Jkjklkl Posted September 17, 2015 Share Posted September 17, 2015 (edited) I've never seen this mentioned, so I thought I'd just let you guys know. These are almost a year old. I would have posted them sooner but I was not a subscriber at the time. No, they didn't start out as 12v12s that lost a lot of people. Just something to look out for http://imgur.com/a/Ei0Ar Edited September 17, 2015 by Jkjklkl Found a third picture Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Enurrsha Posted September 17, 2015 Share Posted September 17, 2015 I've never seen this mentioned, so I thought I'd just let you guys know. These are almost a year old. I would have posted them sooner but I was not a subscriber at the time. No, they didn't start out as 12v12s that lost a lot of people. Just something to look out for http://imgur.com/a/Ei0Ar If I had to guess, I'd say it was a case of 2 people were "offered" the match that either timed-out on the pop-up box or chose "no/cancel" and there wasn't anyone else in the Q. In the case of the wargame(s), I'd speculate the team assignments were made at the time the offer box popped up. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MaximilianPower Posted September 17, 2015 Share Posted September 17, 2015 If I had to guess, I'd say it was a case of 2 people were "offered" the match that either timed-out on the pop-up box or chose "no/cancel" and there wasn't anyone else in the Q. In the case of the wargame(s), I'd speculate the team assignments were made at the time the offer box popped up. Yeah, this. I wouldn't call it a bug. Happens quite a bit. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jasa Posted September 17, 2015 Share Posted September 17, 2015 I remember bug like this or atleast one 5 vs 7 kuat mesas TDM, but I think that was well over a year ago. I'm not sure if it was bug and not just enough players to refill the match, but I have only seen it happen once. I think there was some problem with queue/groupfinder and that it was fixed quickly after it went live, but I could be wrong... I have a feeling it may have been patch 2.8 I haven't seen it since then so pretty sure it's fixed if there ever was bug like that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BlackflameSeven Posted September 18, 2015 Share Posted September 18, 2015 It still exists in one way or another. Only a couple of weeks back, twice in the same day, I had 8v9 matches. Had never seen anything similar, nor again since that day, but it seemed really odd. Potentially four on our side declined the pop, and three of theirs, but there were never any extra added in later as might be expected if the game was truly a 12v12. Around the same time, we also had unexplained deaths that didn't seem to score. The first time a guildie claimed to have died without a reason, we laughed at him, but later that evening, I had the same. The death didn't get shown in the chat, and while it did show against me in the table at the end, the score in the death match didn't work. Adding up the deaths shown against the players on our team came to one more than that shown as the score for the opposing team in the death match, on both occasions. It's never happened again since that day, so we never bothered with a bug report. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Linuxizer Posted September 19, 2015 Share Posted September 19, 2015 I had such a match back in February: http://i.imgur.com/EzoXxcO.jpg http://i.imgur.com/dzCmFYY.jpg It was 7 v 9 from beginning to end. I guess a few people queued but declined. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ramalina Posted September 20, 2015 Share Posted September 20, 2015 It's not a bug as far as I can tell. The matchmaker has a 2 player sized, "allowable team size difference." It will try to backfill to make the match perfectly even, but unless the difference in team numbers is 3 or greater it will not terminate the match due to team number imbalance. Basically, within 2 players is considered "good enough" in the matchmaking algorithm. This makes it much easier for the matchmaker to get games going than if it were forced to wait until a perfectly matched number of player had clicked "accept." It also helps prevent players seeing hung timers, where the match acceptance timer is there and you've clicked, "accept," but the timer is still counting down and you can't actually zone into the match until a person slated for the other team has also clicked, "accept." It also helps prevent force quitting entire matches just because one or a few players have poor connections and are having momentary disconnects. It has been this way since launch. I'm surprised that all of you are just noticing it now, but perhaps Jung Ma has always had more than the average amount of lopsided numbers in queues so I get to see this in operation fairly often. