The culture of having only one teams room is problematic. Often, the players who are waiting in the teams room would be enough to start a new game, but they don't do it. They are waiting while they could just start another game. This doesn't happen in most other RTS. Polls suggest that a quarter of the players actually want to have teams as big as possible, so maybe they want to wait (?), but half of the players prefer small teams. I propose a solution that will hopefully improve things for both: Each waiting player is asked how many players would at least have to join so that they would join a new game, with the possibility to decline the option at all. As many waiting players as possible are then moved to a new teams room such that each one's minimum size requirement is met. Players are considered to be "waiting" if and only if they are in the players section of a room without playing. I can provide some details on an implementation algorithm if desired.
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Make !battle discoverable
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Thread #648 about splitting the large teams room. Casual matchmaker with some kind of shared chat could theoretically work, but every complexity will be a pretty against learning the system of how to play the game. In fact, just add everything after the comma to whatever your suggestion is and it holds true. It's highly likely that 28 zero-k players would rather play a 14 v 14 than a 3 v 3 and 11 v 11, or any permutation of that. And if they don't get that sufficiently massive game, they leave the game for the night, which shrinks the pool of players. Some key identifiable problem is player count and player perception. A solution to our problem needs to successfully shift the perspective of players and work under a highly varied total player count, and it needs to work better than "the one room." In a sense I envey games like Splatoon/apex legends/Fortnite because at player numbers that they have you can literally just use queues which is a wildly different player perception of how to play the game than our lobbies.
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The more people there are in a team, the less effort they need to put in individually in order to win. They would rather just wait for that opportunity than to play a lobby where they are required to put more effort in. One possible solution is to get rid of large team rooms and replace them with 2v2/3v3/4v4 rooms. Unless there's enough people playing for two 16v16 lob pots, which there isn't most of the time.
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The big team room provides reliability. If you spectate an ongoing game of 30 players you can be fairly sure that there will be another game to play shortly after it ends. A smaller room is much more fragile. An eight player room might evaporate with only a few players deciding they don't like the map, the teams, or just calling it a night. If there are multiple rooms then people can scout around for the one they might want to play in, delaying or potentially killing rooms further. These aren't reasons to try to create more than one room. These are difficulties to overcome if any approach is to be successful. Various forms of splitting and asking players whether they want to play a smaller game have been tried. None have worked, although that may be due to implementation details in many cases. A vital metric for these systems is how likely it is that a player will end up in a game that they want to play. quote:
Each waiting player is asked how many players would at least have to join so that they would join a new game, with the possibility to decline the option at all. As many waiting players as possible are then moved to a new teams room such that each one's minimum size requirement is met. Players are considered to be "waiting" if and only if they are in the players section of a room without playing. I can provide some details on an implementation algorithm if desired. |
    DeinFreund tried something similar and it turns out that it doesn't reliably create viable games. People won't know what it does, so enough people will click it then leave the game to teach everyone to never click it. My current idea is to use the waiting list. If there are, say, 12 people in the waiting list then create a new room with them when the current game starts. This at least means that there is no game to leave and try to join, since it just started. The new game is still riskier though, as playing a subpar game then missing the next large team game is worse than just watching a large game and then playing the next.
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I agree that small rooms fragility is a major challenge to overcome. quote:
People won't know what it does, so enough people will click it then leave the game to teach everyone to never click it. |
Just explain what it does in one clear sentence in the GUI. quote:
My current idea is to use the waiting list. If there are, say, 12 people in the waiting list then create a new room with them when the current game starts. |
That's fine. But if you only check it at game start and only if there are ~12 people in the waiting list, this will nearly never happen. You would have to use a much lower threshold and also check it during games, where the set of waiting players is no longer equivalent to the waiting list.
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quote:
Just explain what it does in one clear sentence in the GUI. |
People don't read, and if you make them then they get annoyed and still don't read. quote:
That's fine. But if you only check it at game start and only if there are ~12 people in the waiting list, this will nearly never happen. |
Something happening rarely but working almost always is much better than something happening slightly more often but with a higher chance of failure. We've tried aggressive systems with fairly common failures in the past. Maybe my thresholds are far too high, but I think the broader approach required is that of making something that doesn't fail, and then trying to expand it from there.
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Maybe use a divider to split the rooms in categories 'auto' and 'non-auto'. Then it's more obvious where overflow should go to.
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Me and my friends would like to play some PvP games (usually there aren't enough of us to play inhouse), so a 5v5 or 4v4 rooms would be nice. It's not like you can't have the huge room running at the same time either...Although it would be nice if there always was an open lobby for lower-pop games (as in make a new lobby after previous one began running). Is there a reason matchmaker seems to be dead?
