Premade Teams in the upcoming TMM 4 v 4 Queue

Hi all!

No premades (join as party) in future TMM 4 v 4 Queue, please.

Why?!

Because it is unbalanced.

Premade players fighting against random players is NO fair.

Thoughts?

The Honorable Recall

I like playing with my friends.

Wont it work itself out via ratings? If premade teams get an advantage theyll gain rank, and be up against individually better random players on average which will balance things out

why would you even play that then? XD
4v4 queue is literally made for you to play as a stack and you know why?
->play tmm alone to find out kappa

queuing with a newbie to show him the beauty of tmm and meeting tagada be like:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLcRpdZ0Xb0&ab_channel=Tomoko

I don't understand this stupid approach to multiplayer games, can't you see that pinning premade teams against random players is making the game experience unfair?

Need an example? Team Tagada Nexus- Vs. Team Player 1 Player 2. Even if those random Player 1 and 2 have 2 k+ rating, who will win and why?

Playing in a premade team and playing with random players in a team demands a different approach and some differing skills.

Hence, it should be rated accordingly, separately: TEAM RATING and PERSONAL RATING.

And that leads to the notion that there should be no FULL SHARE, NO FULL SHARE lameness, but instead two different queues: 4v4 TEAM Queue, where premades fight over who is the better team, and 4v4 RANDOM TEAM Queue, where two teams of random players fight each other to show who of them are wielding that special situational awareness skill.

If you decide to allow premade teams playing against random player teams, in time it will transform TMM 4v4 into a race between snob premade teams who care nothing only about their personal (not team) rating. And imagine, you not having a team being constantly matched against such a teams. I doubt, getting beaten just because you got matched against a stacked team is fun.

But wait, what is a stacked team?

A proper stacked team is: big experience playing together, effective resource distribution, voice communication, lots of coordinated build orders for different maps incorporating all the team members.

So, who will win? That stacked team or that random team?

Another example (this one's real good): you guessed it! The Dual Gap (!) round between proper 6 player stacked team Vs. 6 random player team, who will win?

And then again, I though TMM 4v4 is being created to attract new players, I doubt playing against stacked teams from the start will bring much fun to the new player, it will, probably, do the opposite: drive them away to the "Noobs welcome (no gray)" lobbies, that should definitely make them continue playing FAF.

Now, what you want? Fair and fun experience for everyone or the chase for rating by some individuals at the expense of others fun, just because they think that more rating = better person. It is up to you .

The Honorable Recall

Nexus premade with Tagada, enemy team is random of Yudi, Farm, Turbo, or idk EcoNoob

Tagada and Nexus aren’t guaranteed a win.

Also, it is obvious that premades introduce inaccuracy to the system. But it’s incredibly not fun to not be able to play with your friends, this is why plenty of games allow for premade in competitive matchmaking. FAF does not have the playerbase to put premade against premade so you can’t do that, but lots of people would also not play any matchmaker if they couldn’t play with their friends.

Also, parties allow you to control for the type of game you want. For example, if Nexus and Tagada only want high quality top level 2v2s, they queue together and have no risk of the more likely situation of being matched with an 800 against one another which neither wants to play. Parties allow both of them to artificially select against this and allows random 2000s or another premade team of 2000s to match against them.

And yes, this extends to new players. Some guy wants to introduce FAF to his friend? Queue up as a party for matchmakers. Some trainer wants to help somebody? Queue up for a matchmaker? Some new player made a friend in matchmaker? Queue up and play some more with your friend.

Your examples are purely focused on the short term of dudes gaining rating for being “better as a team” without looking at the fact this means

  1. they are actually playing the matchmaker
  2. they gain rating and therefore will play better players anyway, likely making them better players in the long term

Ya obviously you need to be able to play with your friends or else the video game is less fun, and video games are supposed to be fun

if you don't want premades in faf,go play opti,but the 4v4 is going to die in the first 1 week cause it's not fun

queuing with a newbie to show him the beauty of tmm and meeting tagada be like:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLcRpdZ0Xb0&ab_channel=Tomoko

@ftxcommando said in Premade Teams in the upcoming TMM 4 v 4 Queue:

Nexus premade with Tagada, enemy team is random of Yudi, Farm, Turbo, or idk EcoNoob

Tagada and Nexus aren’t guaranteed a win.

