TMM matching

I am starting to play TMM a lot more these days and am finding a few issues that revolve around the fact that TMM seems to attract a lot of high CPU players and/or people with bad connections because they cant get into custom games

For instance a person who is similar rank as me and plays at the same time has a 450 cpu. He doesn't play custom anymore because he gets kicked from the lobbies so he only plays TMM but every single game I get put in with him is a lagfest from min 1 due to him so we will all call him out in chat and we ask him to leave so we can continue 3v2 or 4v3 but he wont leave so then everyone else does only to rematch with him right after.

Is there a way to limit who is able to play TMM based on their CPU score so that say nobody with a CPU score above 300 or whatever seems right is allowed to join? I feel bad for those that don't have a good enough machine to play this game but they need to start respecting that and play small customs games or 1v1 or something.

I am curious if the same can be done with people with network issues.

For now I have him marked as a foe and just wont join TMM while he is online....maybe preventing matching with foes is a solution too?

Not sure how this all works but wanted to throw the idea out there for those that do.

Thanks

No they don't, there is no way anyone is going to limit someone's access to the game because of a bad cpu, your request is so beyond selfish as well since most maps tend to be low count unit matches

@rezy-noob said in TMM matching:

No they don't, there is no way anyone is going to limit someone's access to the game because of a bad cpu, your request is so beyond selfish as well since most maps tend to be low count unit matches

Why take instant offense to things so easy??. My intentions are not selfish even if you interpret them that way for some strange reason. This is a problem that many people are complaining about and I was throwing an idea out there that I think would work. Its not just one single person who has a bad cpu or connection that ruin it for the masses its many people causing the problems because of bad computers and such. I don't see a problem with forcing those people to make custom games that better suit their systems rather than having them ruin TMM matches time and again but If it is not viable then that's fine but getting bitter and accusing me of being selfish is just silly and immature. I'm trying to start a conversation to find a solution, thanks for your constructive input on the matter. It is so helpful!

If the technical details could reasonably be handled well enough, I think it could be a good thing for FAF to have some (but not all) matchmaker queues have minimum requirements to help avoid lag. It could improve the matchmaker experience and consequently improve user retention as well. Maybe it would even be reasonable to have some 5v5+ queues with some reasonable minimum requirements enabled to help avoid lag.

Is it not more selfish to force 5 or 7 other people to deal with your shitty cpu than it is for those players to not want to play with you?

*Not specifying anyone by saying you

If you encounter someone who is constantly slowing down games or causing network issues, then report them, so we can look into it to find a solution.

You can host your own games with your own CPU rating limit, so you can decide which CPU is good enough for you to play with, same for your friends in team games.

@magge said in TMM matching:

If you encounter someone who is constantly slowing down games or causing network issues, then report them, so we can look into it to find a solution.

You can host your own games with your own CPU rating limit, so you can decide which CPU is good enough for you to play with, same for your friends in team games.

So the solution is to just host a custom game rather than play TMM at all? That's exactly what is happening now and TMM is getting the reputation as a place where laggers and high CPUS go to play. TMM has so much potential and people want to love it but it is ruined by the lack of controls that custom games are able to employ. I am a solo player and don't play with any set group but I often get put on a team with players who are in a group and like I said in the OP one player among the 6-8 player pool has a system that cant handle TMM settings and so everyone has to suffer because that one person is not willing to accept the reality of their situation and make custom lobbies that are better suited to their system.

Hosting your own game isn't so cut and dry either because lobbies don't always fill but there might be 15+ in the TMM ques at that time (and multiple people complaining in chat about the problems with TMM funny enough) The point of TMM in the first place is to be able to just find a quick game without having to host custom lobbies isn't it but its being ruined by a small group of people who cant handle it.

I am not trying to single any one player out because these these people are nice people who just want to play FAF so I never thought to report them and even then how does reporting them fix their 450cpu from 1999? Do the people that keep the FAF ship sailing want a bunch of reports coming in about all this so then you all have that much more work to do sifting through legit and BS reports and then dissecting the technical data on top of that to see what a solution might be when simply limiting TMM to a set CPU score and ping would solve a lot of these problems right off the top and establish a new baseline going forward? I don't sail this ship I just play on it so I don't know the answer there.

I haven't really played FAF since TMM no share was a thing but after trying TMM for the last little bit it didn't take long to notice this glaring problem and notice that many people are saying the same thing about TMM

You cant just take your Toyota Prius onto an race track, most tracks have a minimum spec to what a vehicle must have in order to get on the track. Its just the reality of the situation and like Penguin said if it is technically viable than I think it would be a huge benefit in a number of ways.

