1v1 and 2v2 matchmaker pools for March

@Valki Open Palms is not a team map, far from it, as it is one of the most classic 1v1 maps that exists on faf. Biass is absolutely correct in that a map having additional spawns doesn't mean the map isn't made for 1v1 or 2v2. In any case though, could you elaborate on what you think the issues on Badlands are? If your opponents are just straight up leaving the game when they see the map (and you say you'd like to leave as well), that is definitely a problem that should be addressed.

@harzer99 I agree with you that putting appropriate maps for the different skill brackets are very important. I'm trying to ensure that lower rated brackets have a decent pool of "standard" maps that aren't too difficult to play. For the last two map pools, I've tried to put "easy" 20x20s for the 300-800 map pools (Mentor for the month of Jan and Strife of Titan for the map of Feb - both of which are relatively straightforward 15x15 land maps), and I thought Turtle Rocks would fall into that category to play, at least when compared with a lot of the other options for 1v1s on 20x20s.

I was gonna post a separate feedback thread for 1v1 ladder pools, but it seems this thread is turning into that. If anyone has any feedback or thoughts on the 1v1 ladder pool feel free to post them!

@archsimkat said in 1v1 and 2v2 matchmaker pools for March:

@Valki In any case though, could you elaborate on what you think the issues on Badlands are? If your opponents are just straight up leaving the game when they see the map (and you say you'd like to leave as well), that is definitely a problem that should be addressed.

Next time someone leaves I will PM and relay the information here.

For me it is the daunting and vulnerable massive expansion phase, the problems with such a massive expansion phase are:

1. Claiming and defending all start position mexes quickly is a terrible chore.
2. Short rush distance and open nature makes defending these plentiful mexes difficult.
3. At my level (650), it is very difficult to scale up your game to use so much (early) eco. So you will lose to a player who through luck or skill can use so much eco even if you have 50% more. - at least it feels that way

I had multiple games with players leaving 20x20 maps immediately or asking for an instant draw and then leave (ladder rating < 800).

Well people do that at all ratings, with all sort of maps. i've seen people hating on 5x5 cause it's "a stupid micro war" or "map for BO whoring"'. Complaining about the map pool is our community sport, everybody has something to say about it, even tho a lot of efforts have been made to gather and analyze the preferences of everybody to accomodate all tastes ...

Maybe gather some data ? Get ladder 1v1 replays and see which maps have >3 min abandons per rating bracket ?
I personally would leave 20x20 cause it's usually a chore to play and can't be won quickly. 10x10 maps is something like ~5 minutes of walking for acu from your spawn to enemy's, 20x20 map - 20-25 minutes, so not even worth bothering.
By the time you get to the opponent he pretty much has prepared a counter/firebase whatever, so it's a huge waste of time playing those.

@HLPstpBROimSTUCK said in 1v1 and 2v2 matchmaker pools for March:

Maybe gather some data ? Get ladder 1v1 replays and see which maps have >3 min abandons per rating bracket ?
I personally would leave 20x20 cause it's usually a chore to play and can't be won quickly. 10x10 maps is something like ~5 minutes of walking for acu from your spawn to enemy's, 20x20 map - 20-25 minutes, so not even worth bothering.
By the time you get to the opponent he pretty much has prepared a counter/firebase whatever, so it's a huge waste of time playing those.

This is kind of why I would like to see a 20 km purpose built 1v1 map. It probably needs a really low eco density especially at start position. The expansion will need to be placed quite deliberately to make sure that when you can mount a good offensive it is not completely fortified yet. Maybe the richest expansions also need zero buildable area so it must be defended by units...

Sorry, dreaming, I have been wanting to 1v1 and have fun on 20 km forever - never happened yet.

I've also had the experience of opponents asking for draw on maps they don't like or just prefer not to play, but if this is consistently happening for specific maps at a ladder rating that is indicative of a problem with that map for the rating bracket.

I'll endeavour to get the stats on the % of games per map that end within 3 minutes, sorted by rating bracket, to better help make map pools specifically for the lower rated ladder brackets.

Have you even been looking ?

• mentor
• X6
• norfair
• emerald crater
  ... all those are maps that satisfy your criterias, and were in previous pools.

It's not a new information that people don't like certain maps, usually lower rated guys don't like bigger maps because they feel overwhelmed, because of that the current ladder pool system takes those trends (there was a lot of polling data that was used, you can look that up on the old forum if you want) and makes sure that the most amount of people are satisfied while maintaining consistency between rating groups. What it means in practice is that you get more, bigger and more complex maps the higher your rating (and according rating group) is.
Just because the map has x amount of slots it doesn't mean it's meant for X amount of people, it just means that up to X amount of people can in theory play. A lot of maps are made with 1vs1 in mind but can be also played with more people. Eg. Forbidden Pass, The Ditch, Crossfire Canal, Regor Highlands etc.
I understand that you may not like certain maps or group of maps but the point of playing ladder is competing with players on a variety of maps. If you wouldn't get any 20x20 maps you will never learn how to play them. When I was lower rated I used to love 5x5's and hate 20x20's but with time I learned how to play the bigger maps and I started appreciating their complexity and different strategies that were available to me.

@Tagada Not sure if that was directed to me, but it would be good to know the communities problems. I like all sizes from 5x5 to 20x20 (I think), however, I do not like high eco maps. With bigger maps generally featuring more starting positions which often means close and bountiful expansions, I statistically dislike big maps, but not because of their size.

https://forums.faforever.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=19432

This is in the very first post of the matchmaker feedback pinned thread.

