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!

The server update today brought an adjustment to the matchmaking algorithm for the team queues.
The main goal was to enable people near the edges of the rating distribution to be matched with higher priority. This hopefully solves the problem that the very top and bottom players find it very hard or even impossible to find matches. At the same time we tried to further improve the quality of the resulting games with some other tweaks.
This means that the average difference between total ratings of the two teams in 4v4 should be about half of what we had previously. The rating differences between individual players should also be about half for most games. Very high level and low level games will probably not see much difference here. We should also be able to see more high level games.
This is all made possible with an average wait time increase of just 2-3 minutes.

We also lowered the matching timer to 90 seconds to make it less disheartening if you did not get matched in a round.

Speaking of matches, with the new algorithm it is expected that the number of waiting players will regularly exceed the number of theoretically required people for a game, sometimes by a lot. It is not a bug if nobody or just a few people get matched in such a situation! The algorithm requires a pool of people to be able to pick good matches. If the games possible with the current people are not good enough, the algorithm will wait for more people to show up, and if that doesn't happen it will reduce the quality threshold by a bit for those that are already waiting.
When there are many people in the queue that means that there will be low wait times, so don't be discouraged even if you don't get matched immediately.

Please leave feedback below. I am especially interested if the situation improved for high rated players.

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.

I run some tests with the matchmaker and I agree that the matching is not ideal at the moment. There are two things we want to do.

1. Improve the game quality in general
2. Find a way to bias the matchmaker to high rated games somehow.

The first one is relatively easy to achieve, as we can tune config values of the matchmaker. The second one is a bit harder as this requires that the matchmaker doesn't match a semi-high rated player with lower players, so he still stays in queue until more high rated people show up. This is not trivial to do and requires to find some sort of metric that consistently does this first.

I have a script to run the matchmaker with test data and plot the results. If someone wants to try to modify the matchmaker code or to just try different config settings, then I can happily share my script.
In the meantime here is a comparison of the current config values and the new ones I came up with.
Current:

New one:

As you can see there is always a tradeoff between game quality and wait time in queue.
With these particular settings I believe we strike a nice balance between quality and wait time.
This will lead to more people "floating" in queue and not getting matched immediately. This is what allows the matchmaker to pick better matches. It may have the nice side effect that you can actually gauge the queue activity from the amount of people in queue, even shortly after a queue pop. (E.g. 20 people in queue -> high activity, 10 people in queue -> rather low activity.

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.

I think with the right tuning the suggestions in the OP could lead to more interesting bombing decisions. Right now engies are basically the only viable targets, because they die in one pass, while the power in the base needs multiple. A weaker but cheaper bomber could allow you to make two to one-pass either engies or power in the base. So you can now either commit to multiple early bombers and do a lot of damage, or make only one and have less harassment with fewer cost.
Having more vulnerable pgens could also be nice for later raids, right now engies die so much faster than pgens that it's hardly worth it to target pgens instead of buildpower when a raid gets into the base.

Hello everyone,

Today I will present to you an icon mod I made. I recently got a WQHD monitor and on that resolution the default strategic icons are just too small for my eyes. So I wanted to upscale the icons a bit and at the same time try to improve the readability even further.

The most noticable change are the tech markers. For example I found it too difficult to spot if there are T2 tanks mixed into a T1 army. So as a first step I got rid of a marker for T1 alltogether as it is redundant. The next problem I had was to distinguish T2 and T3, as it is not so easy to see at a glance if there are two or three markers under a unit. Especially when icons overlap and look like a T3 marker. So I changed the T3 marker to a bar. The noticable amount of white color in a blob of units makes it easy to immediatly recognize that these are T3.
I kept the symbols pretty vanilla for the most part, but I tried to increase the "boldness" of the symbols where possible. Originally I did this because a one pixel thick line is not so easy to spot on 1440p, but then I noticed that a different visual boldness makes the icons easier to differentiate without having to process the exact shape. Our brain is better at recognizing colors than shapes. The colors are already taken by the teamcolors, so the amount of black in the icon is the next best thing we have. Note that there is no real hirarchy in what units are bolder. This is mainly because the small pixel size restricts how the symbols can be made without looking weird. I did try to make arty and missile units bolder as I saw it fitting that these are more visible.
And that is basically all I did. I'm personally not a fan of emphasizing individual buildings like SML or TML, so I tried to keep the general feel close to the vanilla icons. If you want more of a revamp of the icons, then there are other icon mods that focus more on that.

The mod will be available in the mod tab of the client as Reworked Strategic Icons once I managed to upload it.
EDIT: It is now uploaded.
I'm very interested in your feedback on this mod!

Here is a breakdown of all included icons

I don't understand it either. You would have to talk to him directly to hear his reasoning

@jip said in Split matchmaker into mapgen and regular map queues:

I like the idea of @maudlin27 , reasons being:

• (1) 6 players are less prone to startup problems (not connecting)
• (2) 6 players are less prone to connectivity problems in general (lag)
• (3) 6 players is almost guaranteed that the game can be played from start to finish with no sim slow downs (assuming 600+ units per player means we end up with with about 3600 units, which is far less then what a budget cpu is able to run soon)
• (4) 6 players is unusual meta wise, and there is likely no dedicated air slot

It would also prevent us from having six queues, even though you can enter multiple queues.

This sounds more like arguments against 4v4 in general than being mapgen-specific. Why do you think 6 queues would be too much but 4 would be ok?

It has been suggested before, but then it kinda went quiet again. I suggest that we put the random map generator maps into their own matchmaker queues so we got two queues per team size. One with custom maps only and one with map gen maps only for a total of six. This way everyone can choose if they want to play only with or without mapgen or a mix of both by multiqueueing.

It is possible that some queues might see a lot less activity, but firstly I don't think that is very likely and secondly we can monitor this and then think of a way to make the experience better. As a last resort we could remove some queues again if we see that they are totally dead, but I really don't expect this to happen.

Now, before the "I want my setons/dual gap/whatever queue" dudes inevitably show up: This is not comparable. Map gen has been in literally every map pool so far, so we are basically only splitting the pool. No classic map is included in the pool all the time.

The author of that tool doesn't want to make it open source. As long as that is the case it can't be an official part of the project

That, and I don't even know what utilitarian, industrial, and ethereal is even supposed to mean in this context, making the graph almost devoid of any meaning.

I assume the change for land factories to start building as soon as the unit has left the platform instead of a time delay could be the cause for this change

I guess Physics.MaxGroundVariation 0.5 causes the unit to only tilt half the angle of the ground? Have you tried how setting all structures to a value like 0.5 or 0.8 looks like? I think it would be nice to still keep a hint of a "platform" for the structures. With the new feature it can look kind of wonky sometimes, it deprives the buildings of any sense of weight or heavyness.

With instabuild on air factories used to be able to produce many units per second. Someone could check if that is still the case

To load MBs in milliseconds you need gigabit speed. Only a handful of people will have this.
We could embed a YouTube video in the website if you feel we need a video. I think this would have more opportunity to "sell" the game as well as the graphics are not revolutionary or anything compared to modern standards. So I doubt that a few tanks exploding will automatically create the emotional effect you want to have.

BAR doesn't try to pack in an almost full-screen video. They are much smaller, so they can afford to load it.
Animating such a big part of the website would probably be visually overwhelming anyway