Hello everyone,

we almost completed all required steps to finally have queues that are bigger than 2v2. The main roadblock was having an algorithm that can handle the premade teams of various sizes, that queue up, while still producing good matches. I wrote that algorithm over the last months and we tested it successfully in June. Recently we finally merged the code into the develop branch after making sure the code quality and test coverage was up to standards.
We are now testing new code that will handle the rating initalization for the new tmm rating. Once that has been merged we can make a server release to deploy the new code. Once that is in effect, the new matchmaking code will also be used for 2v2 matching. It is possible that there will be a short delay until we have added the new queues in the database. Once that is done, the new matchmaker queues will appear in the client. A client update is not required.

I will write a separate post about how the new matchmaker code works in the near future.

Of course we will also inform you when the update is in effect, but I guess you will notice that pretty soon if you regularly play matchmaker games.

What will be coming?

We will be releasing the following:

1. 4v4 No Share - also know as Share Until Death
2. 4v4 Fullshare

A combination of the ladder and development teams reviewed the content available for release of the two matchmakers, along with the player councilor discussing feedback from the players. In the end we determined that the two matchmakers for 4v4 would be best to accommodate the desires of the playerbase.

Differences between the two new queues

Per feedback from conversation with players, it was determined that there is a large desire for a matchmaker similar to typical custom games where players can find a more relaxed game experience. So the queues will work like this:

• Share Until Death is enabled - keeping ACU snipes as a viable option to end the game.
• more 10x10 and less 20x20 maps - keep the ratio of 20x20 lower for more relaxed play
• Unique Rating

For the Fullshare Matchmaker:

• Fullshare is enabled - keeps games playable after losing a player
• more 20x20 and less 10x10 maps - more spread out games, similar to a Seton's experience
• Unique Rating

Both queues will use your global rating and add some more deviation on top to initialize the new matchmaker ratings. After that your wins or losses in global won't affect them, just like the other queues. With this we want to avoid that pro players will get matched randomly with lower players like it happened with the initial 2v2 release. The deviation increase will still allow you to reach a new rating quickly if you are under- or overrated in global. It will also make your displayed rating approximately 400 points lower until your deviation has settled again.

Why is there no 3v3 matchmaker being released?

Quite simply, we wanted to bring a matchmaker that would be most appealing to a wider audience. In addition, the following issues exist:

• There are very, very little 3v3 maps in the map vault
• 3v3 is the rarest form of gameplay
• We want to test the 4v4 matchmaker to make adjustments, if necessary, before adding another queue

What needs to happen before release?

We need all people to use a client version that can handle different per-queue game options, most importantly different share conditions. The newest client version (v2021.10.0) has that capability. With an old client you would still see the queues, but the game would refuse to start. Because of this we will need to set the minimum required client version to that version, so everybody will be forced to update. This means it is especially important that this new version doesn't have any big issues and we will only increase the required client version when we are positive that this is the case. So check it out here: https://github.com/FAForever/downlords-faf-client/releases

The other thing that needs to happen is deploying the new server update. We can't really give an estimate when that will happen, because Brutus is very busy at the moment.

Note that the deployment of the new queues is more like a configuration change and separate from the server update and client release. As explained above we can't give an exact date yet, but I estimate some time in the next few weeks is realistic. We will keep you updated when we have a release date.

Hello everyone,

after over one and a half years of developement the first season of the new league system is now live. Every matchmaking queue has it's separate division ranking. By playing the matchmaker you will get placed in a suitable division after your placement games. You can then see your division in the appropriate leaderboard tab and the matchmaking tab next to your name. You will earn or lose points by winning or losing and will thus move up or down to the next division. To see the new leaderboards you need at least client version 2021.12.0.
We will gather your feedback after the first season. Of course you can already post your thoughts in this thread.

Altough I am the guy that kept this particular project moving, it would have not been possible to achieve without a lot of work of other contributors, namely:
UmbraSolis,
Sheikah,
Askaholic,
Brutus5000,
kubko,
and many others that helped me. Thank you so much for all your support that made it possible for me, starting with only little coding knowldege, to implement such a big project!

As I've seen it brought up more often lately I would like to ask everyone to not immediatly bring up the "unpaid volunteer" argument when someone complains about things in a rude manner.
I know you mean well when bringing this up, but firstly, it is irrelevant as we would expect civility even if everybody was paid here, and secondly, it can lead to the impression that you can't criticise decisions because they were made by volunteers in their freetime, which is simply not true.
Thank you

Hello everyone,

it is time for an update on the progress that has been made on the league system. I believe the last post was this one: https://forum.faforever.com/topic/311/graphic-artist-wanted

We have decided to use petrics artwork. You can find his post here: https://forum.faforever.com/topic/311/graphic-artist-wanted/23
You may remember that we originally planned to release the league system alongside the team matchmaker. That was last christmas, or in other words over 9 months ago. So what happened? To answer this I will give you some insight into the developing process:

First some basics: The FAF client communicates with our lobby server and additionally gets some info from our API. Persistent information, like your rating, gets stored in the database, so it can be accessed by the server or the client by using the api whenever necessary.
We wanted the league system to be not part of the lobby server but to be a separate, independed service. This has the benefit that we can update, shut off, restart etc. the league system without having to touch the lobby server. This allows us to deploy updates without having to restart the server and in consequence have everybody kicked and the currently running games destroyed. The league service even has its own database to store the league data.