@archsimkat said in 1v1 and 2v2 matchmaker pools for March:

I thought Turtle Rocks would fall into that category to play, at least when compared with a lot of the other options for 1v1s on 20x20s

Just a quick side not that this definitely is a 10km and plays like a 10km. By that I mean transports feel useful but optional, even moreso than other 10km maps like EotS, Vya, Last Oasis, Vulcan's Reach, Twin Rivers. On 20km maps transports are never really optional imo. Also while there should probably be multiple fronts on Turtle Rocks, they're not far from eachother so one can reinforce another one very quickly. On 20km land maps this isn't the case, it's probably their other defining feature. Not that I dislike Turtle Rocks, it's just not a substitute for a 20km if that's what you wanted it for.

Anyway, like I said to you elsewhere I think this is a really good pool overall, that's probably in part because so many of them are well established 1v1 maps, especially in the lower brackets. I think the balance is maybe a little skewed towards high reclaim and mex counts, particularly in the 5km pool, but I think that's mostly a product of the maps that get made.

Phaaze is so blue it hurts my eyes makes me think im colour blind please remove from the pool.

press 1 if you agree

The reason Turtle Rocks is in the 20x20 segment is because the breakdown in the google sheet was made back when the pool was 4/10/6. I adjusted it to 4/11/5 after some 1800+ players told me it was too many 20x20s, so they got an extra 10x10 at their rating bracket instead.

It’s not intended to play as a 20x20.

Though looking at the sheet, it means that the 300-800 rating bracket doesn’t get a 20x20. Not really how it should work and I’m not sure if he intended for it to be like that, but I don’t really mind it regardless.

@BIG-BENNIS-MAGIC 2? - it is quite blue, but a really refreshing map in terms of layout and gameplay

I do not like maps in which the entire area is red - the eyes get very tired very much

Thanks to the ever amazing @arma473, I have been able to make a spreadsheet with the frequency that ladder matches on particular maps are aborted. I consider a game aborted if it ends within 90 seconds (initially I was doing 3 minutes, but it seems there are some openers such as first bomber, intie rush killing transports, etc. that will potentially end the game within 3 minutes). The data are composed of ladder matches going back to March 1st 2020 and are broken down by ladder rating.

@Valki while I’m not saying you’re wrong, I will say that your anecdotal experience about people quitting frequently on Badlands simply does not agree with the empirical data. 8 - Badlands_v4 has a 1.92% abort rate at <300 and a 2.12% abort rate at 300-800. For reference, the median abort rate for the <300 bracket is ambush the enemy with a 2.91% abort rate and is Vulcan's Reach with 4.44% for at 300-800. In fact, out of the 88 maps that have been played by ladder players at 300-800, only 8 maps have a lower abort rate than Badlands.

@Brutus5000 it seems your experience does match the data. For the 300-800 bracket, outside of Moonlight Mesas with a 20.95% abort rate, the next 4 aborted maps are all 20x20 maps (Seton's Clutch: 10.11%, Roanoke Abyss: 10.24%, Seraphim Glaciers: 11.13%, Crossfire Canal - FAF version: 15.00%). These are very high abort rates and should be taken into account.

Other interesting stats:

• 62/105 maps in the 1800+ bracket have a 0.00% abort rate.
• The highest abort rate maps are in the 1800+ bracket with Adaptive Kusoge at 22.72% and Broken_Vows at 22.22% (small sample size).
• The average* abort rate in the <300 bracket is 3.40%.
• The average* abort rate in the 300-800 bracket is 5.04%.
• The average* abort rate in the 800-1300 bracket is 4.19%.
• The average* abort rate in the 1300-1800 bracket is 3.03%.
• The average* abort rate in the 1800+ bracket is 2.47%.

*average calculated by weighting every map equally.

Overall, the higher the rating, the lower the abort rate. Perhaps the better you get, the less picky you are with maps because you are more comfortable playing a variety of maps (with a few notable exceptions). Or, perhaps the willingness to play on a greater variety of maps makes you a better player. Not sure which direction the causation arrow points. Also not really sure why 300-800 is the pickiest bracket by a decent margin.

Going forward for future ladder pools, I will also take abort data into consideration as an additional criterion when making the map pools.

@MarcSpector if you’d like to go through the trouble of going through the entire ladder map pool and marking each map by color I could take color of map into consideration.

300-800 is probably the pickiest bracket because of a single prolific player. The Moonlight Mesas abort rate is largely because he did that 104 times in a row. Which was almost 8% of all ladder matches on that map for an entire month of FAF.

In my bracket (300-800) you often have the problem that the games tend to take very long even on smaller maps.
Like both players turtle at least a little bit and its hard to get a killing blow (unsure if you have actually enough units, lack of ideas, lack of skill). So many games I played I knew I had already won after 15 minutes still took 40-45 minutes.
I could assume the time here massively scales up with the map size. Many naval maps 20x20 take over an hour and even don't make much kind of "amazing" gameplay.

@archsimkat said in 1v1 and 2v2 matchmaker pools for March:

@Valki while I’m not saying you’re wrong, I will say that your anecdotal experience about people quitting frequently on Badlands simply does not agree with the empirical data. 8 - Badlands_v4 has a 1.92% abort rate at <300 and a 2.12% abort rate at 300-800. For reference, the median abort rate for the <300 bracket is ambush the enemy with a 2.91% abort rate and is Vulcan's Reach with 4.44% for at 300-800. In fact, out of the 88 maps that have been played by ladder players at 300-800, only 8 maps have a lower abort rate than Badlands.

I have no trouble believing I just had bad luck - I play too little to award any statistical significance to my experiences.

However, sometimes I try to look up the replay to take note of who left on me, but often I do not find a replay. Do your abort rate statistics register games that are too short to generate a replay?

Really happy you are taking a look at this though, I have little time to play and spending 2-3 matchmaking rounds to get an "abort" can waste my play opportunity of that moment.