Also, it is obvious that premades introduce inaccuracy to the system. But it’s incredibly not fun to not be able to play with your friends, this is why plenty of games allow for premade in competitive matchmaking. FAF does not have the playerbase to put premade against premade so you can’t do that, but lots of people would also not play any matchmaker if they couldn’t play with their friends.

Also, parties allow you to control for the type of game you want. For example, if Nexus and Tagada only want high quality top level 2v2s, they queue together and have no risk of the more likely situation of being matched with an 800 against one another which neither wants to play. Parties allow both of them to artificially select against this and allows random 2000s or another premade team of 2000s to match against them.

And yes, this extends to new players. Some guy wants to introduce FAF to his friend? Queue up as a party for matchmakers. Some trainer wants to help somebody? Queue up for a matchmaker? Some new player made a friend in matchmaker? Queue up and play some more with your friend.

Your examples are purely focused on the short term of dudes gaining rating for being “better as a team” without looking at the fact this means

  1. they are actually playing the matchmaker
  2. they gain rating and therefore will play better players anyway, likely making them better players in the long term

I like your answer, you ain't fooling around.

I have some thoughts.

"dudes gaining rating for being “better as a team” " against not a team (!) - key point in the problem. Rating for what? For beating random players?

Sure, you mentioned the high level matchmaking, I understand, 2 k+ you can't go wrong, but I am more concerned about the average players. Some of those "better as a team" dudes won't come even close to the high level matchmaking, but they still gonna get matched at that average level against common players, rating aside, they gonna win in an unfair game, loosing in a unfair challenge is NOT FUN.

There is a lot of players in FAF (in games in general, especially in RTS) who are obsessed with the rating, they will exploit this "Friends want to play together" approach and just "farm" on those unsuspecting casual players. We all know what coordinated teamwork can accomplish in Supreme Commander. And again, loosing because you got matched against a clan is not fair. Someone be like: well, life's not fair. I know, but in this case you can make it fair.

My general idea is separate 4v4 Pemade Team and 4v4 Random Team queues and corresponding ratings: 4v4 team rating (not to be confused with clan rating, which is non existent) and 4v4 solo rating. <--- Edited this paragraph.

/ / / / /

FAF is about competition after all, people do care about their rating, to variable extent, but still, they do care, so there is no place for inaccuracies regarding one's rating. People, who reached their rating fairly should be far above those, who were "farming" rating on some random players.

Friends in a team and a proper team (with tag or not) are different things all together.

I don't have anything against people wanting to play with their friends (they should play against other friends (lol)), what I do have against is towards those, who will abuse the mixed queue just to gain personal rating, and going on spreading toxicity in FAF, just as it occasionally happens in common lobbies (premades hosting a game, or joining one and be like: 1, 2, 3, 4 same team).

Loosing is okay, as long as the challenge was fair.

The Honorable Recall

It's not like it will add that much to their rating playing with their friends. I have won basically 1v2 vs a premade of ~1k rated players when I got a new player as my teammate and I am a far cry from a 2k player. If they happen to do really well as a team, then their rating will go up and it will eventually be fair. That's how rating works. Splitting matchmaker like this is not something FAF has the luxury of doing, we simply don't have the player base to maintain two separate 4v4 TMM queues like you're suggesting.

@fiercelv I agree that the team should play against the team, and random only against random

i doubt being premade gives that much of an advantage; e.g. if you have a team of nexus and tagada, they already have allmost 5k rating combined (going from current global) if their opponents are just 4 random 1500's that leaves their team 1k rating for 2 players.
I hardly immagine it will be trivial wins for them if their 500s still have full T2 mex and T2 land on a 20x20 navy map, while everyone else is full T3 eco.
I also dont believe in premades introducing huge benefits from communacating, at least as long as there is no actually competetive teamgame scene. at least I cant remember a single case of an op premade team cruhing 2v2 due to their epic teamplay, only thing that 2 premades matched vs me and a 0 rated/500 rated random guy, due to how matchmaking worked.
what is wy more important would be how matchmaking is implemented to reduce the probability of huge rating gaps and other possible issues which just cause frustration.
This discussion only makes senese if actual 3/4 man teams for in tmm and those actually tryhard it, which I very much doubt that it is gonna happen.

Forumpros doing balance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wTcguJZh3A .
When a canis player remembers to build more than 3 units https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hjp8xJHuyA .

Let me tell you a little story.

