"This game was not rated" in Ladder 1v1

My greetings.
I want to report about the worst ladder system issue right now

I am talking about the case when after a winning of a fair and difficult 1v1 game you have no rating changes because of "This game was not rated". Seriously? Wtf? How is this works? Or ladder is made not for competition?

My friend today had 3 "Not rated" 1v1 ladder wins in a row. And then one lose. Lose was rated, of course. This is just crazy unfair thing.

Fix that, please. That's just turns ladder into a pointless rating roulette instead of a place where hard efforts rewards with some rating points.

Screen one.
Screen two.
Screen three.

The volunteer team is always on the lookout for more people willing to work for free if you want to help them deal with these issues. Otherwise, I'd ease up on the attitude of entitlement.

Both players reported different, conflicting game results. They appear to think they're both on the same team.

https://api.faforever.com/data/game/12389990/playerStats
https://api.faforever.com/data/game/12390064/playerStats
https://api.faforever.com/data/game/12390123/playerStats

This could be a bug in the game code responsible for reporting the results, some issue with the local installation or some deliberate manipulation by a player.

Having issues with connectivity / ICE? Talk to me.

we are going to push a fix for rating. Hopefully this one will actually work.

@Geosearchef said in "This game was not rated" in Ladder 1v1:

deliberate manipulation by a player.

All the screenshots are the same two people playing. Could just be a coincidence?

@keyser hi again
fix was not pushed yet, right?
just another game with this issue happened
Screen

still not pushed, no

playing with one guy, win, "not rated"
same guy, next map, lose, "rated"
pretty fair

2 months passed, still not fixed
i'm crying

Time moves quickly for you

It was supposed to be fixed in the last two patches, but I guess it wasn't. If you both wait until the "Game Over" message appears before leaving or clicking the score button then the games will always count. It has been broken for a lot longer than 2 months and I wouldn't count on it ever being fixed.

Yea, if any of players presses score button before the game is pausing - game becomes "not rated"
Did you lose? Just press "score" button fast enough - and system will forget about that. Ez rating (no, cuz enemy will do the same)

The really sad part is that it most likely could have been fixed a long time ago. It used to be that team games were occasionally not rated properly and ladder games were always rated properly. Then they changed some crap on the server to reverse that. I suggested to just add an if-statement to check if the game was a ladder game and then rate it the way that it used to be done. Askaholic agreed that the solution would probably work and not take very long to implement. However, he doesn't find that solution to be elegant or proper enough, so instead the game is just left in a broken state for several months while he searches for a more tasteful solution. I even offered him money to implement this solution.

Askaholic is one of FAF developers?
holy shit, that sounds awful
while every ladder player suffers from that shit, he's searching "more elegant" solution
i got 2 not rated wins in a row, is this enough elegant?

btw, where can i contact him? github?

should i create new issue on FAF server git?

UPD: ok, i see https://github.com/FAForever/fa/issues/3087

@ETFreeman
Just so you know your are being an ******** here. What the **** is wrong with you. Askaholic is somebody that spends a lot of time and effort in FAF which is if you have not a project run by volunteers. While Askaholic could suely use his programming skills to actually make money(given the time he spends on FAF would be quite some money I guess). Rather he likes donates his time to FAF to deal with people like you.

Soon™️

@axel12
yeah, lets just all shut up and will wait whole ****ing year while ladder is broken and nobody cares
is this your solution?

if he wants money for that fix, i am sure, we can pay for it, but i can't see anywhere anything about "collecting money for ladder rating system fix'

Well, I am really the one being an asshole. I do it intentionally because it is the only way I can see to remedy the issue. I do not care if anyone spends time and effort on FAF, as long as they are actually working in the best interest of the community and not leaving it worse off. There are about 3 people on FAF that might care if there is a hack in the server code and hundreds that care if ladder is working properly. If someone removes a hack from the server code without replacing it with actual working code then FAF has been made worse. The only course of action I have is to convince that person to add the hack back in or to be an asshole to them so that they leave and cannot do any further damage.

This whole attitude that we should be grateful for people spending their free time on FAF is absurd. Pretty much every problem I have encountered on FAF in the last year was created by someone in their spare time. People make changes to the game I didn't want or ask for and break stuff that I do care about in the process. Then I just want a patch to fix the stuff that they broke. The next patch comes and few things get fixed and a few more get broken. I don't really feel like there has been much net progress, certainly not in any areas I care about.

If these people could do something else valuable with their free time then I certainly would prefer that they do that instead of work on FAF. Go make some money, solve real problems in the world, use your skills to help make the world a better place instead of screwing around with this video game for ungrateful nerds.

You should be grateful for people spending their free time on FAF. Else you would have no FAF to complain about in the first place. We don't do it for money. But for fun, to learn, or both. And guess what, we're not perfect and sometimes things break, mistakes are made and some features people like don't work for a while. But that doesn't justify anyone to be an arse. And surely won't convince anyone to fix the issue faster.
One thing stays constant during those times, there are always people so smart, knowing exactly how to fix the issue, claiming its easy to fix, yet I haven't seen a single line of code from them.

Guys, stay cool.

ThomasHiatt brings some valid points. To dismiss them with the argument "all work is voluntary" does not do justice to the matter.

Nevertheless, I would like to start by emphasizing that we have achieved positive results in recent years. The ICE adapter works and has, in my opinion, brought about considerable improvements. The new replay server no longer crashes once a week and generates thousands of broken replays. We have moved the server several times when the old one crashed under load almost every day. All these changes did not go smoothly. Nevertheless, they have improved FAF for everyone, including ThomasHiatt.

None of these improvements would have been possible without the tireless efforts of our volunteers. And none of these projects would ever have gone live if mistakes were not tolerated.

We all try to meet the wishes of the community. These can be bugfixes, small feature requests, but also big tickets like Team Matchmaker or Galactic War.

The basic idea we follow is that when we touch code for a bug or feature, the new code should align with our big tickets. The biggest change at the moment is the Team Matchmaker and it has a big impact on our rating handling.

Now, unfortunately, FAF has another complexity in the interaction of Server<->Client<->Game. People working on the lobby server usually have little knowledge of the game code and vice versa. Unfortunately there are often misunderstandings in communication or bugs in the interaction, especially if server and game are subject to different release cycles. Another problem is the complexity of testing such changes. It cannot be automated and even manual testing is only possible to a very limited extent.

I hope I could make it a bit clear why bugs happen and will continue to happen. The alternative is to stop making any changes until the software slowly dies (yes, software ages, I plan to write a blog article on this topic to explain it in more detail).

So the crucial question is not how to prevent errors, but how best to handle them. And here in this specific case we as developers and especially I as the responsible councilor have failed on several levels in my opinion:

  • We/I did not understand from the community feedback that there is a big problem. For example, I knew that there was a problem, but I had assumed that it only affected a small part of the games.
  • We didn't investigate how many games are affected and we didn't keep any metrics (maybe that's a technical improvement point to take away)
  • And as a result, we have prioritized the problem solution incorrectly

From my point of view it's okay to make room in the forum or elsewhere to escalate the issue, as long as you do so in a respectful and non-personal way. Alternatively, a clarifying conversation with me would have been more effective. That's what I am here for... well, also... somehow.

To cut a long story short: We have understood your distress and a solution proposal is now available that still needs to be evaluated (testing is difficult again, so it will probably be a shot in the dark...). Hopefully it can be rolled out with the planned server update in 3 days.

"Nerds have a really complicated relationship with change: Change is awesome when WE'RE the ones doing it. As soon as change is coming from outside of us it becomes untrustworthy and it threatens what we think of is the familiar."
– Benno Rice