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:

• There will only be 2v2 and 1v1 matchmakers (currently known as ladder).
• The ladder tab will be replaced by a more general matchmaker tab, in which you can join any active queue.
• There will be a party system. Players that queue together in a party are guaranteed to be on the same team.
• You can queue by yourself, and a team will be found for you.
• You can join multiple queues at the same time.
• The new matchmaker queue will have its own rating. This new rating will be based on your global rating, but it will assume higher uncertainty. This rating might not be displayed in game, or might be displayed incorrectly. You should not expect to know exactly what your rating is for this initial TMM release.
• We are NOT deleting your global rating. Custom games will continue to function exactly as they do now (provided there are no bugs).

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.

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:

• 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!

Just some dev updates. We (as in mostly @Sheikah) have worked out the basics of how we need to change the database schema and have some code in the works.

Remember that TMM was created primarily in the spirit of facilitating casual play and enticing new players to stick around, so it is my hope that once we have the code changes in place, we can throw up a casual/unrated/global rating queue that incorporates some random maps. Regardless of where the discussion on competitive play goes, I think this is a valuable addition to the matchmaker.

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:

• Lobby server updates
• Fix achievements not working
• Add ANZ coturn server
• Regular kernel and userspace updates
• Regular updates to faf-stack
• Some internal changes to the ZFS setup

Details

Lobby Server

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:

• Ban times are displayed more accurately
• Ladder anti map repetition should work again
• Map generator games are now ranked
• Team kills no longer automatically generate moderation reports
• Ladder games will be rated using the old method, resulting in fewer unrated games

Contributors:

Roughly ordered by amount of contribution. Special thanks to our first time FAF contributors lirael, mapi5032, and 0x647262!

• Askaholic
• UmbraSolis
• lirael
• mapi5032
• 0x647262
• Sheikah
• Brutus5000

For further details check the github release notes: https://github.com/FAForever/server/releases

Achievements Fix

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.

ANZ Coturn Server

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!

Updates to FAF Stack

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.

I fixed the code already, just waiting for someone to deploy it. I pinged the server admins on zulip, hopefully someone will respond.

I would call preventing Square Enix from taking down FAF for copyright infringement a pretty sane reason.

@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.

Basically the way we report achievements is fucked and it needs to be rewritten. Achievements are almost always broken.

The weird thing is that I didn’t even see any errors in the server logs, it appears as though they are being reported to the API just fine, but obviously something is still broken.

@Sir-Prize said in About Neroxis map generator...:

Why an entirely new ladder and pool?

TMM is still lacking the casual element which was a big part of the design. The 2v2 queue we added is still pretty laddery because it has its own rating. I want to see at least one queue that uses global rating so new players can use it to "get out of the grey." Something that has the casual feel of “all welcome” games. It seems that there wouldn’t be as much resistance to adding mapgen to that sort of a queue, so it just feels like a nice way to test out the idea.

@nemir said in Achievements don't work?:

With regards to the ten minute ranked thing... Can you differentiate between a game that was played and one where someone just ctrl-k?

There could probably be some additional restrictions, like make it have a minimum time as well, or check if the ACU was actually killed. I think there are probably some situations where it would be very hard to tell if it was legit or not though.

That is very good to know because that means its a problem in the stat parsing itself and not the achievement reporting.

Just skimming over it I can't actually find any references to checking for ranked games, for game time, or for the number 10 anywhere, so that one might not be implemented? https://github.com/FAForever/server/blob/develop/server/stats/game_stats_service.py

As for the CZAR, the code is there, so I'm guessing the blueprint string is probably wrong: https://github.com/FAForever/server/blob/3a798049dba99677bec126b774f5acd75e188c23/server/stats/unit.py#L22
I think the e in ueb2401 means it's referencing a UEF unit, so I think that's definitely the case.

Edit: Yea, so I guess czars are counting as mavors: https://unitdb.faforever.com/?id=UEB2401,UEB2401

Just some dev updates. We (as in mostly @Sheikah) have worked out the basics of how we need to change the database schema and have some code in the works.

Remember that TMM was created primarily in the spirit of facilitating casual play and enticing new players to stick around, so it is my hope that once we have the code changes in place, we can throw up a casual/unrated/global rating queue that incorporates some random maps. Regardless of where the discussion on competitive play goes, I think this is a valuable addition to the matchmaker.

Basically the way we report achievements is fucked and it needs to be rewritten. Achievements are almost always broken.

The weird thing is that I didn’t even see any errors in the server logs, it appears as though they are being reported to the API just fine, but obviously something is still broken.

Btw I have a cli tool that is able to parse the .scfareplay format. It can at least tell you the in game time for those replays, I don't know if they have the real time though (I kindof doubt it). I can send a windows binary if you want it.

$ fafreplay info 9001733.scfareplay                                                           
processing replay: 9001733.scfareplay
Supreme Commander v1.50.3701 Replay v1.9

The Pyramid 5v5 (00:01:38)
    The Pyramid is now available for 5v5 gameplay. Map edit by Artifax

Team 1
    civilian (AI) 5

Team 2
    NeoTek (0) Aeon

The source code:
https://gitlab.com/Askaholic/faf-replay-parser

It’s not too much work, but it will require some changes to the database schema, which means it will take a while for logistical reasons.

@Dragun101 The game logs whenever it reports a game result. To reproduce you can ctrl-k and the quickly exit the game. At the bottom of the log file you will see that it reports “defeat” for all armies that are currently alive.

See the issue for a summary of work that I’ve already done: https://github.com/FAForever/fa/issues/3087

As ftx posted in this thread already: the problem is the game reports incorrect results sometimes. If we can fix that then we can fix not only this draw bug, but basically all rating issues that exist atm.

I’m not hugely motivated to work on it because first off it’s a bug in either the engine or the lua code, of which I absolve myself of all responsibility, and secondly because I need someone else to test with, which is annoying because of time zones. But if someone sees me online in discord/zulip/Aeolus and wants to volunteer to run some test games, hit me up and I’ll take another look.

The awkward thing is that maps which go into the map pools need to exist in the vault database (there needs to be an entry in the map_version table). I’m not entirely sure what the consequences would be of doing this, they might become searchable in the vault, but then they won’t have any preview images or any map files on the server. And this also doesn’t allow for having actually randomly generated maps. After a while you would learn the generated maps that are currently in the pool.

Btw there is this thread for cool seeds that you find: https://forum.faforever.com/topic/635/neroxis-map-generator-hall-of-fame-seed-vault/3?_=1613805662428