It goes like this: I joined a Dual Gap lobby (gotta love this map, and I am serious too), the game started, all is good and fine until...
Enemy has launched a rushed nuke at our eco, second later game gets paused by the enemy to emphasize the time at which the nuke was launched, game unpaused, eco's base obliterated. Our team super behind, +need to build those SMD's on bot. Next fast nuke fired, game again(!) gets paused for a moment, nuke hits our navy and destroys it. The enemy proceeds with his fleet with no opposition through the water to our side. They reclaimed the nuke and started a Mavor. I think at this point there is no need to continue the story.

In the end it turned out that the enemy team had three premade players (one of them the host) stationed at the bot (eco, bot air, navy). The host, who was pausing and unpausing the game, had "king" in his nickname, which explains a lot. King in a premade team pwns random noobs - REAL NICE.

So, do you really want to potentially expose unsuspecting average players to this kind of gameplay experience?

And this will happen! Why? Because rating is involved!

Let them premade friends battle against those king team players, but keep the average Joes away from such an experience.

Some one might think: well, you got unlucky, happens... Happens? Go to #aeolus and write "lord" or "king" in the user search, how often will it happen? Regardless, decent players must be kept away from someone's toxic pursuit of rating and the false feeling of achievement.

THIS

The Honorable Recall

Your issue sounds 90% like a dual gap issue and id assume less like to happen on proper maps (also 4v4 not 6v6) where you cannot just afkmex the entire game to then randomly dump 3 slots eco into a nuke.
Especially a decent map variety should prevent sth like this, since not every map will meet the conditions for sth like a nukerush with 2-3 slots economies, automatically reducing the efficiency of this kind of farming since it wouldnt work in X% (maybe 75%?) of the cases to begin with. On top of that, even if these guy get the map they like, they still dont have a guarantee that the right player is on the right slot, immagine the nukerusher is frontslot and has to spam units, ecoslot a random guy, 2nd safe slot the worst player of the 3 guys, cant easily pull of the nukerush that case either.
so y I only will believe it happening in tmm untill I see it - and its obvious the issue cannot be fixed decently easily with an adjusted matchmaking algorithm or an adjusted mappool.

Also why is this in balance discussion? It belongs in general discussion.

Forumpros doing balance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wTcguJZh3A .
When a canis player remembers to build more than 3 units https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hjp8xJHuyA .

LOL

Coordinated team work of a clan will beat the coordinated team work of random players, regardless of the map.

How can't you understand it?

It goes something like this: the required minimum of resources is allocated towards stand-of tactics until a game changer is built hastily by all of the premade team players (even early Monkeylord can make all the difference).

Different ways of working on something together: providing resources, providing build power, providing air cover, providing shields, add your example here.

Random players just don't have that level of interplay and coordination between them, that is what makes it UNBALANCED.

The Honorable Recall

The issue gets resolved via ratings. You’re assuming a premade team are fighting random players of equal skill, but if they were of equal skill the premade team would win more and be higher rank, and so end up fighting random people of greater skill on average.

@maudlin27 said in Premade Teams in the upcoming TMM 4 v 4 Queue:

The issue gets resolved via ratings. You’re assuming a premade team are fighting random players of equal skill, but if they were of equal skill the premade team would win more and be higher rank, and so end up fighting random people of greater skill on average.

Ratin, rating, rating...

Basically, you are writing: from time to time you will play an unwinnable game.
Why I must play an unwinnable game?

Random players can't hide behind their friends.

The Honorable Recall

Because the entire point of skill-based matchmaking is to ensure that everyone has a 50% win rate. If you win rating goes up and you get harder opponents, if you lose rating goes down and you get easier opponents, until you are at a 50% win rate.

you still failed to prove it will actually exist. so to prove that dual gap gameplay one to one carries over to 4v4 teamgames. I rarely see the thing you describe in generic 4v4-7v7s and not at all in 2v2 which would be the best comparison, since its an actual matchmaker environment (compared to custom games with manual balance). as long as you cant provide anything but 2gap (the environment where rating is fucked the hardest except maybe astro) your points are invalid

Forumpros doing balance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wTcguJZh3A .
When a canis player remembers to build more than 3 units https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hjp8xJHuyA .

@thomashiatt said in Premade Teams in the upcoming TMM 4 v 4 Queue:

Because the entire point of skill-based matchmaking is to ensure that everyone has a 50% win rate. If you win rating goes up and you get harder opponents, if you lose rating goes down and you get easier opponents, until you are at a 50% win rate.

I get the concept, but it does not explain playing an unwinnable stacked game.

And again: random players can't hide behind their friends.

The Honorable Recall