So far so good. But actually implementing this was way more difficult than I anticipated. I mentioned that the client queries the API for information. We want this separation of the server to be abstracted away from the client, so all data should be available from the same API. This is actually difficult, because the api has to get access to both databases. But the standard configuration assumes there is only one database. Elide, the library we use for our API can handle the case of several databases, but this requires a reconfiguration. This needs special knowledge, so kubko did the job (Thank you kubko!). However, nobody told kubko that other work couldn't continue until this was solved, so he treated it as low priority until several weeks later we talked about this and I was made aware that this information got lost.
This actually illustrates really well, why the development of the league project happens so slow. This project touches so many different aspects of FAF. It needs changes in at least six different repositories on github, each with their own relase cycles, and many depending on one another. This makes it extremely easy that one part is bottlenecking the rest.

Another example: The league service was actually already running for quite a while, the server sends info messages about games that the league service can read to trigger changes of the players' league scores. However UmbraSolis and me didn't really pay attention to the format of the messages. The league service read these messages, but failed to parse them. Worse, we realized that we actually need different info from the server. So now we needed to change the league service to accept the new message format This was relatively quick to be done, but it reuqired another server and league service relase.

Add to all of this the normal issues of a volunteer project where random people randomly don't have time for some weeks due to the job, university, holidays or whatever and you arrive at the pace that you see. This also illustrates well why we can't really give estimates when a feature will be ready. It is so uncertain how much time people will be able to spend on a project and new issues that need to be dealt with before a release pop up constantly.

Right now the league service is functional and already processing game results for a test season I started. The client UI is also mostly working now. This screenshot is using real data from the test season.

As you can see it is already in a good state, but there are still some things that need to be worked on, like the number of placement games not being relayed. I also need to alter the division distribution because right now, almost nobody gets placed in bronze and we get a bit too much grandmaster players.

The additional UI is quite a large change to the client code, so even when it is ready the new code needs to be reviewed properly and this will also take some time. Because of this it will not make it into the October release. Maybe it will be ready in November if everything is largely smooth sailing from now on.

The only definite release date estimate is - as always- soonTM.

Today I've been able to take a look into the server log from our testing session. It confirmed that things went well. So the test was a success! Thanks again to everyone that helped me with testing!
There are some minor touch ups to do and we also have to set everything up for the production environment, so don't expect a release next week, but we are getting close to a finish line now. If nothing unexpected happens, we can probably see a release in a few weeks.

Good to know that only othe player councillor can host tournaments

Eco manager not only manages your mass fabs, but can entirely prevent shield stalls when your power gets sniped if it finds enough other things to turn off. This can be a pretty substantial advantage.
In my opinion any UI mod that automatically pauses units for you should be banned. We could still integrate automatic toggling of mass fabs or other elements that we find too tedious to manually do, but I think that it is important that we discuss what kind of automation we accept, integrate that and ban additional automations. Ideally we would prevent UI mods from being able to pause units entirely, but I am not sure if that is possible.
The arguments that you can't ban UI mods are not really convincing to me, as we have banned UI mods that automate reclaim and unit movements in the past. We don't have floods of reuploads or reports about them and even if we can't 100% prevent their use it is important to have these rules to communicate what we deem acceptable and what we consider cheating. In tournaments and select high level games we can actually enforce these rules and the same rules should apply to all players.

And in real life no sane person unironically argues for the abolition of all speed limits because you can't catch every speeder as well.

In my board member application I mentioned the idea to have regular meetings where we can share knowledge, exchange ideas or discuss questions.

The first meeting will be this Friday, 29th at 17:00 UTC in discord.

There is no set time limit, everybody is welcome. I especially want to invite the new team leaders, I'm sure you have questions or things to discuss. I envision this as a possibility to connect and to have some space to talk without a set agenda.

I will do this somewhat regularly, but I don't know how often yet.

See you soon

I see a lot of "FtX ignores the lower rated players" but not a lot of specifics, so here are some thoughts and some questions I have so we can maybe see how much merit this statement has.

One aspect I saw mentioned, is that there are almost no tournaments for lower rated players. I think that is a fair observation and we could really use more of these. Morax also recently pointed this out in a separate thread. Luckily Suzuji seems to be very motivated to organize some. And because you don't need to be PC to be a tournament director, I'm looking forward to seeing some tournaments from him regardless how this election goes.

It seems like Emperor_Penguin and the players he knows are very unhappy with the maps in the ladder pool. Can you elaborate why the pool "doesn’t prioritize regular player preference, fun, playerbase growth, and new player retention anywhere near as much as it should"?
Also what exactly do low rated players desire, when talking about mapsize is apparently not it? What are these same things that they all dislike as Valki said? And how do you determine that what you and the people you talked to is representative to the playerbase as a whole? I am about 1k rated myself and I generally like the pool. I think the rating brackets for the pool are a good solution to give lower rated players maps that are easier to play.

