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Lobby server maintainer https://github.com/FAForever/server
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:
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.
!subscribe Tester
About a month ago I posted about our plans to release the Team Matchmaker towards the end of December or early January. I wanted to follow up on that post to say that we are still on schedule with that timeline.
At the end of this week, we will be entering an "opt-in beta" phase of the matchmaker release. This means sometime around the 25th of December we will make another forum post with a download link to a special version of the FAF client that you can use to start playing TMM. The matchmaker will remain in this "opt-in" state for an as yet undefined amount of time until we have had a chance to evaluate the matchmaker's performance and squash any remaining critical bugs.
The more people opt-in, the shorter the wait times will be, so please help me spread the news!
The matchmaker is now playable on FAF using the client build linked here, but before you download it please read over these important notes:
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).
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!
Note: As a result of the server update you must update your client to version 1.2.0 for it to properly display the game list.
The next server downtime is scheduled for the 24th of September 2020 at 06:00 UTC. During the downtime the following updates will be applied:
This release consists mostly of bugfixes courtesy of our first time contributors (see below) as well as server enforcement of lobby rating ranges. With future client support, the rating ranges you select for your lobbies will mean that players who don't fall into the desired range will not be shown your lobby. So make sure you check those min and max rating fields before hosting a game!
There are also some internal generalizations of the matchmaking system which are working toward team matchmaker support. So stay tuned, team matchmaking may only be a few releases away!
Other noteworthy changes:
Contributors:
Roughly ordered by amount of contribution. Special thanks to our first time FAF contributors lirael, mapi5032, and 0x647262!
For further details check the github release notes: https://github.com/FAForever/server/releases
Due to a configuration issue, the lobby server was unable to authenticate with the API, and therefore was not able to post achievement progress updates. This will be fixed.
Thanks to the work of the FAF Council and Paul Wayper, we will be enabling the use of a secondary coturn server located in Australia. The coturn server is responsible for relaying game data between players which allows you to connect and play with people across the globe. However, it can also be responsible for high latency if you are located physically far away from Europe (such as in Austrailia or New Zealand). Our hope is that the addition of this new server will reduce the latency between players in Oceania and players in the rest of the world. So let us know if you notice a difference!
See the github release notes: https://github.com/FAForever/faf-stack/releases
@tatsu Looks cool but I think just changing the size makes it pretty hard to tell between the sub tiers. Like if you just see one of them you won't be sure if it's tier 2 or 3 because they both look too similar.
Here's my idea, although I'm not particularly good at the graphics so maybe someone wants to take inspiration from it and come up with their own version, or just use this as a base and make it better. Go for it, you have full permission!
Divisions are differentiated by color, sub-divisions are differentiated by the number of stripes or stars and the final tier gets its own special icon. I tried to go for the commander mask, but it could be anything so long as it strikes fear into the hearts of your enemies.
I guess you need to be careful with colors because of colorblindness, so maybe the border should get progressively more fancy as you go up divisions. Something like
Bronze -> no border Silver -> Top and bottom Gold -> Full border plain Diamond -> Full border embellished Master -> Even more embellished
Anyway, I've spent too much time making this already
Edit: I worked on polishing it up and heres what I came up with. I kindof made the mistake of assuming the rank numbers increase as you gain rank, but it's supposed to be the opposite. These icons make more sense if subdivision 5 is the top and 1 is the bottom.
Yea it still needs to be implemented in the client. Right now it just tries to guess based on the game title.
@Cascade I like the idea of the second highest tier being “Support Commander”, although it’s visually very similar to “Supreme Commander” and has the same initials.
Those look awesome. One thing I've been thinking about though are the roman numerals, as a lot of ideas have included them, but I am not convinced that they're the way to go.
The issue I have is that their progression doesn't make sense visually. Like, we go from additional lines meaning higher number: I, II, III, to all of a sudden fewer lines meaning higher number: IV, V. It kindof breaks with the whole idea of having more stuff mean higher number. You can see in @tatsu's first submission that the IV has to get squeezed in with a smaller font in order to fit in the same space. Plus when you read roman numerals like IV, you are forced to do math in your head: "lets see... IV means I -> 1 and V -> 5 so I need to swap the order and subtract 5-1=4!". And sure, you can expect most people to just have this memorized because of experience, but I just feel like there must be a more intuitive way to represent the tier than roman numerals.
For example here is a little modification I threw together in a few minutes: I think it's pretty clear what each of those means without me needing to explain anything, and actually looks pretty good too (ignoring the sloppiness). No need to do math as our brains are naturally able to count objects (up to about 7 or 8 I believe). It could be any object really, stripes or diamonds, or circles; I just thought the 5 pointed star fit nicely inside of the pentagon.
@biass thoughts?
The league system will solve this problem without the need to touch trueskill. The trueskill value will remain the same but you will not have it displayed anywhere. Instead you have your league and points displayed which will reset every season.
From what I know, TMM and divisions/leagues are completely separate. Neither is waiting for the other, they just both happen to have a similar expected completion date. Both of them are pretty much complete, and are facing the usual logistical delays of finding time for server updates, code reviews, testing, etc.
@Eternal said in What I think about the timer in the Ladder/TMM?:
@FtXCommando I'm infuriated by these 3 minutes, and the list of players who can't connect because they're not queal.
Go host a custom game and play lobby sim for 30 minutes then.
@Sheikah I changed the link in the post
@arma473 Good question. We'll probably have to disable that. We've made a note of it.
You can start playing TMM now! Download link is available in this post: https://forum.faforever.com/topic/854/team-matchmaker-beta-release-now-available
Wow. And a rating of *3322+
@archsimkat I’ll let @FtXCommando answer those questions as he is responsible for those decisions.