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1v1 matchmaker is not dead, I've seen players of a wide range in skill have matches with it. However, small teams matchmaker never took off. We don't seem to have the community that wants small team games so much, that they will break out of the small teams room into a second small teams room. They stay in the same room as spectators, complain about the playerlimit until it raises, then become players in the one lobby. We actually have that second room right now. [A] Teams All Welcome #2(10 v 10 max) and [A] Small Teams All Welcome(4 v 4 max). Noone's in them. Also, players are free to make their own lobbies, passworded or not, but we'll moderate over rooms that imitate the [A] Teams All Welcome room that abuse the privileges come with room 'ownership'.(don't force an !exit when you're losing)
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I'm continuing this thread to discuss specifically my suggestion for fixing the problem described in
Vote to split Teams - All Welcome into 2 smaller teams rooms?: quote:
Each waiting player is asked how many players would at least have to join so that they would join a new game, with the possibility to decline the option at all. As many waiting players as possible are then moved to a new teams room such that each one's minimum size requirement is met. Players are considered to be "waiting" if and only if they are in the players section of a room without playing. I can provide some details on an implementation algorithm if desired. |
quote:
quote:
Just explain what it does in one clear sentence in the GUI. |
People don't read, and if you make them then they get annoyed and still don't read.
quote:
That's fine. But if you only check it at game start and only if there are ~12 people in the waiting list, this will nearly never happen. |
Something happening rarely but working almost always is much better than something happening slightly more often but with a higher chance of failure. |
To pretend that people will not read is not really a good reason to leave the problem unfixed with a 100% chance of failure. There must be a way to direct people to a new room. Also, players in a non-running teams room could be automatically notified about other team game ends without having to write !notify. Right now, the most practical solution is often to play a different game.
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I wonder having the "Waiting list" per host is bad mental model - as soon as you have more than one host this model breaks (which host will you join? You will want the first one that finishes, but you can't determine that). I agree in principle with the intention of the suggestion for making a new host, but I am afraid that people will not like that the "second host will die" (being smaller, new people will join the first one) and that there is no natural "merge" of hosts again (when total players go lower)...
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Until a way is found that allows for more players. So far we are bad at finding one, but I guess we are not the kind of people to never try something after some defeats.
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quote:
To pretend that people will not read is not really a good reason to leave the problem unfixed with a 100% chance of failure. There must be a way to direct people to a new room. Also, players in a non-running teams room could be automatically notified about other team game ends without having to write !notify. Right now, the most practical solution is often to play a different game. |
It's pretty disingenuous to say I'm pretending that people don't want to read, for what, because I don't want to solve the problem? Which of us has actively worked on this stuff in the past? It's just that the cost of failure isn't mere failure. The cost is annoying players, using up goodwill, and making it harder to try anything else in the future. If we implement 10 failed systems to give people small team games, then people are not going into the 11th with a good mindset. I'm not just saying people don't read so I don't expect this to work. I'm saying that something very close to your system was tried, it didn't work, and the reason seemed to be that people don't read. And obviously I'm not saying nobody reads. What happened is enough people didn't read to inject enough chaos into the system to make it useless for everyone. The central problem any system like this needs to solve is how to guarantee that the players who leave the big room actually get to play a worthwhile game. Most people in the big teams rooms who prefer small games are clearly prioritising playing a game over not playing. So say you're one such person, getting ready to play the next big team game, and some sort of prompt appears asking whether you want to go play a small game instead. You now have the choice to trade your certain big team game for a chance at a small game, and a chance at nothing. How likely does getting a small game have to be for you to accept? 80%? 95%? If asked I expect people would say that or higher, players want to play rather than not play. To make a game happen everyone at least needs to know what they are getting into when they click the button. Otherwise you get into the game, someone goes "WTF is this?", leaves, and now you're in a 2v3 that nobody wants to play. The requirement is less strict for slightly larger games as a 5v6 might still be playable. So if UI flow of the system isn't design right, it will just fail. The people who would want to use it are taught not to by all the times when the "Play a small game" button turned out to be "Get booted from the only game you could play" button instead. This is exactly what the last trial of this system did. It made some games, booted some people, and then just ended up being a wasted step in the big teams room. The devil is in the detail, and it's the detail you've left out. Without detail your system looks essentially the same as what was tried before. Perhaps you could expand upon it. quote:
I propose a solution that will hopefully improve things for both: Each waiting player is asked how many players would at least have to join so that they would join a new game, with the possibility to decline the option at all. As many waiting players as possible are then moved to a new teams room such that each one's minimum size requirement is met. Players are considered to be "waiting" if and only if they are in the players section of a room without playing. I can provide some details on an implementation algorithm if desired. |
What does "is asked" mean exactly? How are you going to protect the system against the portion of people who will just randomly click through prompts to make them go away? How are you going to reward people for interacting with the system enough for them to keep trying? The other way to fail is for the system to make a game so infrequently that people who want to use it don't even bother clicking it.
