Smooth game rating

[Franck83]

Hi all commanders,

Same question i posted on discord.

What do you think of a feature that allows to add players with which we had a smooth (less laggy) game ?

It would be an optional feature, like the friend system, but just for smoothness (green color for example on player name)
So we can join games with people that we know empirically had a no lag experience. This feature allows people grouping together to have a smoother global game experience.

[Louvegarde]

Isn't that what the "Add friend' button is for already ? What would be the difference ?
People aren't going to want to play again with someone who is "very toxic, but has a great connection". The opposite may also be true. I don't see what this feature would bring.

[Franck83]

Sure you can do it with friend feature. But a friend is more than just that.

And always pinged when a friend player log may not be fun. At least you can have at the end maybe 300-350 smoothy players experience.

Some suggested on discord to do it with a mod (recording average packet loss, average ping, to empiricaly set a lag quality score to a player id). That seems to be a good suggestion.

[Geosearchef]

I see multiple problems with this.
First of all, it kinda creates a system that excludes people from playing sometimes even accidently.
This feels to me like discriminating people for something that is out of their reach. To me it's similar to discriminating a disabled person so I see some huge moral issues here.

In case of lag caused by CPU issues this can already be seen by the CPU rating in the lobby.
Most network issues will hopefully be fixed by the introduction of ICE therefore rendering this system a bit useless.

I also think that it's not worth the hassle of implementing as this would need support of both clients aswell as API support (and will probably be rendered obsolete anyways). How do you wanna detect a "smooth" game? How do you wanna detect who caused that game to lag? How can such a system go wrong. If you wanna let players report you're facing a bit of restructuring of client UIs and a lot of API implementation.

[Geosearchef]

About the "do it with a mod" suggestion. This is to my knowledge fairly impossible. The game is not able to send any data to the client/server after leaving the lobby except for player army stats (score).

This may change in the future as I'm thinking about playing around a bit in the ICE adapter with actually reading the messages FA is sending, but currently this is not possible.

[Franck83]

If a better system is on track to give mostly smoother game experience, sure its a nice news .

My idea is a simple empiric system. I played with 3 players. That game was very smooth. Sure, i want add them to my smoothness list, just a 'I like' system.
Maybe some infos with packet loss or ping maybe useful too. This is not a punishment system but a reward of good system.
2 players can have each either bad smoothness, but good with others. You don't need to explain why, you just take care of lagness fact.

Although, i understand the moral issues here. It should not be if we group together people with best connectivity. Except for people with bad connection with all players, sure... i admit...this is discriminating for them.

But, as you said, it seems that the problem will be solved soon. So end of discussion.

[FtXCommando]

You know you can just foe people that lag your games so that they don’t join?

[Franck83]

That's true. About smoothness accuracy, in a 4 players game, you may don't know who lags. On a reward system, if a 4 players game was smooth you can retain all players.