Team Matchmaker beta release NOW AVAILABLE!

The matchmaker is now playable on FAF using the client build linked here, but before you download it please read over these important notes:

• If you do not see the 2v2 queue, restart your client. This is a known bug.
• To prevent game setup from timing out, make sure to install all maps in the map pool prior to queuing. For now this needs to be done manually.

Now that you have read the important notes above, you can download the client installer from here:
https://github.com/FAForever/downlords-faf-client/releases/tag/v1.4.0-RC2

After some 2 odd years of working on the team matchmaker I'm really happy to see it released to the community in a mostly playable capacity. Of course there is still a way to go until it becomes stable enough to be merged into the official client branch, but we are making progress.

The main feature that Team Matchmaking adds is a 2v2 queue which works similar to the current ladder queue. You can join this queue by yourself and be matched with a teammate automatically, or you can use the new party system to queue together with a teammate of your choosing. The 2v2 queue uses its own rating which is completely separate from global and ladder 1v1 ratings, however this third rating is currently only visible in the replay vault. Your 2v2 rating will be initialized based on your global rating (trueskill mean remains the same but deviation is increased) so it's likely that you will match with people who have similar global rating as you.

As I said in my previous post, for the time being the matchmaker will only be available by downloading the pre-release version of the client linked above. If you have any feedback or find any bugs, you can leave your reports in discord (#faf-testing), the forum, or GitHub.

There are a few known bugs that you may want to be aware of (please don't make bug reports for these).

• Sometimes queues randomly don't show up.
• Accepting an invite after the party owner has already started a queue will cause the party to become locked until that person leaves again (the owner can't kick them, and cannot leave the queue).
• There is no way to prevent people from sending you party invites (other than foeing them individually).

Special thanks to everyone who has volunteered their time and effort to make Team Matchmaking happen!
@biass
@BlackYps
@Brutus5000
@FtXCommando
@Geosearchef
@umbrasolis

And shout out to our amazing testers who helped us find countless bugs already!

Happy FAFfing and happy holidays!

The 2v2 Pool for the beta.

Also, still looking for people interested in joining the matchmaker team for 2v2 pool/map curation.

https://discord.com/invite/hgvj6Af

We've added voice rooms for teams to play together on the FAF Discord alongside a text channel to find people interested in playing the beta with you.

Going to test this now myself, but noticed we may need to post install instructions here for the less tech inclined.
Such as: does this overwrite the original if installed over it or just don't do that if you want to keep both.

I have no problems so far after 3 games. Thanks a lot for making this possible! I love it.

This is amazing! you guys are the absolute bomb!

Had my first match and it matched us (1500+900) against a similar pair, seems like really good luck.

I do not even know where to begin. I was really hoping this worked well, but it ended up being GREAT.

A big thanks to everyone for adding this wonderful features, hope I can help out in some way and say "thanks" : D

After playing quite a few games over the last days and participating in the rush for the highest rating I must say that this is truly amazing, never before was I able to just come online and play games during non prime times without the need to wait in a lobby sim for 30+ minutes. After the ratings are settled I believe that sadly TMM will die out in the 2k+ bracket (although I really hope it won't be the case) but for the rest of the players it's a huge game changer. I believe that TMM will help a lot of players get better at the game and allow them to experience the huge variety of maps and strategies FA has to offer. There are few bugs but they are minor and everything is working really really well especially considering this is just a beta. It's already awesome and it's gonna be even better when there will be full release as well as the addition of leagues/divisions.
Overall huge thanks and hats off to everyone involve with the project.

I have also played several games,it feels really good,would have probably change the map pool since some maps were giving me aids.It's a great choice over the abominational t3 mex rushes in teamgames,good work so far.
let's just hope we can keep up the queue!

In a regular ladder game yesterday, it showed my global rating on the scoreboard (SSB v6), I've never seen that before

Is there a way to initialize trueskill with values other than zero? I understand the system doesn't like it if you go in and just tweak the numbers. It wants to learn from actual matches. But can't you programatically make fake matches in order to generate ratings? For example: if you have 1000 players to add to TMM, have the system "match" them up at random for 2v2s and decide who wins these fake games based on global/ladder rating. Make let's say 10-20 fake games each and use that info to build initial 2v2 ratings. (More fake games should give more accurate initial ratings but less deviation so it will be slower to correct the ratings.) The number of fake games per player might be based on the number of real games they have. If they are close to zero rating anyway or they have fewer than 50 real games in the last year, don't put them into any "fake" games because it's fine for them to start with zero.

If we are going to have more and more ratings systems (3v3, 4v4, seton's, special events, etc.) it would make sense to start most of them with ratings other than zero. Maybe a special event "race to the top" starting at zero makes sense. But for a Seton's rating, you could invent the fake matches with data from actual ranked seton's 4v4 games from each player's history.

@Askaholic said in Team Matchmaker beta release NOW AVAILABLE!:

Your 2v2 rating will be initialized based on your global rating (trueskill mean remains the same but deviation is increased) so it's likely that you will match with people who have similar global rating as you.

You can initialize the rating as whatever you want. It is just a number in a database. The system does not have any likes or dislikes since it is just some lines of code on a computer and not a sentient being.

I wanna broach the fullshare topic... I love it personally. Feels just right that way.

what's the frequency of the pool change?

It won't be changing during the beta.

I am able to launch replays while I am in the TMM queue. Is that a mistake? Can I be chosen for a game while the replay is open? What happens if I am picked for a team while the replay is open?

@arma473 Good question. We'll probably have to disable that. We've made a note of it.

@arma473 @Askaholic Currently it appears the players get stuck in "setting up automatch" while the other player stays in the replay.

I was ejected from a custom game because the game launched and they did not allow observers. It said I can't queue because it thought I was in a match.

I also had a couple of issues when leaving custom games early and then trying to queue. It tells me I am still ingame. Refafing fixes that but in combination with the tmm ui not loading 1/2 of the time this problem is annoying.

Also soloqueue also displays global rating ingame. I think a couple of people were more afraid of me than they had to be

Also the rating dependent map selection seems to be working a bit weird. I suppose it works by the shown 2v2 rating (µ-3*sigma). For instance I got canis multiple times despite being very far from 1800 rated. Also avrg of all players was far from 1800. Now the question is did I understand smth wrong, did Brutus get a wrong list or maybe made a mistake when entering the maps into the system or is there an error in the code?

But so far it has been a nice experience.