TS rating on test hosts

TS rating on test hosts

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iridium
Posts: 4
Joined: 12 Jan 2018, 21:45

TS rating on test hosts

Post by iridium »

Currently, there are a lot of games going on at the BA test hosts. This autohost does not use trueskill balancing and currently Triton is spending quite some time to manually chrank players in order to get balanced teams.

The rationale for this is obvious, games on the test host are not supposed to influence the TS rating of the players as to not discourage playing around with new, potentially unbalanced, game features.

Technically, this seems to be implemented by choosing a different mod-shortname for the pre-release builds of BA. SLDB then falls back to rank-based rating in absence of any TS rating database.

I've spent some time digging through the source of SLDB, replays.springrts.com, and SPADS. As far as I can say, the simplest (and probably hackiest) way would probably be to modify SLDB to map ([:alpha:])-test to \1, e.g. in Sldb.pm:1076. bibim: Any thoughts on this?

(Not opening a github issue, but discussing it here, for various reasons. Most importantly, I'm still not entirely sure if SLDB is the right place to solve this).
dansan
Server Owner & Developer
Posts: 1203
Joined: 29 May 2010, 23:40

Re: TS rating on test hosts

Post by dansan »

I haven't looked at the SLDB code, but isn't it possible to clone the existing BA TS DB to a new mod "BA-test" (or similar)?
iridium
Posts: 4
Joined: 12 Jan 2018, 21:45

Re: TS rating on test hosts

Post by iridium »

Then, BA-test and BA TS values would slowly diverge. The idea is that test games should not have an impact on TS, as they are often unbalanced or people are not familiar with new features. Still, it is often helpful to have somewhat balanced teams in order for the game not to end too soon.
abma
Spring Developer
Posts: 3798
Joined: 01 Jun 2009, 00:08

Re: TS rating on test hosts

Post by abma »

ATM it looks for me like BA-test IS BA. Its to stable / heavily used that it can be named "test" 8)

why not just enable TS for it?
iridium
Posts: 4
Joined: 12 Jan 2018, 21:45

Re: TS rating on test hosts

Post by iridium »

It might be heavily used, but I would not call it stable. There are regular games with experimental features enabled that are mostly played with the idea "let's see what happens" - for example, the new MM scaling formulas by Doo. I do not think that the result of such games is evidence to base ranking on.
dansan
Server Owner & Developer
Posts: 1203
Joined: 29 May 2010, 23:40

Re: TS rating on test hosts

Post by dansan »

Ask bibim if he can script a daily copy of the DB "BA" → "BA-test".
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Silentwings
Posts: 3720
Joined: 25 Oct 2008, 00:23

Re: TS rating on test hosts

Post by Silentwings »

This is definitely possible somehow - we had it on the old testing BHH, a few years ago. I'm not sure how it was done. I don't think it was a hack, but I'm not certain.
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bibim
Lobby Developer
Posts: 952
Joined: 06 Dec 2007, 11:12

Re: TS rating on test hosts

Post by bibim »

I don't remember exactly if/how I handled BA test versions specifically a few years ago (maybe I just handled test versions like normal versions, thus updating TS values ?), but I just added a functionality in SLDB to make it possible to manage them correctly, without hack. Test versions use same TrueSkill values as original mods for balancing, but they don't update the TrueSkill values.
I configured BA / BA test mod names regexp to use this functionality, so it should be ok now.

Of course it's still possible to fork TS database instead if needed, to have totally independent TS values for test mods.
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