Release: Quickmatching System

[Licho]

Quickmatchers also attract more people to room, imo only problem is they should leave for longer if you drive them out..
(To not slow you down)
I recommend you send them out when you have game ready to start - they respond instantly to !spacafk

[Auswaschbar]

Out of curiosity, can everyone join a battle and !specafk people for the lulz?

[Hobo Joe]

Sounds kinda useless, TBH. it's rare that there's more than 5 rooms with people in them, it's not like you have to sift through a list of hundreds of games to find one you like. Which also would make most parameters useless, because Spring is small, and as such you can't be real picky-choosy, you just play what's available, or try to con other people into playing what you want.

[Licho]

Well its mostly if you want click and forget/rare mod.
In lobby, if you ready up too soon they can start with less people,if not, they can ring spam you.
Host can leave, map can change to one you dont have etc.

With this you just click 1x and do something else until spring starts.

[zerver]

Actually I have been thinking about a system like this for more than a year, primarily because "almost full" servers seem very popular while "almost empty" ones are not. In other words, people sit and wait for an "almost full" server to pop up rather than joining the best one currently available. This behavior is disastrous because it means we get fewer running games.

There are some gotchas though that prevented me from posting this suggestion so I'm interested to see if this works. For example, you may end up in a stacked game, you may end up in a game where someone has a slow PC or you may end up in an otherwise bad or badly configured autohost.

[hoijui]

Actually I have been thinking about a system like this for more than a year, primarily because "almost full" servers seem very popular while "almost empty" ones are not. In other words, people sit and wait for an "almost full" server to pop up rather than joining the best one currently available. This behavior is disastrous because it means we get fewer running games.

this. +1
as i got it though, this system does not solve this problem, does it?
it would only join if there are enough people in the match, not if there are enough willing to join (if i got it right).
that really has the potential to help getting more games running.

[Licho]

If game is full or running it will of course join other game.
It also knows what other quickmatchers want - so if there are 4 people and 2 of them demand 6 people game, it knows only 2 are available.

However it does not solve problems zerver talks about - joining stacked or imba games. Springie uses ELO balancing so at least for CA it isn't a problem.
I think it could be solved by creating autohosts designed for quickmatching (with sensible rules and balancing) and mark some existing autohost as "good for quickmatching".

More problems will appear if more people are using quickmatching than normal manual joining. But atm its just hypothetical :)
If it happens, system will need a way to tell FFA map from team maps to setup teams properly and start automatically.
So far I was thinking about manual configuration of map, could be part of mapinfo metadata, or algorithm that detects shape of startpoints.

[Caydr]

This the sort of thing where it actually takes longer to join a game with the "matchmaking system" than just starting the server browser and picking a game you actually want to play? Like the way it is with every other "matchmaking system"?

[knorke]

no but people like you make every game grow into 10 vs 10
if you want to play Gundam for example it would be impossible right now. The matchmaking system would inform you if someone else wants to play it too.
Normally, you would have never found out.

[Tribulex]

haha the xta people found a person like this the other day on oxygen or something. We kept speccing him, and he kept rejoining, and then someone like det or bd or lere (not sure which but i like to consider them the same person most of the time) decided it was a bot and was like LOL !SPEC every time he joined, about 100 times, but honestly we were all lolling.

now i feel bad. Poor newbie

[JohannesH]

when it says "quickmatching, waiting for 2 players", does that mean it waits for a 2 player game or wants 2 players more?

Ive only seen 1 rankers use it... And if they play 1v1 vs each other its much nicer for everyone than slamming them into a dsd game.



Then this noob cant connect and is kicked and probably knows nothing of wtf is going on, this system blows atm

[quantum]

2 means it wants at least a 2 player game. Rank 1 means smurf, people probably use it in parallel with SL.

[JohannesH]

Rank 1 means smurf, people probably use it in parallel with SL.

Rank 1 doesnt mean smurf at least when he cant connect to any game... And smurf or not doesnt even matter, nobody wants a guy like that to join their game but he'd be happy to play a 1v1 game.

[cleanrock]

A bit off topic but i want this off my heart:
I think spring would be more popular and have more fun games if servers were setup with max 4v4 players, that way we would get more healthy games and less waiting. I think all 6v6+ games are ruining the spring experience.

[KaiserJ]

Then this noob cant connect and is kicked and probably knows nothing of wtf is going on, this system blows atm

ahh crap, i feel bad now, a first rank kept trying to play with us last night, i don't think he spoke any english; he would join the match, say something related to quickmatch, and people raged and booted him (because he was unable to connect to any game) poor guy

[CarRepairer]

fyi that same guy committed suicide later that night.

[Gota]

A bit off topic but i want this off my heart:
I think spring would be more popular and have more fun games if servers were setup with max 4v4 players, that way we would get more healthy games and less waiting. I think all 6v6+ games are ruining the spring experience.

I somewhat agree.
I think though that allowing players to join big games should be gradual and based on their "time played".
This way newbies will not join huge games,there will be more games of smaller sizes and newbies will learn how to play better,quicker.
Also,this will combat smurfing to some extant.
I know this idea will never be accepted though.

[quantum]

With a bit of refining and enough users, quickmatching can prevent games from becoming larger than the players' preference. Of course this would only reduce the game size if enough players want small games.

[Pxtl]

I think it'd be less about "players wanting smaller games" as "players want to start sooner".

If you have 4 guys who have "minimum 4", then you dump them all into a new game and they can start immediately if they choose.

[Gota]

I think players love huge games so much because we lack porcy maps...
Players like to play crowded cause most find it hard to deal with a lot of terrain and mexes that are hard to control and defend, and don't want to get humiliated and owned badly.
If we had smaller porcy maps i think that maybe more would play smaller games.