Add a game quality slider to the matchmaker
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There have been a lot of complaints regarding the matchmaker's matching system. Some people want to just get really high quality games even if they have to wait a while, while others want to just play more games without having to wait so long even if that results in somewhat lower quality games. Longer wait times with higher required game quality result in the latter group queuing less, while shorter wait times with lower required game quality result in the former group queuing less. A solution would be to add a game quality slider that each player (party leader in parties) can set. One end of the slider would result in better game quality with good balance, low range of ratings, and longer wait times on average, while the other end of the slider would result in shorter wait times with a lower minimum game quality, and the remainder of the slider would be a spectrum between those two extremes, The user could adjust the position of the slider as desired, and this slider system could either be made in a way that is queue-specific or that applies to all queues.
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Way too much user control that 95% of people will have no idea how to properly operate.
Queue 10 forum threads “why is matchmaker missing me????? Broken shit client.”
“did you set balance quality to 100?”
“well yeah more balance more gooder?”
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If a slider is too much there are alternatives to acheive a similar effect, e.g. a checkbox to allow high/low variance
A variation would be a display of what rating range you're likely to be considered for, and having it increase by more over time in the queue, so that you can leave the queue and rejoin to reset the variance permitted. Such a display could also be used with the slider appraoch which would reduce the risks of people not understanding why they've been matched.
I.e. if you have a slider and changing it from 0% to 100% means where you're queuing it is showing you will be matched up to say for illustration +/-200 (0%) to +/- 1500 (100%), you likely reduce the number of forum posts about poor balance since people will be clearer on what range the matchmaker will consider acceptable.If a slider was used I'd probably favour just having 3 options to keep it simple initially - low variation; default; and high variation.
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Problem is variance doesnt refer to your shown rating so you’re going to get dudes complaining that it’s wrong because they will assume it does. Another problem is that the whole point of divisions is to specifically stop throwing these numerics at players. If you want to do such a system, it should substitute division placing for rating.
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@ftxcommando said in Add a game quality slider to the matchmaker:
Way too much user control that 95% of people will have no idea how to properly operate.
Queue 10 forum threads “why is matchmaker missing me????? Broken shit client.”
“did you set balance quality to 100?”
“well yeah more balance more gooder?”
Better to try and risk failure, than never try at all. I think this game generally attracts intelligent players due it's complexity and I'd guess that those who stick around may appreciate this feature. And i say that as someone who rarely plays matchmaker!
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@serpentor said in Add a game quality slider to the matchmaker:
I think this game generally attracts intelligent players
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I don’t think you could even attach a number to it because that would be far too limiting as to making changes to the algorithm under the hood. For example the matchmaker used to use trueskill game quality to decide if a match was good or not, but since the addition of 4v4 games we’ve completely rewritten the algorithm to use our own custom metric so that we can specifically tweak and control many different factors like maximum difference between rating which wouldn’t be possible using game quality. So having a game quality slider wouldn’t work with the current metric at all, it would have to be some arbitrary number that gets factored in in some completely opaque way. It would literally have to be a slider with “fastest match” on one end and “best balance” on the other.
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Just quadruple the number of active players on FAF. Adding more and more complexity to the matchmaking code isn't going to help.
