Spring RTS Engine

[DISCLAIMER] This mostly pertains to BA, however it's here because it pertains to many parts of the main server infrastructure.

So I think we all agree that the community, whatever it used to be, is horrible now. I'd like to propse some reforms to be made, because nothing seems to be done about it. If all else fails we can fork the community. But wasn't it damaging enough when zk left?

I'd like to tackle a couple things which people seem to be worried about: True skill, newbies affecting team games, and the way battlerooms work. I believe if tackled properly, this problem can be resolved.

Firsltly, to deal with the True Skill problem, I propose that we remove the distinctions between duel, team, ffa, and team ffa. Furthermore, I propose that only 1v1 and ffa should affect trueskill. Why? In team games, you will no longer be caring about your ts, which is said to be the biggest downfall of the ts ranking system. Similarly with teamffa. How can I be sure this won't mess up balancing? I am pretty sure that for most players there is very little distinction between their skill in team, ffa, duel, and ffa. If you think this is too harsh, then balance team of duel ratings, and teamffa off teamffa ratings. But I don't think that distinction is necessary at all. "But", you may ask, "if everyone only plays team, how will their rating be changed?" We force everyone to play a 1v1 at a certain frequency. This has been suggested before, and I don't think it's a bad idea. And if people are deliberately changing their own rank, there's always chrank.

Newbies are likely overwhelmed by joining a team game. The battleroom itself would be enough to do this, especially if it's an autohost. Plus, they typically have no idea how to play the game they're joining. So maybe we should mandate that players with less than 10 hours play only 1v1. In fact, if we're going that far, it wouldn't be to hard for us to set them up against an AI. For all they knew they joined the game queue, and are playing a person. It would be beneficial then, also, if we give AIs a trueskill. As in each individual AI gets their own ts. This should not be too hard to achieve on its own, and it would ensure that all players would have a rating before entering the main playerbase. Moreover, this solves another problem: It would be the perfect time-waster to seriously discourage trolls from creating a new account.

But this would require a fundamental change in the way that battlerooms work, which is my final point. I believe that a better model would be to have a queue of people waiting for a game. You can have a list for 1v1, 2v2, 3v3, ffa, etc. and everyone can wait in as many lists as they like. To do this we could create a special class of channel to which there is a matchmaking bot which matches players of similar skills in the queue and sends a CONNECTUSER command to the clients. As noted above, bots should refuse to add players which have not played enough 1v1s, to ensure that their ts does not stagnate. They would need their moderators yes, but with automatically uploaded replays players can always be reported and warned, or worse banned. I also believe that what we should hide private games (and create a separate facility for joining a private game) as this would work to discourage autohosts, which seem to be a nonworking solution at the moment.

Through changing the way ts works, adjusting the introduction of newbies and restructuring battlerooms, I believe this community could have a fighting chance. I am willing to volunteer for any work that needs to be done, although please acknowledge that my programming experience starts and ends with my swift-written lobby client. But I believe I should be able to assist with modifying of uberserver (I am learning to read python) and whatever else that seems feasable for one unexperienced. But since this situation needs to change, then I will do whatever I need to in order to change the state of the community.

~MasterBel2

((this may be a useful link, discussing similar issues: viewtopic.php?f=44&t=35950))

Forcing or coercing players to do things is some of the problem. Many of these solutions can make the problem worse although their is a consensus on better induction for newbies. I also agree that TS is a major part of the problem but that's really a serious symptom of a more significant problem.

You can see here the kind of problem that is happening in games (sorry for quality rush job):

I planed to try going air in this game after previously teching until I had a good handle on it. I haven't done badly the last couple of times I went air and it won those two games. Before it even starts people start attacking me and then when it starts the player below comes up and dguns me. This is how it goes from annoying to exclusionary harassment of players from a group of well established players.

https://youtu.be/YHLojhQy3k4

Here I try again. I took the same spot and readied intending to go air again. The first thing they start attacking again and this time after I already readied up someone takes the same spot. I try to make the best of it but they're about to kick me and give my com to Kodiak so I selfd. After that banned.

https://youtu.be/BYILmu8mIck

It is easy to see who is doing this. They're repeat offenders and harass you every game even when you try to be reasonable with them and not hold a grudge. This is nothing to do with the system. It's to do with the quality of users of the system. You have people dgunning others and kicking them from the game simply because they or their friend didn't even get the start spot they wanted.

