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Hi guys. We’ve spent a large amount of time recently fixing loads of performance issues and bugs, and we’re at the stage where most of that is pretty much done. One of the things we’re looking into working on / improving next is game quality, at both ends of the spectrum.

With the discussions on the other thread about the various different mix methods not completely working, I was wondering – what exactly is needed to organise the mix? To my understanding, you need a date/time, server details, mumble details, and players signed up (plus possibly subs?).

Just some idle thinking by me at the moment and no promising anything, but since we have the playerbase to support these kinds of things, what can we do to help? What is different compared with a standard lobby?

So how can we filter out skill levels? We could probably limit based on membership of steam groups, or put in a permissions layer where players have to be invited by existing members? Have peer reviews by other players to say what skill level you actually are?

TrueSkill is probably would be a nice thing to implement, allowing mixes to be automatically balanced. You’d need quite a lot of statistics for that, but it’s obtainable using logs.tf

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/trueskill/details.aspx

There’s a couple of maths bods working on the theory of ranking systems, testing out the numbers and seeing how the balance comes out for existing games.

However – current mixes do work. Is the skill limit there just because the link to spreadsheet isn’t given out to everyone?

Make Div requirement feature, if a player played in Div X, he can play in that lobby mix, don’t forget about UGC divs

Make a Shuffle button, a Leader of a mix can Shuffle players if Leader sees that teams are stacked, by Shuffling, players keep their Class spot but switched to other team, who gets shuffled, might depend on Lobbies played, hours, div(?) or completely random, not everyone gets shuffled ofc, only like 4-5 players, but Shuffling should have limited uses or else it’s easy to abuse, just shuffle until you get specific players in your team, which will be retarded. Shuffle feature only for Mixes, or else people gonna abuse that in regular lobbies

Special channels for mixes in Mumble, password (token?) protected so that the other players won’t be able to join and annoy players.

Mixes lobbies are highlighted and always on top of Lobby list, so that people won’t have any trouble finding a mix or just make Tabs for Mixes and Lobbies, so we could switch between 2 of them.

That’s all i got for now

Quoted from Popcorp

Make Div requirement feature, if a player played in Div X, he’s can play in that lobby mix, don’t forget about UGC divs

Actually I support this.

Quoted from foxy_dave

Do they need to have a date/time to go with them, or just when it’s full?

I prefer date/time, since I could sign up while at work/school, and then get home and play a quality game. If it’s just when full, you have to pay attention to it, and it will just be like a lobby

Allow sandwich