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jkjklkl Posted September 20, 2015 Author Share Posted September 20, 2015 (edited) The main aspect that leads me to think that this is a bug is the 9. All group content in the game requires a multiple of 4 people. Warzones are 4 or 8 people per team. Flashpoints are 4 people. Operations are 8 or 16 people. GSF is 8 or 12 people. Open world bosses (at level) require up to 24 people. Under 8 people is understandable - people have real life issues that come up, or maybe they just get frustrated with how the game is going. I would never claim that a 6v8 is a bug, for example. Again, all of the games I posted started out as full 8v8s. Maybe, just maybe, it was supposed to be a 12v12 but 4 people on each side declined the pop. But the game was still flagged as a 12v12 so the matchmaker was still letting people in. I don't know. But the likelihood of 8 people all quitting the same queue on Harbinger of all places is unlikely. Edited September 20, 2015 by Jkjklkl Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DakhathKilrathi Posted September 20, 2015 Share Posted September 20, 2015 (edited) I've seen this sort of thing happen before with what was definitely an 8 vs 8 wargame. One side had someone drop. Mikaboshi took the pop and it put him on the wrong side. (At least, I'm pretty sure that's what happened. I may be misremembering which of us took the backfill, but I do remember the result.) One side had 7, the other side had 9. I'm inclined to think it's a bug, but I don't know how to replicate it. I've only seen it happen once. Edited September 20, 2015 by DakhathKilrathi Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
plasticx Posted September 20, 2015 Share Posted September 20, 2015 I've seen this sort of thing happen before with what was definitely an 8 vs 8 wargame. One side had someone drop. Mikaboshi took the pop and it put him on the wrong side. (At least, I'm pretty sure that's what happened. I may be misremembering which of us took the backfill, but I do remember the result.) One side had 7, the other side had 9. I'm inclined to think it's a bug, but I don't know how to replicate it. I've only seen it happen once. No, you're good. 8v8 Impside wargame on the Hawk, Kuat TDM. February or so, right before I left. We're both solo queueing; you get the pop, I don't. Someone on your team leaves the match, and matchmaker sends me a backfill pop, I take it, and it puts me on the team that already had 8. So it goes from 8v8, to 7v8, to 7v9. I also stole a south DO from you. And you said you hate me. I remember. I remember. For what it's worth, I've encountered this bug/quirk/whatever thrice--the Hawk incident I've just recounted, once on the Bastion in a cross-faction Kuat Dom (that time my team ended up with the 7), and once recently on the Harbinger to Drako and I (Shipyards Dom I think), though I'm quite sure that it was just long enough ago that it's in neither of our stream archives. I might actually be bored enough to go fishing for screenshots. Stay tuned. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ramalina Posted September 20, 2015 Share Posted September 20, 2015 You people clearly don't spend enough time queuing on low pop servers. The PvP matchmaker(s), as far as I can tell, operate on the assumption that people that get the pop will take it, or at least have some probability of taking it. In PVE groupfinder it won't spawn an instance without a full group of 4, "accepts," but for 8v8 warzones, 4v4, warzones, and GSF it's willing to spawn an instance before full groups have hit accept. I've played quite a few 2v3, 3v4, and a few 2 v 4 WZs where the shorthanded team never has the missing players even spawn in. For 8v8 WZs and for GSF it seems to like a minimum of 4 players on each team, but beyond that doesn't care what the numbers are as long as the team disparities are within limits. It will keep trying to backfill until both teams are at full strength, and as a result you can have weird games where you start off getting your butts kicked because you're down a couple of players and then pull out a smashing victory because your team picks up four backfills but the other team doesn't get any. Making a match happen is higher priority than making the match balanced. The matchmaker is sort of built around the "hope" that backfills will even out teams pretty early in the match, but it doesn't postpone spawning a PvP instance due to fear of unbalanced matches as long as the team mismatch is within limits. If you play a lot on low pop servers being optimistic about the chances of backfills and learning to play conservative defense to prolong the game enough so that backfills have a chance to zone in before you're hopelessly behind in points are both valuable PvP skills. The algorithms in general are pretty good about managing backfills even in low population queues, and it's not really common to see a lot of matches that go more than half way before the teams backfill to balanced numbers (except 4v4, 4v4 almost never backfills properly). Uneven numbers are annoying, but with low populations the latitude the matchmaker has in starting games with unbalanced numbers can be the difference between a queue that is limping along at an almost-decent pace and a completely dead queue. I often wish that the PvE groupfinder would let you start tactical FPs with 2, and storymode FPs with 2 as long as one is checked as either a healer or tank role. Inflexibility with starting numbers really cripples a groupfinder/matchmaker in a low population environment. