Some good news about Team Matchmaking (TMM)

People keep asking for an ETA for Team Matchmaking, and until now our response has always been "we don't know." Well, I'm happy to say that I believe enough progress has been made to release an initial version in the near future!

My plan as of writing this is to have a working TMM "beta" version released to the FAF community by the end of the year. That is, if everything goes well, you should be able to play 2v2 matchmaker games with your friends in late December or early January.

WARNING: Do not expect everything to work perfectly! If you've been around for a while, you will be familiar with the usual chaos that ensues after a server update or game patch, and I expect this to be no different. While I hope it won't be the case, I will not be at all surprised if everything burns to the ground and we have to shut it off shortly after release in order to resolve critical issues.

That being said, here are some things you should know in the unlikely event of a successful deployment:

• There will only be 2v2 and 1v1 matchmakers (currently known as ladder).
• The ladder tab will be replaced by a more general matchmaker tab, in which you can join any active queue.
• There will be a party system. Players that queue together in a party are guaranteed to be on the same team.
• You can queue by yourself, and a team will be found for you.
• You can join multiple queues at the same time.
• The new matchmaker queue will have its own rating. This new rating will be based on your global rating, but it will assume higher uncertainty. This rating might not be displayed in game, or might be displayed incorrectly. You should not expect to know exactly what your rating is for this initial TMM release.
• We are NOT deleting your global rating. Custom games will continue to function exactly as they do now (provided there are no bugs).

If you are so anxious about playing TMM that you can't wait until the end of December, there will be a few opportunities to help with pre-release testing which I will announce in the FAF Discord (invite link in the client and on faforever.com). Just make sure you're subscribed to the Tester role by writing !subscribe Tester in the #bot-commands channel and you will receive a ping from me personally when we need you.

Will the different queues (1v1, 2v2, 3v3, and 4v4) have separate ratings? Also, why not seed the initial TMM rating from ladder rating instead of global rating? It is likely to be more correlated with actual skill.

sounds great

@archsimkat I’ll let @FtXCommando answer those questions as he is responsible for those decisions.

Likely to have 3 ratings
1v1
2v2
3v3+

Global has significantly more data (9/10ths of faf games are outside of ladder) which means the system has more information to go off of for its initial placement of players. I’d rather not have only 1/10th of FAF have placement data. The initial rating of players will also involve a sigma increase of 250 which should be more than enough of an adjustment for the vast, vast quantity of FAF players even if they never played a 2v2 before.

Fair enough, I didn't realize that only 1/10th of FAF players have enough ladder games to give them usable placement data. Also, 2v2 ladder will be fullshare right? What about 3v3/4v4?

This will be a breath of fresh air for the FAF. I will be happy to popularize TMM on streams and treat possible bugs with understanding.

Currently I plan on every teamgame using full share.

Good news, time to search my own blood mate for 2v2's

soooooooo GW soon?

In the words of Mando,

"This is the way."

Great work guys. I hope a lot of underplayed maps get more played this way.

Is there already a draft for the Mappool? I suppose you @FtxCommando will be in charge of that as well?

Yes I’m responsible for map pools.

will there still be a "global rating" outside of TMM, and if not how can "setons players" or the like keep on playing the maps they like with fair/balanced teams?

"We are NOT deleting your global rating. Custom games will continue to function exactly as they do now (provided there are no bugs)."

Reading is hard.

@FtXCommando Please for the love of FAF, include mapgen

and crazyrush!

Actually I'm strongly against gimmick maps in map pools because they break my personal principle of a player being able to spawn in with full grasp of game mechanics and being able to iron out a strategy as well as a guy that has 1000 games on the map. Obviously experience has a lot of value and it's impractical to really expect such players to be competitive against one another, but the point is that everything is equal when you enter the game and survey what your options are.

If I had a map that had one random crazyrush mex in the corner, then there's no real reason for you to realize that's a mechanic until it's possibly too late to adjust anything about your build to account for it. Same with the crazyrush map itself. You have no idea if these mexes are infinite, you have no idea if buildings block the script, you might have had no idea that the mexes even expand and blocked it with pgens at the start. It's BS as a player, like if every FAF map had 0 natural reclaim except this one map that is put into a pool every 3rd month.

Of course it is put in tournaments, and that's mostly because people for whatever reason enjoy playing it. I just rationalize it as people knowing the make exists beforehand so it's a fair game since they should be expected to enter the tournament with a knowledge base of the maps in it.

When it comes to map gen, it's the same criteria I had before. It needs to meet the same minimum baseline of quality that I require manual maps to reach.

@speed2 said in Some good news about Team Matchmaking (TMM):

soooooooo GW soon?