I do play ladder but Ill respond anyways. When you loose in a 1v1 game, you only have yourself to blame. Alternative is to deny that and blame it on stuff like BO's, faction difference, map, etc etc. But in the end you can't fool yourself and get frustrated.

That is a big part of what makes 1v1 feel more competitive and stressful than teamgames and it's partly the reason why some people don't play it. Also 1v1 requires more attention and working memory from the player than teamgames.

That said, this thread may accidentally imply to people that ladder is somehow less played. It really isn't. It's actually a quite popular matchmaker and has been that way for years. That said it is true that the 2k+ bracket has all but died out. Prob because there is very few streamers playing or casting high level ladder the past 1 to 2 years or so, which induced a vicious circle of fewer high level players playing > longer que times > even fewer players playing.

So are old replays (older than 1 year) just gone? I was hoping the problem was temporary, but it has been quite a while now. If they are, this is a big deal imo. There is a lot of FAF history in those older replays and a lot to learn for 2024 players trying to become better at the game. Any way to still access them?

Tree groups are a beautiful feature only seen if FAF you barbarians

I only read the original post from Jip, but it seems to me the problem mostly has to do with your own mindset, rather than the visibility of ratings. When I play a guy with higher rating than me I feel relaxed, because I have little to loose and alot to win. Also knowing the rating of the opponent is beneficial for tactics. You would create a situation where people will have to learn by heart the ratings of others. Lastly I believe a part of why people enjoy playing these type of multiplayer games is because there is a rating system that u can fight over. Take away the visibility of the rating and u take away some motivation to play for these people.

@cheeseberry

I think its mainly two things. 1. Mapgen has made teamgames a lot better, so that even custom games are not as BO dependent anymore. 2. Jagged stopped casting 1v1 ladder.

Making high level 1v1 more popular will mostly be dependent on a popular caster/streamer giving it attention. But im hoping the upcoming veto mechanic will help a little bit as well.

Third, making the league system more prominent and changing custom games to unranked casual games would ofcourse help make the matchmakers more relevant in general. But its not clear whether that is worth it.

@azroc

I agreee Azroc. I have no idea who did what. But posting internal conflicts like this on the news page of a video game is about the most amateur thing you can do. But then again, it is an amateur project after all. I just hope all the childish play at politics doesnt discourage the awesome people of this community that contribute their time and expertise on actually maintaining this game.

@treos

Yeah but you need to do this in order to keep the positions fair. You want to have the strongest and weakest player of both teams to be in the same position to their (rotational) mirror. The asymmetry it creates is often beneficial for the gameplay anyways. But moreover, you need this to keep it fair. Imagine the case were on one team the strongest player gets a spot with 8 mexes and on the other team the strongest player gets 25 mexes. That's way worse.

I checked out the 3v3 replay you've posted. There is nothing wrong there in terms of the positions. Sure the weaker player has to fight the stronger one, but I don't think that is necessarily bad there. At least the strongest players start in the same relative positions, which is more important.

Matchmaker pools Febuary 2024

Matchmaker pools Febuary 2024

The maps that are played in the matchmakers are selected from pools that are setup on a monthly schedule. They are curated by the Matchmaker Team. Each queue has its individual map pool, for which the maps are selected in such a way to provide a good balance of familiarity and variation to the player. Only maps that are competitive and are considered of high quality by the team are included. In this thread the matchmaker map pools will be posted. Scroll down to see the maps that are featured in the matchmakers this month.

Keep in mind, no map pool will satisfy all players. If you have feedback on the map pools however, don’t hesitate to leave a comment in the feedback thread, linked below

https://forum.faforever.com/topic/3410/matchmaker-pool-feedback-thread/211

Matchmaker pools May 2024

Recently there has been a suggestion to perhaps make the center of tree groups visible when you are in reclaim mode (CTRL-Shift). A problem with this is, that it will make the trajectory of unscouted enemy labs visible to the player. See this discussion in Discord: https://discord.com/channels/197033481883222026/1190144799588745277

A possible solution is to make treegroups impervious to labs. It might even make sense considering the labs have "legs". But I'm not sure. What do others think?

Yeah I like the idea, as long as its not too large of course. Perhaps some kind of trail to the projectile could help make it more visible as well.

Matchmaker pools March 2024

I can see how FAF is a more "nerdy" game with numbers. And that could tilt preference more towards using exact number based ranking. I'm not defending the league system. Frankly Im not sure if it will be healthy for FAF in the long run. And I definitely dont prefer it either. Atleast not yet anyways. I'm just pointing out that people confuse their personal preference with what is good for the game. This because they want to find some more noble argument for their preference than "I don't like X and I want you to fix it for me".

Matchmaker pools April 2024

True, good chance though that some people in that queue would rather have no game then an unbalanced one. Quite a few players stop queuing for the 2v2 queue because of too many games with a lot of rating spread between players.

I'm not sure whether the current matchmaker parameters are set optimally. I believe BlackYps fine-tunes them on occasion and I personally think the current balance is set pretty well overall. However, it won't give the best results at all times of course.

Matchmaker Pools July 2024

@snoog I don't think awards for the other divisions make sense. Because that would make it so that in some cases a player does not want to play or win more games in order to stay in the division he is currently nr. 1 in. Also it encourages smurf accounts or trading of accounts.

Matchmaker pools October 2024