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DakhathKilrathi Posted September 20, 2015 Share Posted September 20, 2015 (edited) You people clearly don't spend enough time queuing on low pop servers. I queue on TEH until the queue dies. It's not low pop, but by the time people give up for the night the number of players participating is low enough that weird things happen. I've seen the sort of matches you're referring to, and I know what they look like. That's not what this was. For 8v8 WZs and for GSF it seems to like a minimum of 4 players on each team, but beyond that doesn't care what the numbers are as long as the team disparities are within limits. It will keep trying to backfill until both teams are at full strength, and as a result you can have weird games where you start off getting your butts kicked because you're down a couple of players and then pull out a smashing victory because your team picks up four backfills but the other team doesn't get any. Here's the thing. In the example I mentioned, Mikaboshi was skipped. he didn't get a queue pop until the match was already in progress (and, as I recall, more than a couple minutes in). He didn't get a a queue pop until after someone on one side quit. Then he did, and it put him on the wrong side. Because of that I'm firmly convinced that, at least in that case, this is a bug and not a case of a 12 vs 12 with 7 and 9. Edited September 20, 2015 by DakhathKilrathi Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ramalina Posted September 21, 2015 Share Posted September 21, 2015 I haven't seen enough cases to be sure that this is how it works, but you actually don't need a bug to explain this. If to start the match Mikaboshi is farther down the list than other people that are queued, possibly due to nebulous matchmaking weighting factors that rarely have the population to work well, then Mikaboshi being skipped is fairly easy to explain. Then if you get a drop, or even if the teams just aren't full 12 v 12, the matchmaker tries to backfill from whatever is in the queue. So if you have a disparity of one, three people are in queue, the matchmaker assumes queued people will probably accept, then all that has to happen to get added to the wrong team is for Mikaboshi to be assigned to the team that's already one up and the other two people in the queue to be slated for the other team and both decline the pop. It's a design that doesn't try to deal well with team balance in the face of uncertainty in players accepting pops, but the assumptions are fairly simple to code, and it's pretty good at making a match happen if it is at all possible for a match to happen. The team balancing could probably be done quite a bit better, but coding for that while keeping the same rate of match production in poor environments would almost certainly be a lot more complex than the current matchmaker is. It's frustratingly difficult to understand without dev communication because we see such a small fraction of the information that the matchmaker is using that there are behaviors where you can't really tell for sure what the heck it's doing. I have some strong suspicions about how some matchmaking processes work based on observation, and some things that I'm pretty confident of because the devs have said, "it works like this," but given how messy GSF is I don't take even that as absolutely certain. Based on a large personal sample of lopsided matches observed, I'd say that the balance of probability is that this is a case of, "working as deliberately programmed." Whether that's precisely the same as, "working as intended," I have no idea. Dev enlightenment on this subject would be lovely, but I don't think it's likely. They don't seem fond of discussing matchmaking in any great detail, though I'd guess that it's not that different than what you'd pull out of a computer science text on basic forms of queuing algorithms. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DakhathKilrathi Posted September 21, 2015 Share Posted September 21, 2015 Then if you get a drop, or even if the teams just aren't full 12 v 12, the matchmaker tries to backfill from whatever is in the queue. So if you have a disparity of one, three people are in queue, the matchmaker assumes queued people will probably accept, then all that has to happen to get added to the wrong team is for Mikaboshi to be assigned to the team that's already one up and the other two people in the queue to be slated for the other team and both decline the pop. We were far enough into the match that at least 8 people would have needed to decline. On both sides. Are you honestly suggesting that's more likely? Bear in mind that this was a wargame, so it had a reduced player pool. The Ebon Hawk simply doesn't have that many people playing, and it didn't at the time either. Never mind the fact that he and I were both in queue at the same time and had similar matchmaking profiles (though I probably had fewer mastered ships, I did have at least three). And the match went on long enough that, had this been the case, someone would have filled on one team or the other as things went on. Sorry, I just don't see it. Not for this particular example. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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