MMR Matchmaking Planning Thread. Nerds welcome.

[Kassius]

Some thoughts qan

MMR is the future, but why it needs to be split into several arenas I don't know. We should be able to segment the map into, for example, 2 jav maps and 2 wb maps. This helps with new player accessibility. One bot to handle 4 concurrent games, or 4 bots in the interim. It'd just be like concurrent duels. Also, MMR needs a rebrand, we all know what MMR is, but it means nothing to Jonny Tightlips and trying to get them out of public. Call it something that is unambiguous to new players, I don't have a good suggestion for this right now though.
Also, public players need to have a starting ELO of 1000 tops to make it more welcoming. A simple lookup to the twd database determines the if the player is new or not. The pathway to competitive play is now much easier without having to worry about twd. Having a conveyor belt of new players to MMR should be a top priority imo to help with retention.

I believe the following is already on the road map, but automating the MMR bot to be 'always available' would be great, you log into to the zone and if you're already signed up to MMR, you get a PM of the current Jav and wb signups to MMR. You can then reply to join either or both queues. Players that have never played MMR can get a pm, once per session, to ask players if they'd be interested in trying it, and go from there.

The bot tracks if you log out by polling ?find commands periodically to update the queues. This would promote zone population numbers around the clock, as you can leave your client open without having to actively monitor the game, and just respond to the pings from the not when games are starting.

After all this you can have the polish, people like bitmap medals, well why not a medal for MMR with bands of players grouped 'leagues', like Bronze/Silver/Gold etc. like Starcraft 2. So after each MMR season, you get a medal based on your finishing league. Your final league then becomes your new ELO for the new season, so the top tier players have something to aim for as their ELO is set to be the same as all other players in their league.

[Cape]

Can we get a base MMR bot? Have it go with TWBT ratings until 20 games or something.

[Rab]

https://trenchwars.org/mmr/

I noticed all the wbs are over 3k, and most of the javs too.

I thought mmr was meant to be zero-sum, am I wrong?

[beam]

https://trenchwars.org/mmr/

I noticed all the wbs are over 3k, and most of the javs too.

I thought mmr was meant to be zero-sum, am I wrong?

that's only the top 20 rated players with minimum 20 games played not a full list of everybody

[Riverside]

Can we get a base MMR bot? Have it go with TWBT ratings until 20 games or something.

qan , for basing, would it possible to create a temporary solution and separate the mmr basing rating of players into 3 ships?

Terrier, spider, shark

!p 5, 8

!p gives the default spider option (that includes players who wanted to shark or terr)

[Vehicle]

Should just say screw ships and implement the current MMR system or a tweaked version that's purely based on W:L / amount of stomp. It's not going to make that much of a difference when you consider the ecosystem of players. Like what 1800 level spider is a 900 level shark? And what captain wouldn't know that? If people want to play outside their main (and therefore rating-related) ship, that's up to the captain to take the handicap.

I'd personally really like to see MMR basing but I do understand that it's much more difficult than a dueling system.

Edit: And do set times already. You'd get a lot more participation and potentially even people logging on during the week if you just said "Tuesday and Thursdays from 8-10 is MMR time". I don't see why not. And before you say "We're all volunteers blah blah," you and I both know you're gonna be online anyway.

[Riverside]

Like what 1800 level spider is a 900 level shark? And what captain wouldn't know that? If people want to play outside their main (and therefore rating-related) ship, that's up to the captain to take the handicap.

there are no player captains making line-up decisions for teams in mmr

The bot matches players to 2 (4, 6, etc) teams using individual ratings

[Vehicle]

there are no player captains making line-up decisions for teams in mmr

The bot matches players to 2 (4, 6, etc) teams using individual ratings

According to whom? Why cant a bot just split 16 people into what it thinks are two even teams of 8 and assign the highest ELO player a cap (or even have people pm !cap to bot) who picks ships? Could even bake in trading so, say, Freq 1 could give Freq 0 a shark in exchange for one of their spiders. It doesn't have to be a grand multi-ship rating system.

[Riverside]

According to whom? Why cant a bot just split 16 people into what it thinks are two even teams of 8 and assign the highest ELO player a cap (or even have people pm !cap to bot) who picks ships? Could even bake in trading so, say, Freq 1 could give Freq 0 a shark in exchange for one of their spiders. It doesn't have to be a grand multi-ship rating system.

Pirhips

personal preference is letting the bot maintain the matchmaking, and considering ways to move that forward

[Rab]

there was a guy with 80 wb games on the mmr web page yesterday, now he's not there, how does this happen, are we sure the website's displaying everyone?

[qan]

Thanks for the heads up on that. I expanded the query to top 50. (This is all a temporary solution, though. Will need to tweak how we handle displaying ratings at some point.)

Base code still isn't in yet. BIET implemented Rab's basing alg into TSLBot, but this was right before I forked off MMRBot. There are some small differences between the two, so it means it's not just directly dropping the basing alg from TSLBot into MMRBot, but I don't think it would be too much of a challenge. IIRC it does still need testing, however.

We could have the bot select teams with recommended ships but still allow the captain to arrange teams as desired, especially for the early matches. Base is the place where matches between unrated players are bound to be the most lopsided, I think. Also, captaincy among unrateds would be a problem unless we use prior data (such as base stars) to assign captains. There hasn't been too much discussion on base recently, though. As for dev time, work is slowing down for me a bit, fortunately, but I still don't have a ton of free time.

For those asking about base ratings, yes, they're designed as split into 3 ships.

The biggest issue with base is that switches and subs are common, so unless people are willing to play without them, it needs a solid solution on how to handle those with regard to ratings adjustments (especially if using individual ship ratings). Rating changes are based on comparison of strength of the two teams at the start of a match, currently. I have a basic plan for how to handle subs/switches: essentially taking ratings snapshots before each sub/switch and applying ratings changes as a percentage of time played of the total round time for each ship. Not certain if that's mathematically sound, but it may be good enough for our purposes, so long as it can't be gamed.

[Rab]

*thumbs up*

[Rab]

matchups seem to get less balanced when there are 4 teams, not entirely convinced it's matching 1v2 and 3v4

[Cape]

As for dev time, work is slowing down for me a bit, fortunately, but I still don't have a ton of free time..

I recommend Terring on your free time

[Cape]

Bot Note: Instances when multiple games run simultaneously; Bot should place all higher rated players in the same game.