, which would require other people to get matched earlier as well, which would mean that now they have to wait for the same amount of time until they can get into the game that you get as well.
The proper solution is to make queueing in multiple queues a popular thing in general, and 2v2 TMM should help with that once it goes into the client officially. But if certain rating brackets dont have enough players during certain times there is not really a way to fix that except to have more players.
At least with the current system you only need to expect a match every 3 minutes and not at literally any moment.
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Your timer is just a search limit, a limit for players. You use a timer to hold the players for 3 minutes, and then try to create a match if they fit. But what happens if the match is not created? It will just reset, and will go 3 minutes again.
The timer should be a guarantee that after 3 minutes, you will get a guaranteed game. It should show :
- "Be ready, in 3 minutes I will launch you into the game".
But what does your timer do?
- "Wait, I have a rest for 3 minutes. I will start working only after this time has elapsed. Whether you get the game or not depends on your rating"
- The player must click on the "Search" button and wait, without any timer.
- You should receive a notification that players have been found for the game
- The wait timer should start before creating the game
It is also not necessary to explain to me why your timer is so important. I realized that it keeps your TMM system from creating the wrong game that will be created anyway
Games where teams have a point difference of like 1000, both ladder / global rating and TMM rating, send you greetings
Maybe I'm arguing for no reason, but this is my opinion on this
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One question: can it be implemented to be able to watch replays while sitting in tmm queue or even in a lobby? With the java client this was possible by activating debug mode or something. Would be nice for the competitive individual thats wants to waste no time getting better.
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Unfortunately this is not possible currently while sitting in queue as watching replays on an older version would prevent you from having the correct version of the game when the matchmaker game starts which would cause either a crash or a desync of the game. The experimental feature of watching features while in the game lobby currently does not support launching a new game while watching a replay
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Yes, your argument is entirely incoherent and I fail to understand what it is you even want or what you want anyone to address. You're mad that the system can't will into existence the perfect opponent for you or something? Your problem is with the player pool, not the matching algorithm.
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@FtXCommando I'm infuriated by these 3 minutes, and the list of players who can't connect because they're not queal.
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I think it's very safe to say that the majority of FAF disagrees with the crux of your post which seems to be that "bad game" beats "no game." If this were true, there wouldn't have been a massive cry from both 0 rated players and 1500 rated players to make the matching algorithm not give themselves as opponents. 1500 rated players were getting 0 rated players extremely often, meaning they get games all the time, but these are terrible games. What did it do? It made 1500 rated players want to play even less.
People want a decent game. There are less people available for a decent game at higher levels. There is no need to cannibalize a fun game between two teams of 1200s so that the 1800s can waste time making 2k income in RAS SACUs against a team of 1200s.
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@Sheikah said in What I think about the timer in the Ladder/TMM?:
Unfortunately this is not possible currently while sitting in queue as watching replays on an older version would prevent you from having the correct version of the game when the matchmaker game starts which would cause either a crash or a desync of the game. The experimental feature of watching features while in the game lobby currently does not support launching a new game while watching a replay
Maybe its possible to allow watching replays that were played on the current game patch and have an error message for others. Depends on how often people want to watch games from a different patch...
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People reported from the beta that even that caused the game not to start due to file locking issues
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@Katharsas said in What I think about the timer in the Ladder/TMM?:
Maybe its possible to allow watching replays that were played on the current game patch and have an error message for others. Depends on how often people want to watch games from a different patch...
How often they would want that would depend on how long it has been since the last patch release.
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@Eternal said in What I think about the timer in the Ladder/TMM?:
@FtXCommando I'm infuriated by these 3 minutes, and the list of players who can't connect because they're not queal.
Go host a custom game and play lobby sim for 30 minutes then.
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Noone has bought it up, but it's a requirement for further down the line wherein there will be mutiple queues.
(That's why the 2v2 queue button looks so randomly big, there could be up to 5 other queues there for you to join)
We're really not trying to blue-ball you for no actual reason. It's a constraint, not a feature.
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If the player base massively increases with dozens of people in the queue, the timer could be reduced.
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TMM 4v4 Full Share is super FUN! Great job!
I was so wrong thinking that No Share for TMM 4v4 would be better, not to mention my false assumptions about premade teams abusing the queue...
Regarding the three minute wait time:
The three minute wait time kinda sticks a stick in a spinning wheel of TMM 4v4, because given specific circumstances it sometimes manages to drive people away from the queue.
Here are some examples:
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There are more than 8 players and less than 16 players in queue, after the three minute wait time eight lucky players get automatched and the rest (less than 8 ) are left to wait again, at this point, quite often, some of those who didn't get automatched leave the queue. The three minute wait time is one of the motivators for leaving in this situation. Doubts that other players will join the queue - another motivator.
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There are 8 players in queue, wait time expires and nobody gets automatched, and the three minute wait time kicks in, again (!) - often players leave at this point, not wanting to wait that long again (!), considering that there still is a big possibility of not being automatched while having enough players in the queue, again (!). Not to mention the time spent waiting for the eight players to gather in the queue to begin with.
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There are 20+ players in queue, after the three minute wait time only 8 of them are automatched, and the rest 12+ are forced to wait another three minutes for no reason. At this point the three minute wait time combined with the perplexity caused by the fact that there are still more than 8 players in the queue and they still didn't get automatched drives people away firmly.
I think these examples are the most prominent ones.
Also the long three minute wait time indirectly causes more failed automatches.
Because just sitting and waiting is boring, people start other games, and when they're automatched, the Supreme Commander process fails to start because active processes get in conflict over the available resources of the system, what leads to an failed automatch (encountered this with some games while being in the queue, totally not on purpose).Anyway, hope this information will help the developers to make the 4v4 TMM even more good!
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@fiercelv said in What I think about the timer in the Ladder/TMM?:
Also the long three minute wait time indirectly causes more failed automatches.
Because just sitting and waiting is boring, people start other games, and when they're automatched, the Supreme Commander process fails to start because active processes get in conflict over the available resources of the system, what leads to an failed automatch (encountered this with some games while being in the queue, totally not on purpose).The client shouldn't let you join games while being in a queue if this happens send me a log as it is a bug.
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I think he means other games, like OSU etc.
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@fiercelv said in What I think about the timer in the Ladder/TMM?:
The three minute wait time kinda sticks a stick in a spinning wheel of TMM 4v4, because given specific circumstances it sometimes manages to drive people away from the queue.
I can understand the frustration, but the alternative of having no timer would in fact not solve these problems. Some examples:
Two 0s are queued up as a team, over time a 2k and mulitple 1ks join, all solo. Once we reach 8 players in the queue we could theoretically get a game, but it would be terrible, because it would be the 2k + the two 0s + a 1k player against 4 1k players. So the match doesn't start and everyone is confused why it doesn't. Over time another 2k and a 1k join, then a game starts with a 2k + 3 1ks in each team. The two 0s get left behind. As you can see, we still have the same problems as described in your example 1 and 2.
It gets even more confusing as the time bonus for waiting in the queue would tick up at intervals that are unknown to the players. This can lead to edge cases where there are enough players for a match in the queue, but the game quality would barely be too bad, so no match happens. After a short while the time bonus is big enough to lift the game quality above the threshold and the match starts while the number of players in the queue didn't even change.To address example 3 we have reduced the people in queue that are needed to make the pop timer start at less than three minutes. This should reduce the queue time during busy hours and alleviate the problem a bit that tons of people pile up in the queue. It will be in the next server patch, but there is no ETA yet when it will come.