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I know that you do most of the work    GoogleFrog and I'm happy about anything you try to solve the problem. quote:
What does "is asked" mean exactly? |
There would be a messagebox similar to the one when a matchmaker game is found. Ideally, those messageboxes would be made such that they don't prevent you from doing anything else while they are open. quote:
How are you going to protect the system against the portion of people who will just randomly click through prompts to make them go away? |
I would make a field where you can enter the minimum player number and below two buttons: Accept and decline. Pressing accept would only be possible after a number is entered. The entered number would be saved for next time. There could be an option to deactivate and activate those prompts and to change the number even after the prompt. This is an attempt at a minimally invasive solution such that even people who want to keep things as they are can accept it. Indeed, it has the problem that the start of a new game is not guaranteed. [Spoiler] There would be the option to instead allow a direct start vote among the waiting players of a running room, but this would probably be worse because it would be too unexpected who would participate in such a started game. To guarantee a game, the problem can instead be fixed by a more fundamental change: It is strange that the state of whether you are playing, waiting or spectating can be different between the running battle and the room of the running battle. I think that it should not be possible to join a room of a running game except as a spectator. There should be one designated non-running teams waiting room, marked with a colored frame. There should be a big button to join this room such that you could even join it if new rooms were created at high frequency. When a non-password protected team game ends, all its players are sent to the designated waiting room. When a game in the designated room starts, it becomes non-designated, another designated room is started and the players from the waiting list of the old designated room are sent to the new one. When a player joins a room (manually or automatically), the game start should be delayed by few seconds or until that player has confirmed that they are ready to play.
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quote:
There would be a messagebox similar to the one when a matchmaker game is found. Ideally, those messageboxes would be made such that they don't prevent you from doing anything else while they are open. |
The defining feature of the game found message box is that it demands an answer and times out in 30 seconds. So I really don't know what you mean by making a message like that, but which doesn't prevent other actions.
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Reposting my (   fiendicus_prime's?) idea from the other thread: quote:
I could see something like a multi-game megaroom working.
Spitballing: new all welcome autohost having a "split at over 32 players" mod option which both: will start two games when the start vote passes and displays what the team composition will be (e.g. the moment you get over 32 players the UI will change sorta like how multiple teams works), first game that finishes dumps players back into the same room, where they can either try another start vote or spec the second game.
This solves the problem of people not being able join because the room is too full while not causing the main issues that two separate rooms has.
Main downside? This sounds really hard to implement infra-wise. |
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I feel the reason players want larger rooms should be the PROBLEM that needs to be addressed. Newer players like to be part of the idea of a large battle (even if they don't contribute much to the end result) Newer players like the slightly more lax approach to the game because of the buffer of other players carrying the team. Veterans like the bigger map because it offers more complex strategy and competition. Veterans like the bigger map because of the mid to late game mechanics or the ability to play against those mechanics. Regular players like bigger maps because they get to try our their strategies in a more complex environment but still with safety of falling back to recognized strengths. So, here are my solutions to helping spread the rooms around (I did use AI to help with ideas): Give sweet rewards for small games: Hook up players with cool in-game stuff like currency, XP, or even cosmetic items when they join or create smaller matches. This helps because it gets people excited about smaller games and makes them feel like they're not missing out compared to larger battles. Match folks based on skill: Set up a matchmaking system that pairs players with others who have a similar skill level. This helps because newbies won't feel overwhelmed by pro players, and veterans can still enjoy tough competition. Everybody wins! Spread the love for custom game modes and maps: Get the community involved by encouraging them to make and share unique game modes and maps for all group sizes and skill levels. Show off these creations in-game or on social media so people know they exist. This tackles the problem by giving players more options and variety when choosing game rooms. Throw fun events and challenges: Keep things fresh by organizing in-game events, tourneys, or challenges focused on smaller game rooms or different modes. Players will be more inclined to try new things, and it'll add some spice to the game room selection. Keep the game balanced and enjoyable: Make sure all game sizes and modes are fun by continuously evaluating and tweaking game balance. This helps solve the issue because when every game size offers a great experience, players won't feel the need to always go for the biggest battles. Set up a mentorship program: Let experienced players show newbies the ropes in smaller game rooms or private matches. This helps because it gives newcomers a chill environment to learn from the pros and improve their skills, without the pressure of larger games.
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Doesn't this problem just stem from the fact you can't be in two rooms at the same time, or at least being able to look at or chat in multiple rooms? Many people just join the teams room (because its the only one avaible game thats currently active), join spec (because theres a game in progress) then !notify and alttab until it dings. It works, its effective and its killing the game that there's no other alternative because either you go to single player or you queue for 1v1 to get owned by a blue/purple star. Certainly beats Matchmaking for Battle (because nobody queues and it bans you from matchmaking if you alttab or go afk for less than a minute, necessitating that you slave yourself into the game or run an autoclicker). Or joining a random lobby and waiting solo without even being able to view replays or do whatever else while waiting for people that may never come. Asking for people to join another Teams lobby is futile. Either you upset the actual players in the game because it shows as Allchat in the lobby or nobody listens because specs are, again, alttabed and waiting for !notify "EXP" incentives is just unnecessary threadmill that... is already implemented. In the coloured military Chevrons denoting ELO. I don't like them. I wish I could opt out. But if you really like it, just make ELO gains visible after every match and mask them as "EXP" It won't solve anything except making number addicts happier, but I guess you could try.
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quote:
because nobody queues and it bans you from matchmaking if you alttab or go afk for less than a minute, necessitating that you slave yourself into the game or run an autoclicker |
That sounds like it needs a bug report.
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