Matchmaker Pool Feedback Thread

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?

https://replay.faforever.com/20419951

I'm on mobile and you're gonna have to use words if you want to make a point

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

Just watch the goddamn replay.

@xiaomao I will once I get home.

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.

It's not even about the 3.3k dude. The game is over at minute 10 cuz the low rated dude got put on carry slot vs someone competent. And there's nothing you can do about that.

@xiaomao is the carry slot not rock? isn't that the 3300's slot? I'm confused. Anyway, opti balance could use some improvement since autobalance proves the task can be done better. Why not use that for tmm instead? As I said, ideally every game has every player of equal rating and the balancer is moot, but the more restrictions, the more players need to queue before games can be found. It would be great if someday it could serve us all perfectly balanced games with little hassle but the priority should be growing it's popularity because that's the only way it can be achieved. Until then you can host custom and enforce rating restrictions with not that much hassle.

None of it explains why custom "all welcome" lobbies need to be unrated.

There was literally 10 minute strat bomber that got ctrlk'ed to just not end the game at that point...

Also, it's a perfect example of game that should of have never been rated.

Looked to me like the better team won in that replay ftx posted, but it also looked like the game never should have had 89% quality as everyone on south team was doing significantly worse than their counterparts and their 4v4 ratings compared to north team don't justify 89%. In that sense I'd say the rating system worked but a bit suboptimally, and I suspect some goofy abused global rating was substituted for 4v4 rating so there was bad data to start with. The rating system adjusted player ratings in the right direction. The lane balance was shit but that can be better and the code already exists, courtesy of Penguin. Why do you think it shouldn't have been rated @Xiaomao? I agree it's not a good match for the matchmaker to put together, probably happened because of bad input data, but the rating system responded correctly, more or less, and adjusted the ratings in the right directions.

#20443714 can you tell me why this should be unrated? I didn't cherry pick it, it's literally the first 3v3 tmm replay i stumbled upon with 2 high and 1 low rated member per team and it's a solution i think would work decently well. Why is this not good enough?

G-great. You picked a game with underrated Voodo stack, full on voice and playing same squad every fucking day be it 4v4 or 3v3.
The 500 rated player you see there is actually 1.1k in 4v4 with his Voodo stack.

You better watch this https://replay.faforever.com/19738422 and tell me this is fine.

Also, this is just sad:

so voodoo's "500" buddy should uhh, grind alone until his rating reflects his skill? that will surely fix the issue right ?

Yes. Just like Grimplex shouldn't be able to play with all these 100-500 rated players in TMM.

Watch the replay and say it straight to my face that it was a fine game of FAF. And that we should encourage more of such game to be had in a ranked enviroment.