Polling lower rated people is really difficult because their community interaction is really low. Many don't even read the news. Only a server message to all boosted the poll result numbers significantly and I don't want to have everyone bothered by popups every month.

I'd also like to hear some examples of the "toxic/derogatory attitude/rhetoric", because the dictator FtX meme gets hinted at a lot, but so far nobody bothered to explain what egregious things he has apparently done. To me it seems that some people are disgruntled because he denied their proposed changes/maps/ideas. In my experience, everytime this happened was because the ideas or maps were not well thought out (i.e. had negative implications that the proposer didn't think of, or didn't even adress the root problem but merely a symptom), were of low quality or simply not feasible (hello low dev resources).

There is no point in having a custom game leaderboard. PLayers have so much control what maps and positions and with whom they play, that a rating comparison of different players makes no sense, which is the whole purpose of a leaderboard.
In this community we are already an outlier by providing rated custom games. Many other games don't even do that.

It's possible that the league service that updates these tables didn't survive the latest server outage. We are investigating.

Iirc the client chooses a faction for you when you play matchmaker. The only way to be playing as random in the sense of these statistics is to select random in a custom lobby

Is seeing a lab through the fog of war that big of a deal? From the gifs I would have to actively look at that area to be able to notice the visual differences. That means I don't do anything else in that time, which is a pretty high cost. It looks like the main visual difference comes from different LOD values, can't we align them, so the tree group looks basically the same when it got broken?

Regarding the breaking of tree groups on purpose: People complain about build orders being too OP all the time. We have a tool here to disrupt the enemy's build order, but this is now unwanted too? I would like to hear some more explanation why you want to get rid of this mechanic. Do you take issue with the fact that the unit doesn't need to shoot to do damage? I think it's a creative use of the game's mechanics to counter a greedy build order and it's one of the very few options when your own build order is inferior.

If we still want to lessen the impact of broken tree groups we could play with the mass adjustment for broken groups. That has already been done once and that way we don't have to introduce additional complexity, where some units arbitrarily break trees while others don't. Plus we can keep the nice visuals of a lab crushing trees while running through a forest.

It seems like you want the brush to not be as efficient as maual reclaim, but then the whole "people don't need to manual reclaim anymore" falls flat, as they will still see the pros do it and think it is important. If it's not supposed to completely replace manual reclaim it's just redundant because it provides a middle ground to two options which both have their role. We don't need another option that is a bit of both. One of the extremes will always be the better option.

Regardless of the above, I feel this feature would just collapse because of the processing power requirements that it will have.
You claim that is possible to implement it in a way that is not laggy, while still providing better pathfinding to the reclaim targets than attack move. Yet when looking at the details all evidence seems to point to the contrary. At this point you need to go into more details how you think you can solve this and why it would still be a good feature even with the limitations you need instead of handwaving the problems away with "we'll limit the number of commands somehow".

Honestly the lack of an area reclaim brush seems to be a non-issue to me.
We have attack move that acts as a big circular brush (that you can't drag). Sure, it's more clunky than a paintable brush, but it's not like there is no way to automate reclaim. The added utility of such a feature doesn't outweight the drawbacks we have to consider.
When such a brush exists people will obviously very generously paint the map with it. Jip already mentioned the burden on the command queue. So we need something to limit the amount of orders it generates. If you limit the brush size too much it is clunky to use again, if you limit the commands in some technical way, you get inconsistent behaviour that will look like a bug to the players. You also need to find a good way to sort the order of the reclaim orders to come close to manual reclaim efficiency, which seems to be what you want.
So we do all this to deal with the consequences of easier reclaim mechanics when manual reclaim is not at all relevant to win games. Manual reclaim is boring to me, so I just don't do it. The average amount of manual reclaim orders I issue per game is probably less than 10. I got to a 1000 rating and I certainly don't feel that I am outmatched by the superior reclaim skills of my opponents if I wanted to climb higher.
We don't need complicated QoL improvements for features that are not relevant. If you don't want to click rocks then just micro your tanks instead. There is nothing stopping you other than the collective delusion that you somehow need to manual reclaim all the time to be good. And I honestly don't know where that comes from. It's at most used at the start of the game when there isn't really anything else to do anyway. If you make this faster, what will you do with your idle time instead?

I added a circle like this to the additional camera stuff mod

So what makes a game feel modern?

Did many (or all?) units constantly recheck targets before?

Degradation for the matchmaking queues is unnecessary as we have the league system now. When you haven't played in a while you are unlisted again, so it basically achieves the same effect.
For customs the root of the problem is that the custom games are ranked at all. But if anyone dares to mention the idea to unrank custom games, people pull out the pitchforks again.
In reality most people will be back at roughely their old rating after a few games, so they just have to bite the bullet and play.