Posts made by Katharsas

Ok i think the formula makes sense, except checking top_player. If there are a top player and a noob in the same team it will probably already create bad uniformity right?

However, for finding good parameters, i would have to code that formula up and try it with varying numbers, cannot really tell anything from your example calculations. So yeah i don't think you will get much use out of the forum for that^^

Okay, what does deviation = stats.pstdev(ratings) do?

@humanpotatoe said in Alternative to game quality indicator - Handicaps/Bonuses:

trueskill is useless for anything other than 1v1, and even there whoever controls the map pool and decides what the reclaim values are on each map effect that rating. whoever controls it now loves rocks and spam heavy gameplay

You are trolling right? Please leave this discussion if you have nothing of value to add.

Any idea that changes the probabilities of a games outcome significantly based on player rating, be it by unit balance, or by adding prebuilt structures, kills Trueskill ability to work correctly.

Edit:
Let me clearer on that:

The rating of a player must never influence the game rules, because otherwise you break the maths and the world explodes.

And this is probably true for most rating systems.

I assume all players in that list have a newbie bonus of 0?
Search(['p7', 'p8', 'p9'], 925.3333333333334) means those 3 players are in the queue together, and 925 is their average rating?

Questions about algorithm:
What is inside the match array?
rating_imbalance = abs(match[0].cumulated_rating - match[1].cumulated_rating)
What is match[0] / match[1] reffering to?
Why is has_top_player() important and what does it do?

@funkoff said in Alternative to game quality indicator - Handicaps/Bonuses:

In the context of equal teams in FPS games, yes. However, truskill was never intended for use in RTS games or in game with unequal numbers of players in each team.

Trueskills is a mathematical model of player skill. It does not matter in which genre. What can matter however, is how a certain game mode works, so yes it could have problems with how Trueskil expects player skill to add up in teams.

Your suggestion however, does nohing to fix that problem. I turns gameplan from a good player trying to carry a bad team to a good player trying to exploit the bonuses of his team mate in the best way possible.
It makes the entire game unpredictable and inconsistent (you now longer know much damage ANYTHING does to each other) and in a way unlearnable, or rather increases the skill gap massively because you now need to learn how every units properties scale with malus/bonus level.
And it adds an entire dimension of balance maintenance work. Not gonna happen.

So, here are the two solutions to the problem:

• Change Trueskill to model how bad players can be a net negative for the team by preventing a better player from gaining more mex spots. Not gonna happen.
• Change the game so that a dying low rated player no longer gives any additional mex spots to the team. For example by removing core mex spots on death. However, that changes a whole bunch of other dynamics related to player deaths and share conditions.

Could you randomly generate some imaginary players with rating values/number of games, put them into random teams, and then calculate the quality? Without concrete examples its rally hard to judge such an algorithm.

Edit: And throw away examples where fairness is too far off.

Excellent idea. Some things:

• Make sure that the replay runs generally at least two minutes in realtime, so that we can have a chance of seeing CPU throttling kicking in.
• We should integrate it into the client eventually (maybe even gather hardware information automatically), the client would then produce a "text result" that people can just copy into the thread and that we can ask them to do when they create a "performance is bad" thread.
• Is there some way for the game to calculate average FPS via a mod? Would be nice to get the full picture.

the Cybran how thing is messing with your intel

Thats not true. Cybrans thing is stealth., not "messing with yout Intel". UEF have false radar signatures on frigates. So you could argue that actually a mechanic like this would be more fitting on a UEF unit than a cybran unit.

But even then, you don't need to treat it as a threat. You just have to zoom in. Thats my whole point. A simple mechanical action like using your scrollwheel completely invalidates any use of this as a strategy, so its stupid to give this any strategic value.

If this was ever actually intended, then when the unit would move out of radar-only-vision into true vision, the icon would change. But this is not the case, so it is 99% not intended.

Stop claiming that "icon confusion" was intended by the devs.

• You have no idea if that is true.
• The whole point of the stratetgic icons was that it was supposed to allow players to play at the strategic level instead of zooming in. So the icon confusion actually goes against stated goals of this game's design.

This processor is worse than the first-generation intel 7 laptop. It's just impossible to play. But in all tests, Ryzen is ahead of this i7 at times. And in other games, it is clearly much more powerful. It's a shame that this is happening in the FAF.

Unless you tell us what exactly you issue is (low FPS? causing lag in multiplayer?) all of this discussion is useless. Because probably your problem has nothing to do with CPU.

Or make it easy to see the 5 (?) most played maps of any player in lobby (might require a bit of UI work). If most played map is "Gap v27" people will understand what that means if they are in "Gap v28" lobby.

You can opare the stats here btw:
https://faforever.github.io/spooky-db/#/
"time" = build power cost

Yes. More numbers:

A T1 land factory has a build power cost of 300. The equivalent 4 T1 engineers have a combined build power cost of 260x4 = 960.
That means its takes 3.2 times more buildpower (or time) to build 4 engies instead of 1 factory. In practice even more because of roll off time.

There is no limit.
Building anything costs a certain amount of buildpower ("build time") to build 100%, every building has a certain build power ("build rate", lets call that number BR), engineers have certain buildpower (lets call it ER). So if you have enough engineers assisting so that ER = BR, your unit will be built twice as fast.

Time for unit to move out of the way for next unit does not change. Some buildings have such a high build power, for example nukes launchers (and the nuke itself has a high build power cost), that adding enginners does not do much.

