Fuck the rating system and it's integrity. It's farmable and you need to address that before nitpicking this. Realize that before the matchmaker is any good at all it needs player count. You're not gonna achieve that without some compromise at the start.
Matchmaker Pool Feedback Thread
How about you enjoy the game in whatever curated custom lobby you desire instead of telling others to play unrated? Do you even realize how hard it is to join a game as a 0 rated player? People enter the lobby and say don't kick me before even saying hi.
This isn't some uniform issue. There are plenty of new players that get pissed off at getting a game where the rating range is huge, particularly since you can get situations where the 0 rated player gets the slot that is supposed to lose against say a 1200 and the game becomes "who can gank the enemy new player faster." I read complaints from both ends about not getting games or getting shit games from every level of FAF.
I'm not even aware what the odds of not getting a game would be, I don't really see why it's a problem at low level lobbies. It isn't that difficult to get another <500 rated player to join or just launching with 2 players less. Most of the costs here are centered at high rated players that have no option but to join an 800+ game or whatever equivalent. Or queueing with 500s in tmm as a 2k. However if I had more security in being able to get an 1800+ match in tmm which would come with not having to worry about 2ks trying to curate a match via partying with 500s, I would also be more likely to queue. So that calculus is also not that simple.
It ultimately boils down to player counts. If they were high enough these problems would be easier to address. And if you're throwing new players under the bus to "fix" the issue now, you're giving up the opportunity for a better fix further down the line.
Your comments about games where the lanes are imbalaned also makes me wonder why you suggested custom lobbies need this restriction when that's precisely where the problem can be minimized by having 2 noobs face each other in a lane with manual balance.
TMM exists for new players. But It would now not let a 1200 queue with his 0 rated friend. Unranked/Coop/AI games exist. But they don't want to play it, only ranked pvp games. So now they join games. But they get kicked all the time because of the 0 rated guy.
This specific subset of new players would be harmed. Beyond that, this change is more likely to harm the smaller population pool of high rated players that have less options for games than the new players with a larger pool of viable games. There are as many <300 rated players playing matchmakers as 300+ rated players. I don't see the lack of game options as a reasonable concern.
The specific subset of players negatively affected you mentioned is way larger than the high rated players you wish to optimize tmm for, more likely to quit when faced with such bullshit as not being allowed to play with their friends, and since the custom lobby exists where you can enact all your balance fantasies I don't see why we should risk losing new players for pro convenience.
Global rating is shit because people can spam just one map, not because "all welcome" games exist. Either deal with the former or deal with the fact it's imperfect and your proposal does nothing to fix it.
On the contrary I’m trying to optimize the game for everyone by making games happen between players that are within at least 3 standard deviations of skill of one another. Which is already pretty lax by the standards of most games. It just isn’t as lax as “literally no restrictions at all.”
No the one map problem is vastly less of a concern. If dual gap players were playing 1800+ dual gap to get 2200 there, they would have a much easier time transitioning to other game modes.
Watch Foley play normal teamgames. He isn’t 2300 but he is still able to keep up with a 2000 skill player. That’s because he still plays high level games where people push the game, not 1k+ lobbies where it’s just 2-4 dudes playing with everyone else floundering around. When a dude that plays 1k+ games comes into higher rated lobbies, it’s significantly more noticeable. Problem with dual gap is that it’s too big (need 12 players) with too low skill pool (not 12 1800 dg players around) to host those lobbies so it caps out at 1.2k+.
Now apply your critical skills to figure out why tmm/ladder is 0 0 0 0 when 10 astro/gap "all welcome" lobbies are waiting to fill and 20 more are being played and how your proposal might help or hinder getting that gang to play the same game the rest of us are playing, and how much better the matchmaker would be if that was achieved.
Can't play with your friend is a dealbreaker for people that might otherwise put up with a less-than-perfectly balanced game as long as the discord banter with said buddy was fun.
I mean it definitely isn’t cuz all the 0 rated dudes are best buds with the 1200s in astro
map simplicity, streamer popularity feedback cycle, inertia are the biggest ones probably
I definitely met more players sick of astro and at a loss for games to play hosting all welcome than the dozen or so players you restrict yourself to playing with. I distinctly remember one of them, Raquaza, beating inspektor_kot on faflive in some scta tournament a while back. He had 900 global rating at the time I think, which made for some fun banter by the hosts and stream chat. He stopped playing astro as soon as his rating was high enough not to get kicked from human lobbies. He got there mostly by playing all welcome on normal maps.
Why the fuck should players like him not get rating from all welcome games, where their better but dead teammates can teach them what to do with all the bases? How the hell does that restriction fix global rating exactly?
Why do you think it's appropriate for you to gatekeep who plays with who when you can already do that in custom games if you want to?
Nah think it's a good end to my points. The rhetorical questions I already answered tends to be a sign the convo is over.
Wasn't very productive I'm afraid. Instead of gaining an appreciation for your position I feel sickened by your entitlement instead. Maybe I'll have to reread your arguments when I'm feeling more charitable, but the long wait times and gatekeeping still seem like too high costs to me.
With the system I proposed, 2 very high or low rated players could maybe find a 4v4 match if 12 other players were looking, whereas what you propose might require the player pool to reach into the 50s before they get a match. That cuts the time they could use tmm from a few hours a day to a few hours each weekend.
And this would affect all players queueing, regardless how picky they were about the balance they got
I watched the replay. In case I missed the point you were trying to make, here's what I noticed: the lane balance was really weird and could have been better (opti fail? dunno) . Ruler (1000 4v4 rating) made a fatboy on beach, that's weird, right? Surely I missed a lot of things.
Since FTX never bothered to give more details I'll just give my thoughts on both possible scenarios:
If this was a tmm game, opti needs to be more like autobalance at the very least. I think if the lane balance was different the game might have been better. I'm not sure why opti decided 1200 vs 1800 on air was good, or why 1000 vs 2300 in north pond was good, or any other matchup, in fact. Not as good as if everyone had the same rating, obviously. That would be ideal. I just think it's too much to wish for when the player pool is so small and enforcing that too strictly could lead to players in the tails of the rating distribution finding way fewer games, especially 3v3 / 4v4. If this is one of Raider's first tmm games and the rating system is using his global rating as a temporary stand-in for his 4v4 rating, it's understandable why the matchups were so garbage, but that seems like an edge case on top of another edge case: first game of an abuser. Doesn't really scream "typical tmm experience" to me and even with ftx's proposed change such edge cases will exist.
If this was a custom game, why exactly should it not be rated? Everyone participating decided it was a fair matchup by joining and x'ing. The quality was 89%. The ratings are definitely not representative of skill, and 3300 is ridiculous. Ruler's rating is in fact around 1000 on all ladders except global, where they got that high by spamming astro exclusively. The solution is to make ladder/tmm more popular than custom games and bury global rating in a deep UI hole so that players actually have to get good to maximize their status signifier which should be their league badges, not global rating. UI changes to the client and game are needed for that, at the very least, but anything that can increase the popularity of ladder/tmm for the average casual player will help achieve this goal. Banning "all welcome" might help with cases such as Ruler but is throwing out too much baby with the bathwater and the league solution is better and at least 60% of the way there in terms of implementation, meaning most of the back-end stuff is done and some of the front-end as well.