Punish bad lobbies

@ftxcommando said in Punish bad lobbies:

Should be based on what rationale? By popular sovereignty half of all queues wouldn’t even involve players facing players.

Ultimately these queues have never been about some popularity poll. The first queue in GPG was 1v1, this carried out into FAF, now it’s different. Back when it was only 1v1, this was basically the entire rationale for balance decisions with some sentons sprinkled in. Now the schema of games viewed this way has gone beyond 1v1 and you have a roster of teamgames that have legitimacy for considerations about the game.

1v1 wasn’t chosen because it was popular, never was. It was easy dev resource wise, it had historical precedent, and it was built upon using said precedent.

Why do you speak about history? This is not about history, this is about actual problem.

I do not understand your point. You say lobbies are too bad to play them, matchmaker is for strange different (then play game and get fun??) purpose. But currently faf is lobby simulator with rare gameplay inclusions. So what do you suggest to solve this issue?

I don’t see an actual problem. I see you wanting to have the powers of the dude that hosted a lobby but only to enforce the things you want. If you want that, host it yourself. Otherwise, lower your list of criteria in terms of slots, balance, maps, etc and if you lower it enough, you can use a matchmaker for the process to be automated.

Host by definition had to spend the most lobby sim time, if he doesn’t want to play with somebody or play in some sort of way and increase said lobby sim time, it’s his prerogative.

You don’t get to choose the map. The rating limit. What slots are open. If it’s optimal balance. Why would you suddenly get a choice over who he kicks or anything else?

Has anyone even thought about why there exist five different gap lobbies at the same time? Why did four people host another lobby, enduring the maximum amount of lobby sim possible, instead of joining the existing lobby? What makes you confident that a matchmaker queue would reduce this fragmentation? Would these people even play in a gap matchmaker?

Honestly, wouldn't be even surprised if after getting gap Q they would come to bitch about FAF balance team not working on the balance for TMM gap, player balance in game, TMM using wrong map version, or the fact that they can't pick they starting position lmao.

@ftxcommando said in Punish bad lobbies:

This is almost always playing with specific people and then everything your matchmaker can't do.

You can party queue in the matchmaker.

Yes, but if you want to play against specific people. (There are people that don't enjoy competing with stranger, but like to compete with their friends)

@ftxcommando said in Punish bad lobbies:

But you want the matchmaker to be able to handle as many scenarios as possible,

No.

Why wouldn't you want that?
Or rather why would FAF be the literally only online game that doesn't want people to primarily use the matchmaker?
Every other modern game has a quickplay button and only a negligible amount of custom games

@ftxcommando said in Punish bad lobbies:

Then we would remove all the matchmakers as they currently stand and simply have a pve queue that leads to astro and culminates in dg.

If the PvE players would like to play with random people and wouldn't care which of the coop maps they play, a PvE queue might also make sense. (Maybe survival could work as a queue )
And I don't see how this would lead to the removal of the currently existing queues.

@ftxcommando said in Punish bad lobbies:

Nobody said you need to try your ass off, but the game is ultimately balanced around some overton window of acceptably deemed situations. These are the matchmakers.

It's not about needing to try your best. It's about the complexity of the game which is just lower in an astro game. Sure the game isn't balanced around astro, but it doesn't need to be balanced for every possible queue.
You could then also add specific ratings for the astro/DG queues and just hide those ratings from the players, to make the feel even more casual.

@ftxcommando said in Punish bad lobbies:

These are all big, simple teamgames. They are all too similar.

How is Astro 4v4/3v3 too similar to dual gap and those two compared to setons?
I don't really see many wonder hosts, so I don't think it plays a role in this, but a Setons queue could also work.

@ftxcommando said in Punish bad lobbies:

This already happens organically.

How is anything here happening organically?
There are always multiple different lobbys of the same or almost the same map hosted.
The problem exists and a queue might solve it.

@blackyps said in Punish bad lobbies:

Has anyone even thought about why there exist five different gap lobbies at the same time? Why did four people host another lobby, enduring the maximum amount of lobby sim possible, instead of joining the existing lobby?

I don't know why people do that. Maybe because every second advice is host your own custom game if you don't want to get kicked?
Also they get hosted for different rating ranges, but that could also be solved more efficiently by a matchmaker.

@blackyps said in Punish bad lobbies:

What makes you confident that a matchmaker queue would reduce this fragmentation? Would these people even play in a gap matchmaker?

Would they play a matchmaker queue? I don't know and probably nobody will ever know until such a queue is tested. But I'd think that a queue attracts people more than custom game lobby sim, since it requires less effort. They don't have to fear getting kicked, they don't need to check if the settings are correct or change in between you joining and the game starting. You don't need to fear getting the spot you want, just for it to be taken away a minute later.

@endranii said in Punish bad lobbies:

Honestly, wouldn't be even surprised if after getting gap Q they would come to bitch about FAF balance team not working on the balance for TMM gap, player balance in game, TMM using wrong map version, or the fact that they can't pick they starting position lmao

You'd need to use the most popular version and at least most dual gap (all of the currently hosted games) use the same version and the queue would then naturally decide what the correct version is once you get people to start using it. Since the "correct" version is just what people are used to playing.

To get around people complaining about their queue not being considered in balance talks, you could split the queues between a "competitive" and a "casual" section, to clarify the difference.

For starting positions: If the queue only hosts one map, allowing for preferences in starting positions is actually doable and more reliable than hoping the host of the custom game finds the best solution to all players preferences.

@Nex agree. Moreover this is the simplest solution could be - just add more queues like other queues already exist nearby.