People stealing control away from newbies or anyone they have deem inferior and bashing them or blaming them for everything even when they aren't to blame is part of that. The default thought has become we lost lets blame the perceived weakest player on the team which is more based on prejudice half the time than anything else. The default thought is not we lost, why and how can I do better. It's automatically blame the newbie. Every time a team loses its the newbie. It's never the team. How could it ever be such regular know it all well honed perfect players that would never lose were it not for those pesky newbies? That's not teamskill in my book. It's scapegoating. Yes a newbie can occasionally be a drag but this goes beyond all reason.

I'm not sure it's easy to make TS perfect itself. People take it way to seriously. I do smell the lack of any real competitive form of play in TA Spring being a bit of a problem why people are obsessively raging on about TS like their life depends on it but still ultimately even with that deficit unreasonable player behaviour is at the root of it all.

People blaming losing on smurfs and newbies or players that play a lot and still do badly (unsmurfs). Sometimes it happens but I think more often it is sore losers or people that take it way too seriously making more of the problem. I assume TS was meant to be a good thing but if you have players with serious attitude issues you can't have good things. It's not the system that's a problem. I was playing this years ago and there weren't anywhere near these kinds of problems.

Something like TS is very hard to calculate and I have no idea how it is implemented in TA Spring. There isn't really a highly accurate way to do it. Perhaps the most accurate will turn out to be the crudest of wins losses. It is worse that if you do a search for taspring teamskill you get no results explaining it. I am not the type to go mental playing only for TS especially as I was playing before it was a thing and never had any issues with that enjoying each game for what it was but on the other hand when I see players taking stock in it to the point that it justifies mobbing when you can see players with more TS doing worse in a game but you getting blamed instead of them then you want to know how it works to defend yourself. All some people see is TS. They hover around your base like flies and actually lose sometimes because they didn't pay attention to other players or the rest of the map or even what they were doing themselves. Some of these players make bad decisions assuming you will fail trying to compensate that really messes things up. It is a pattern of behaviour that becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. People go nuts that they will lose because of a low TS and then the way they have a tantrum and turn against their own team ensures that that they will lose. Before the game has even started they blame and attack people on their team. That in my book is no kind of a teamskill. A team is united in attacking the enemy not itself.

Some things give me the impression it relates to the score board at the end of the game and rewards. If so there might be a problem with this. I am not a great early bird or rusher and in a short period of time I played around four or five games where things were turning around, I was contributing and in a few might have been the one to trash the enemy base but those games all terminated prematurely for no obvious reason. Almost every game like that where it was working towards a win and I was very likely to be about to inflict massive damage on the enemy base it suddenly stops. My TS was around 20 to 30 then randomly plummeted immediately when I started playing BA. However I saw higher TS players doing worse or the same. At the very least the mechanisms of TS really need to be well explained and stickied somewhere here with the term teamskill so it can be searched easily. Otherwise what is TS? Teamspeak? Transexual?

It is very easy for us technicians to look for technical solutions to this but I think some aspects of the problem go beyond that and involve human nature. I am not sure fixing the machine always fixes the users. I would say at this point just remove it and randomise games. I don't see it solving any problems. People are still screaming on about balance even more than they did before TS existed. How can you make these people happy? That is not diminishing returns, it's negative returns. If you implement a solution and have even more complaining and hatred about balance then it didn't work. You really need to take a step back and think about if you are really solving the problem you intend to. What problem are you solving and whose. Is it really about balance or are you catering to sore losers with a newbie blame complex who have been allowed too run the show?