Your problem is the fact that you are not familiar with faf infrastructure so let me clarify some aspects:
1)laptops exist and they throttle quite bad unless it's beast laptop, which dowgrades cpu scores by at least 70-80 with unit amount scaling
2)amd components show fake 450+ cpu rating because the score doesnt consider the correct benchmark
3)you can easily fake your cpu score regardless either via programs or 3 mins of irl search of info
4)you exclude population based on a very few examples that are irrelevant and has happened to a minority of players which is not even remotely appropriate for a system change

Also yes, it's still selfish since instead of switching to custom where you can control the players that are in, your option is straight up booting players for not having a good pc which is not very ok since you are not on a race, but in a game from 2007 with a problematic engine

So theoretically the not-selfish option if 1 guy is queueing for 4v4 tmm with a PC that can only handle winter duel is for everybody else to get out of the queue and play custom games?

I think rezy made some very good points as to why a general filter is both undesirable and inadequate. Perhaps something like the foe system could do the job better: the matchmaker could discard potential matches if any of the players involved have foed each other. It's not a universal exclusion of players, and it more gracefully handles connection issues and other reasons people might want to avoid certain other players

For instance a person who is similar rank as me and plays at the same time has a 450 cpu. He doesn't play custom anymore because he gets kicked from the lobbies so he only plays TMM but every single game I get put in with him is a lagfest from min 1 due to him so we will all call him out in chat and we ask him to leave so we can continue 3v2 or 4v3 but he wont leave so then everyone else does only to rematch with him right after.

If this happens too often then it seems to me you have good grounds to report him for the following rule:

• You will not ruin the game intentionally by any means.

As @magge pointed out, the moderator team can then take over.

The points that @Rezy-Noob makes are very legit. Any type of gatekeeping as the original topic suggests would entirely rely on the client. Anything on the client can be changed. Therefore you can evade the gatekeeping with little to no effort. And when you detect someone that does this then you can again report them to the moderators. Which brings us back to the previous solution. Therefore it would likely be a lot of developer time just to come back to the same solution.

That's exactly what is happening now and TMM is getting the reputation as a place where laggers and high CPUS go to play.

I do not share this assessment. I've been playing 10+ 3v3 games since the release using the matchmaker and none of them had any issues. Doesn't mean it sucks that it happened to you - but there are tools for you to prevent it in the future.

The issue lies with how do you define a bad connection? Do you ban all Russians because they sometimes have poor connections to Australians (or vice versa)? Similarly how do you determine a bad cpu?

TMM is supposed to be the place where you can't be kicked for your flag, you can't be kicked for CPU and you can't be kicked for some arbitrary host made decision.

Using the foe system doesn't work because then people are capable of abusing the system by foeing opponents they don't want to fight because they know they'll lose.

@angelofd347h ok, that makes sense

I'm sorry, but I find it utterly despicable and out of touch that some people consider a 20x20 map to be fully playable in 4v4 scenario with someone running Athlon from 2009...

But as they say, road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Like ffs, you people even made a whole new benchmark that could be used for proper gauging of what is playable and yet you still ask inane questions like "what is bad cpu"?

@angelofd347h said in TMM matching:

The issue lies with how do you define a bad connection? Do you ban all Russians because they sometimes have poor connections to Australians (or vice versa)? Similarly how do you determine a bad cpu?

TMM is supposed to be the place where you can't be kicked for your flag, you can't be kicked for CPU and you can't be kicked for some arbitrary host made decision.

Using the foe system doesn't work because then people are capable of abusing the system by foeing opponents they don't want to fight because they know they'll lose.

I misunderstood the intention behind TMM I guess. I thought it was so that people could find a match somewhat fast and consistent and have multiple games in a relatively quick timeframe so as to make FAF more accessible.

I agree I have no idea how the stuff works under the hood of all this but I do think that TMM needs to be the controlled aspect of FAF whereas custom can be the wide open free for all and nobody should feel bad about it.

Minimum specifications are a very real thing in video games and implementing them in certain cases as a hard rule shouldnt be viewed as negative selfish gatekeeping. With CPU scores it is more cut and dry and feels like a no brainer to me. Anyone in a custom lobby who sees someone with a 300+cpu score know that dude is going to be a problem.

With networking/ping stuff it is way more of a grey area I get that. I live on the west coast of Canada, my condo sits directly above the main fiber line that runs down the western seaboard, I have a 1,5g symmetrical fiber connection with cat8 networking cable as my only copper run from the fiber router (or whatever its called) to my PC but even I can be the one guy who needs to be kicked from a lobby if I am matched with some aussies and russians in certain cases. Usually I have no issues but sometimes I do. I shouldn't be banned from TMM for this because networking can change day to day.

I often play with only aussies because I am night shift here in Canada so my schedule lines up with the other side of the world usually. I will join the same custom lobbies day in and day out with the same core group of players but on a random day for some reason it lags and those are the times I should be filtered out of tmm and matched with players I ping nicely with.

Easy to say I know but I guess my main point is that TMM shouldn't be the free for all it currently is and should be gate kept so its the bets experience possible.

Thanks for all your input everyone, I have reached the limit of what I am able to offer such a topic but glad it can at least be discussed openly, this is how problems are solved.