No the simplest solution is to start hosting lobbies yourself, not sure why that’s constantly ignored when other people in this thread bring it up.

I generally play setons and I would be against a setons queue and wouldn’t use it unless it killed custom lobbies and I had no choice, and if it did it would be a downgrade. This is how I’ve felt about that for a long time now and I’ve said as much before.

Sometimes people are reluctant to host themselves because it seems like the slowest option to get a game. @Cocucka all I can suggest is make your lobbies fun and fair and hopefully people will flock to them. It's slow at first but it gets better as you get better at hosting. Once enough people add you to their friends list, they get notified when you make a game and it fills a lot faster, even compared to matchmaking at prime time.

This whole thread in painful.

@exselsior the OP is indeed trying to host themselves already, I've seen their lobbies in the list.

Maybe the thread is partly about that solution not being entirely frustration free, and that might have something to do with people's reluctance to join lobbies hosted by lower rated players, but I'm just guessing.

Personally, I have to admit whatever gut feelings I might have about a hypothetical gap only queue are worthless since the death of 4v4 tmm came as quite a surprise to me. It was vindicating, but surprising as hell, based on what I perceived the consensus to be at my rating level at the time. The fact that it even existed at all is proof that fullshare was at the very least controversial, forcing the devs to launch tmm with both, which was the right call.

I wonder if no-share's utter failure came as a surprise to any them as well, and if so, maybe it's worth reminding ourselves our intuition is not perfect at predicting how large, mostly silent communities will react and can't replace actual experiments.

On the other hand, if it came as no surprise at all to anyone on the dev team, more the reason to trust their judgement on this, but it's interesting to think that they were willing to entertain no-share then just to prove to people hardly anyone wants to play it, so it must not have been that huge of an effort.

Well, can someone explain what I am doing wrong?

Spent 30 minutes in lobby without any single connection

great idea to tell people to just host themselves and then wonder why there are 5 dual gap lobbys for <1000 with a total of 13 players that now can enjoy the lobby even more.

@phong said in Punish bad lobbies:

Personally, I have to admit whatever gut feelings I might have about a hypothetical gap only queue are worthless since the death of 4v4 tmm came as quite a surprise to me. It was vindicating, but surprising as hell, based on what I perceived the consensus to be at my rating level at the time. The fact that it even existed at all is proof that fullshare was at the very least controversial, forcing the devs to launch tmm with both. I wonder if no-share's utter failure came as a surprise to them as well, and if so, maybe it's worth reminding ourselves our intuition is not perfect at predicting how large, mostly silent communities will react and can't replace actual experiments. On the other hand, if it came as no surprise at all to anyone on the dev team, more the reason to trust their judgement on this.

This is easily bitten by statistics. But I can not find any in open access. Unfortunately, last years devs try to hide their "popularity".

@phong I don't know why the no-share queue was made and I can only guess on why it was removed, but it always seemed kinda empty anyway.
I think it's good that it was removed, because (unlike a dual gap or astro queue) this mode was competing with other queues (4v4 full-share) for players, since these queues were quite similar. So if you come to a point where there are actually people in queue in both of them, then people will stop queuing for the one they prefer less without knowing the rating distribution and actual likelihood of getting a match, thus segregating the players and reducing the chance and quality of matches.

So the addition of a dual gap queue could be detrimental to the experience if we expect a good portion of the regular queue players to switch over to dual gap instead, but I don't think that will happen.

@cocucka I think I saw some numbers about 4v4 share vs no-share on this very forum posted by the devs, trying to find them now

The objective arguments for a full share queue were always better than for no share. There would have been only be a 4v4 full share queue if it wasn't for all the outrage on the forum and similar that we need a no share queue, as full share was perceived as game-ruining by many. At least they argued so. So we reached the compromise to launch with both. Iirc the no-share queue started with around a third of the total 4v4 games, but then quickly died of until it was compeletely and absolutely dead. At that point it was removed.
So the "surprise" was that it died in spite of all the people insisting that it would be popular. I can't speak for anyone else, but in my perception the original intution was that we should launch only with full share, the backlash from the community introduced some doubts, so we changed plans in a "well, we could be wrong with our original assesment" line of thought. But in the end the original intuition proved to be right.

@blackyps Yeah, I suspected as much and it feels like the right call, although, ironically, it kind of set a bad precedent. At least that argument is now dead and buried, though, mostly, thanks to that extra work. Is it worth putting in a similar effort again to settle the matter of gap tmm? I have no idea how much work it actually is, but I also have a gut feeling that it's a problem the community will have to face at some point, if the long-term goal is to reduce emphasis on custom games.

As previously stated by Brutus a gap queue is highly unlikely just due to the number of players and connections. The reason it can work in custom games is because in lobby you know if players can connect to others or not and thus they can be removed. With the matchmaker this is not possible.

And as we already see complaints about failure to launch with 4v4 it only grows exponentially with 6v6. And this is even assuming that all the recent elevated connection issues are resolved.

The technical implementation to launch some sort of gap queue is not an issue (I am purely talking about setting up such a queue. The issue Sheikah mentioned is highly relevant), but there is more to it than just technical aspects.
You can't just try something like that and then pretend like it never happened when it fails. People will demand experiments with other maps/other configurations etc. Not to mention the question of whether we want single map queues at all in principle.
I haven't really seen a coherent argument for map-specific queues that doesn't fundamentally conflict with the vision of the matchmaker as it is now, and I believe that has less to do with the specific map and is more just that, a fundamental incompatibility.