There is another thread going back a few years on another forum for TA explaining the problem the same way I see it which is players having meltdowns like it's a crucial tournament instead of just playing. I think some of these people are borderline pathological blaming others for their losses as a matter of compulsion. Like I say with TS it ended up even worse because they blame you for losing the game before the game even started then they concede the game for you and still blame you for ruining the game when it is actually them. It is like how kids behave in school when forming teams. This is embarrassing as you would think after all this time you would have more adults in the game.

Spring has always been a bit or a high frustration game but normally people just insult each other and be done with it. By the next game most people would have dropped their grudges and just gotten on with it. There seems to be a point now where people have a problem with basic communication and if you did poorly in one game or simply didn't follow the instructions they kept obnoxiously spamming over your base will hold a grudge for days. I remember back in the day someone would just say we need air. Now people scream at you to build air because this is the air spot from the start. Then when you do what you planned to do they throw and absolutely horrendous earth shaking tantrum when they don't get their own way. There are also problems with teams coordinating because the chat box gets filled with spam early game. I start to think you want a separate box for team communications.

The game seems to be more selfish I don't remember people buying t2 nearly as much or as a default. Often a player would rush to t2 then share with the team or people nearby expecting enough to do so for the greater good. If you needed m to speed it up then you might ask but otherwise giving your neighbour a quick path to 2X or 3X more metal is probably in your interest for them to have better eco to keep things quiet for you. It is annoying now with players demanding you sell when you fast teched for eco and are about to reclaim you lab and instead contribute with leaking and producing many units with a bigger eco. This seems like a discourse but it is a change I have seen that I think reflects on how players have changed. One person recently said they would even give me a t2 like it was something special to share with your teammates. If I can share I do. What seems to be happening is that team players start competing with each other in a way where they will happily undercut one another. I occasionally make sacrifices for the team but I have to wonder how it reflects in teamskill.

What I see today is less teamskill than I have ever seen in spring. Whatever TS is measuring it is not teamskill. I have to worry more about my own team stealing my mexes and invading my space than I do the enemy more than I ever had to in spring. Players do not see low TS as a possible anomaly or that you might need some help or advice. They see it as an excuse to make you their bitch. I have worked great with some players in a team recently and worked with them towards victory. They asked appropriately, were able to communicate effectively and not just demanding you do what they want or threatening to kick you from the game if you don't do as they instruct. Sometimes I give to these players and I don't think it went to my TS much even though the units I gave were a good part of the attack the took out the entire enemy in one go. The player I helped and gave though as he seemed to have a plan and knew what he was doing likely got the lions share of the TS. What I see other players doing is snatching and insisting on having the lions share because they are full of themselves and don't respect others having an equal right to participate. They are like ball hoggers. I don't give a crap about people calling names like newbie until all the regular players gang up and then move to kick a player just for not following every order or having low TS to give the com to someone with higher TS. I don't know what people expect with this. If people do that then they will selfd before being kicked and/or leave the game altogether.

At least some of these people might do better if they improve on their communication skills. I spend a lot of time professionally mentoring people and it can be hard when you can code things faster than you can explain it. Saying that the skill difference here is not as anywhere near wide as it is for me in my profession. You have people acting in a severely prejudicial way just because someone has a new account or low TS. Some of the advice I am given is plain wrong such as one player telling me to build two metal storages when I am using a strategy where that has never been a problem and is of no benefit.

There is a risk when a community gets so small that a small lobby of players can hold the community hostage. If a rabble of a dozen or so control freaks are pandered to in order retain a few of them but the result is losing several times more users in the long run wasting efforts to bring in new users because some old users can never be satisfied the sadmath does not bode well for that. I can see next that these players will demand that new people can't even play and players with high TS automatically have control of low ts or new accounts. That is where this leads. The only solution for that if you want to take it so far is full segregation as in if these players hate others so much why not set up their own private server (its easy as pie) and make it an exclusive club for TS 40 players only or simply put a password on the autohost and make it private? Can't you even put a TS limit on it to 30 or above?