@Rezy-Noob

You cite potential technical hurdles. If the technical hurdles can't be solved, then maybe we should leave the system as-is, but if they can be solved, maybe we should change it.

Selfish is defined as showing or arising from an excessive concern with oneself and a lack of concern for others.

If one person makes the experience a lot worse for several other people for a slight personal benefit, does that not meet the definition of selfishness?

Is it not more selfish for that one person to significantly worsen the TMM experience for many others than for those many others to want that person to be limited to select TMM queues and custom games?

@Jip

I understand that you personally have not been experiencing much lag in TMM games, but you presumably get matched with higher rated players in general, who seem less likely to play games where they lag a lot on average. I believe this problem is more pronounced at lower ratings, as I have noticed disproportionately more lag in lower-rated games compared to higher-rated games on average. Either way, there are players who consistently lag a lot and significantly worsen the TMM experience for others, sometimes resulting in numerous people leaving the TMM queues or dealing with bad TMM experiences due to the lag.

I'm not suggesting limitations be applied to all queues, but it seems like there should be at least some queues with some minimum requirements if the technical side of that can be handled reasonably enough.

Regarding how to handle the technical limitations, why not use the new metric that has been created for calculating players' lagginess across games? Even if people can find workarounds to spoof their scores, I imagine the vast majority of the severe laggers won't do that, and the ones who do could be moderated against. That would presumably require a lower level of moderation than if we moderated as you suggested but didn't use the new metric to filter out most of the severe laggers.

Alternatively, perhaps a system could be created that takes the extant in-game measurements for lagginess (for both connection and sim speed) and logs roughly how much each player contributes to lag in each game, and then have that data automatically reported back to the server at the end of each game.

Altenratively or additionally, perhaps stuff related to ICE could be utilized in some way to provide some additional data on which combinations of players are too likely to lag too much and or who tends to lag a lot from a connectivity perspective.

Also, as a side note, I think a lot of the severe laggers are not intentionally trying to ruin the games with their lag, but just trying to play. So, the rule you quoted doesn't seem like it would apply to most of them anyway... perhaps the rules could be changed to address this issue though...

Wonder if you can use CPU model instead of CPU score
and have something like, "if CPU performance lower than 1000 display a warning" (according to this chart for example https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html#desktop-thread)

maybe have an option for players with good CPU to not get trown in games with people with bad CPU

@Penguin_ I feel like you've skipped my argumentation. All the checks would run through the client. Due to the open source nature of the client it is trivial to bypass. Any reading from the preference file is even easier to manipulate. None of what you mentioned addresses this, except maybe for this paragraph:

Regarding how to handle the technical limitations, why not use the new metric that has been created for calculating players' lagginess across games? Even if people can find workarounds to spoof their scores, I imagine the vast majority of the severe laggers won't do that, and the ones who do could be moderated against. That would presumably require a lower level of moderation than if we moderated as you suggested but didn't use the new metric to filter out most of the severe laggers.

Which is based on assumptions and not on facts. People spoof their names, their ratings and there are certainly people that spoof their CPU rating.

Also, as a side note, I think a lot of the severe laggers are not intentionally trying to ruin the games with their lag, but just trying to play. So, the rule you quoted doesn't seem like it would apply to most of them anyway... perhaps the rules could be changed to address this issue though...

It may not be their intention but it can be the result of their actions. Usually that is what matters in the end, but I can't talk for the moderators.

I'm not against the idea of enforcing minimal requirements. It is just that it would be difficult to actually enforce as the client itself or the data it reads from can be manipulated. It is important that you and other people that read this understand that. Let alone when we start talking about false negatives, where we accidentally keep people out that would be able to play the game just fine.

What about a warning message based on someone's CPU score, e.g. if they try joining 3v3 or 4v4 matchmaker and are below a certain threshold (which is lower for 4v4) then they get a popup warning them they are likely to slow down the game and should consider playing on smaller maps with fewer players? There's nothing to bypass or spoof as they can still join the queue, but at least they are less likely to.

@jip

I do think it's a reasonable assumption that most of the severe laggers would not figure out and go through the technical hassles and rule breaking that it would take to spoof their data for this.

Also, I think you might've missed or misunderstood part of what I meant when I said:

Alternatively, perhaps a system could be created that takes the extant in-game measurements for lagginess (for both connection and sim speed) and logs roughly how much each player contributes to lag in each game, and then have that data automatically reported back to the server at the end of each game.

Altenratively or additionally, perhaps stuff related to ICE could be utilized in some way to provide some additional data on which combinations of players are too likely to lag too much and or who tends to lag a lot from a connectivity perspective.

If the relevant data would be autoamatically reported to the server by everyone in a match (or at least by multiple people) comparably to how win/loss is reported, then that should offer some resilience against individual tampering. I'm not saying it would be perfect, but hey, if that sort of system is good enough that we already use it for reporting wins and losses, it seems like it should be good enough for this as well.