Example 1:
T1 Land factory has 20 BR.
T1 Engy has 5 ER.
-> You need 4 assisting T1 engies to build twice as fast
-> 4 T1 engys cost 208 mass vs additional factory cost 240 mass -> engys more effective for raw buildpower

Example 2:
Nuke Launcher has 1500 BR.
T3 Engy has 30 ER.
-> You need 50 assisting T3 engies to build nuke twice as fast
-> 50 T3 engies cost 15600 mass vs additional nuke launcher cost 15000 mass -> building more nukes launchers more effective on average

It makes no sense (both in terms of gameplay and lore) that you can zoom in and clearly see that its a Mantis (aka bigger threat than lab), and then just zoom out and somehow the information lost now?

The other factions would have to gimp their own tactical overview on purpose to remove information they already have, why.

Ok now i want to look at the far future.
Arguably there is still a lot of time until map generator maps reach a level of quality where somebody like FTX will replace 100% of the 1v1 queue with random maps. But still.

Lets make some likely assuptions:

• The quality of the map generator maps will improve, to a point where most people (except handmade map makers) will not notice the difference in asthetic quality.
• More and more people will like the notion of a guarantuee that makes BO-whoring impossible, and we make it so this is actually enforcable (we mark mapgen maps that where created from known seeds vs newly generated as such). What doesnt matter is if BO-whoring is actually a problem, what matters is if people perceive it as a problem and want that guarantuee in ladder.

If we make these assumptions, it should be quite easy to see, that after a long period of transition, the endgame is AOE2, in other words, the death of handmade maps in competitive play. You might disagree with those assumptions, but please think about wether you actually disagree with them OR if you just dont want to follow through to the conclusion, maybe because this conclusion is subjectively horrifying.

Now, in that scenario, a lot of people will just not care and go with it, some people will be sad, and handmade maps will fight a war for dominance, that they will slowly and agonizinly loose as more and more players desire the things that mapgen can provide. This thread is a good indicator for how that will look like imo.

Now, there is another hidden asumption here:

• Handmade maps mostly stay as they are know

But we could change this if we want. We already have adaptive maps. What if handmade maps could provide the same guarantuess that generated maps could in terms of BO-whoring?

• Predefined mex groups that sometimes appear and sometimes not.
• Mexes that slightly move position
• Several possible positions for hydros to appear, sometimes they dont appear at all.
• Same for big wrecks

Im not saying we need to do this. But if the first too assumptions hold, i think that handmade maps need to evolve in the long term. And i think they can, and anyway discussing how that would look like would be much more productive than descussing how far along the trajectory mapgen maps are right now.

In in additon to that, we can think about maybe a better way to present handmade maps or allow players to select them, but that is mo harder to achieve.

People always tend to prefer things they know, when they have a choice. This is why the mapgen can do what handmade maps cannot.

If a person goes into the map vault, they see a bunch of maps they have never seen alongside ones that they already now, and their brain is automatically going to dismiss the maps they dont't know because anything thats new is frightening on a primitive human level.

The mapgen solves this problem by frontloading that choice:

• Do you want to play an unknown map or not?

And then forcing you to stay with that choice by preventing your brain from categorizing it as just another map and therefore reverting your decision to try something new. So the way in which the mapgen creates an advantage is not necessarily by just creating unknown maps, but psychologycally.

Of course the mapgen should eventually still reach higher level of quality. But its important to realize how important the UI is here.

Lets assume that there is a way for the client to automatically select a handmade map that

• Follows some easy to use filters (size, amount of water, etc.) similar to map generator
• Guarantuess to select a map that is generally not very actively played by the community and of certain minimum quality
• Introduces some sort of UI-barrier to backpedalling from the decision to play something new

Then maybe handmade maps could in some way fullfill the same function that the mapgen does. However, we dont have that kind of UI for handmade maps, and as long as it is that way, people will resort to the mapgen to play unknown maps instead of simply selecting a not much played handmade map.

The mapgen also crates some sort of unspoken contract: The map is guarantueed to be new to everybody (in reality thats not true because you can regenerate a seed, but this is still the expectation that people have). This is of course very hard to replicate with handmade maps.

PS:
Could participants in this thread please stop assuming that everybody else argues in bad faith or against their interests? Turning this thread into a mapgen vs handmade war will not create many usefull insights on this topic. Too late probably.

@FtxCommando

I modified armas answer into a potential FAQ entry because i think it was well written:

How do mods work?

UI = User Interface
Sim = Simulation

A UI mod affects only your computer, it affects how you interact with the game. It can change how information is displayed to you (for example on the scoreboard) and it can turn things on and off for you, like it could sometimes turn your radar off to save power.

A SIM mod can make much more serious changes to the game for all players. For example, a SIM mod could change the amount of HP that a tank has or add new units. A SIM mod could change how the scoreboard looks to every player. Games with SIM mods are unrated.

Each player can choose their own selection of UI mods, but SIM mods (which can be activated in custom games by the host) need to be identical for every player in a game.

That is because each player's computer is simulating the entire game and they must stay synchronized. It would break ("desync") the game if, on your computer, a tank had 300 hp, and on your teammate's computer, the tank only had 250hp. To ensure this, when you join a lobby with activated SIM mods, your client will automatically attempt to download and activate (only) those mods.