It's called TrueSkill.

Original discussion: viewtopic.php?t=28791
Current implementation: https://github.com/Yaribz/SLDB
Microsofts page: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/researc ... ng-system/
Super cool page on the math: http://www.moserware.com/2010/03/comput ... skill.html

brainfart wrote:It is easy to see who is doing this. They're repeat offenders and harass you every game even when you try to be reasonable with them and not hold a grudge. This is nothing to do with the system. It's to do with the quality of users of the system. You have people dgunning others and kicking them from the game simply because they or their friend didn't even get the start spot they wanted.

Proposed solution: moderators that can remove them from the queue for… 30 min? Or more?

brainfart wrote: People stealing control away from newbies or anyone they have deem inferior and bashing them or blaming them for everything even when they aren't to blame is part of that. The default thought has become we lost lets blame the perceived weakest player on the team which is more based on prejudice half the time than anything else. The default thought is not we lost, why and how can I do better. It's automatically blame the newbie. Every time a team loses its the newbie. It's never the team. How could it ever be such regular know it all well honed perfect players that would never lose were it not for those pesky newbies? That's not teamskill in my book. It's scapegoating. Yes a newbie can occasionally be a drag but this goes beyond all reason.

brainfart wrote: I'm not sure it's easy to make TS perfect itself. People take it way to seriously. I do smell the lack of any real competitive form of play in TA Spring being a bit of a problem why people are obsessively raging on about TS like their life depends on it but still ultimately even with that deficit unreasonable player behaviour is at the root of it all.

The aim of 1v1 and ffa being the only two game forms to affect ts is designed to take this sort of argument out of the team games, so people won't be ruining it for their teams. The TS obsessed will be relegated to the 1v1/ffa queue.

brainfart wrote: People blaming losing on smurfs and newbies or players that play a lot and still do badly (unsmurfs). Sometimes it happens but I think more often it is sore losers or people that take it way too seriously making more of the problem. I assume TS was meant to be a good thing but if you have players with serious attitude issues you can't have good things. It's not the system that's a problem. I was playing this years ago and there weren't anywhere near these kinds of problems.

brainfart wrote: Something like TS is very hard to calculate and I have no idea how it is implemented in TA Spring. There isn't really a highly accurate way to do it. Perhaps the most accurate will turn out to be the crudest of wins losses. It is worse that if you do a search for taspring teamskill you get no results explaining it. I am not the type to go mental playing only for TS especially as I was playing before it was a thing and never had any issues with that enjoying each game for what it was but on the other hand when I see players taking stock in it to the point that it justifies mobbing when you can see players with more TS doing worse in a game but you getting blamed instead of them then you want to know how it works to defend yourself. All some people see is TS. They hover around your base like flies and actually lose sometimes because they didn't pay attention to other players or the rest of the map or even what they were doing themselves. Some of these players make bad decisions assuming you will fail trying to compensate that really messes things up. It is a pattern of behaviour that becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. People go nuts that they will lose because of a low TS and then the way they have a tantrum and turn against their own team ensures that that they will lose. Before the game has even started they blame and attack people on their team. That in my book is no kind of a teamskill. A team is united in attacking the enemy not itself.

TrueSkill is very reliable and its balancing works very well. Google it, you'll see a number of pages talking about how it works.

brainfart wrote: There is another thread going back a few years on another forum for TA explaining the problem the same way I see it which is players having meltdowns like it's a crucial tournament instead of just playing. I think some of these people are borderline pathological blaming others for their losses as a matter of compulsion. Like I say with TS it ended up even worse because they blame you for losing the game before the game even started then they concede the game for you and still blame you for ruining the game when it is actually them. It is like how kids behave in school when forming teams. This is embarrassing as you would think after all this time you would have more adults in the game.

brainfart wrote:Spring has always been a bit or a high frustration game but normally people just insult each other and be done with it. By the next game most people would have dropped their grudges and just gotten on with it. There seems to be a point now where people have a problem with basic communication and if you did poorly in one game or simply didn't follow the instructions they kept obnoxiously spamming over your base will hold a grudge for days. I remember back in the day someone would just say we need air. Now people scream at you to build air because this is the air spot from the start. Then when you do what you planned to do they throw and absolutely horrendous earth shaking tantrum when they don't get their own way. There are also problems with teams coordinating because the chat box gets filled with spam early game. I start to think you want a separate box for team communications.

This would actually be quite clever. +1

brainfart wrote:What I see today is less teamskill than I have ever seen in spring. Whatever TS is measuring it is not teamskill. I have to worry more about my own team stealing my mexes and invading my space than I do the enemy more than I ever had to in spring. Players do not see low TS as a possible anomaly or that you might need some help or advice. They see it as an excuse to make you their bitch. I have worked great with some players in a team recently and worked with them towards victory. They asked appropriately, were able to communicate effectively and not just demanding you do what they want or threatening to kick you from the game if you don't do as they instruct. Sometimes I give to these players and I don't think it went to my TS much even though the units I gave were a good part of the attack the took out the entire enemy in one go. The player I helped and gave though as he seemed to have a plan and knew what he was doing likely got the lions share of the TS. What I see other players doing is snatching and insisting on having the lions share because they are full of themselves and don't respect others having an equal right to participate. They are like ball hoggers. I don't give a crap about people calling names like newbie until all the regular players gang up and then move to kick a player just for not following every order or having low TS to give the com to someone with higher TS. I don't know what people expect with this. If people do that then they will selfd before being kicked and/or leave the game altogether.

This is very sad. Keep in mind, though, that ts is only calculated based on who wins and who loses, not necessarily in-game performance.

brainfart wrote:There is a risk when a community gets so small that a small lobby of players can hold the community hostage. If a rabble of a dozen or so control freaks are pandered to in order retain a few of them but the result is losing several times more users in the long run wasting efforts to bring in new users because some old users can never be satisfied the sadmath does not bode well for that. I can see next that these players will demand that new people can't even play and players with high TS automatically have control of low ts or new accounts. That is where this leads. The only solution for that if you want to take it so far is full segregation as in if these players hate others so much why not set up their own private server (its easy as pie) and make it an exclusive club for TS 40 players only or simply put a password on the autohost and make it private? Can't you even put a TS limit on it to 30 or above?

I wouldn't limit it; it would damage the effectiveness of it. Keep in mind that a matchmaking bot would probably be designed to match players of similar skill, therefore decreasing the power imbalance between players in most games.

~MasterBel2

Correction 1: I said that TS can't be limited, but that's not quite true: afaik the max value is supposed to be 50 and min value 0. It's something to do with a normal distribution (currently studying them).

Correction 2: I think I might have misunderstood what you were saying: Yes, hosts should be able to limit who can play in a host to people with specific ts. If we had enough players It would be a viable option, but at this point in time probably not.

MasterBel2 wrote:Yes, hosts should be able to limit who can play in a host to people with specific ts. If we had enough players It would be a viable option, but at this point in time probably not.

We had this... some years ago... don't remember why not anymore - probably not enough players?
The idea was mainly to allow newbies to play against each other, without "pros" messing their game up. The problem are smurfs ofc...

dansan wrote:

MasterBel2 wrote:Yes, hosts should be able to limit who can play in a host to people with specific ts. If we had enough players It would be a viable option, but at this point in time probably not.

We had this... some years ago... don't remember why not anymore - probably not enough players?
The idea was mainly to allow newbies to play against each other, without "pros" messing their game up. The problem are smurfs ofc...

Yes, we had a try for it.
It doesn't worked.... Even if it's a good thing to do, there's not enough players for it.

DSD needs its own trueskill catagory along with 1v1 and 8v8 etc. Energy production rank should factor into trueskill calculation.

That AntiAres guy is also a smurf and not a member of AFUS.