Possible Improvements for Searching Replays

[EasyCo]

I absolutely love how easy it is to watch replays in this game. After watching several Youtube channels (Gyle, for example) focused on showing various replays, I ended up getting FAF and watching replays myself. It really is a lot of fun to watch all of these replays, and I'm glad that they are there in the first place.

That said, actually finding an even slightly decent replay is just about an exercise in futility. It can often reach the point where I just quit without actually watching a single replay because I just get too frustrated from the task of finding one that even works. That's why I wanted to come on the forums and mention some of the ideas I've had which, if possible, would really help in making it easier to find decent (or heck, even working) replays. Not only that, but if they could work then these ideas would also make it easier to search for more types of games. For the sake of simplicity, I'll put my ideas in a list.

1. Add a way to tag replays which desync. I get the idea behind what causes a desync, but I'm not sure how consistent they are. If I watch a replay which has a desync just seconds into the game, then will anyone else who watches that replay get the same desync, and if so does it occur at the same time? Will that replay always end up with a desync? If desyncs are consistent enough, then adding a way to tag replays that desync would be a massive time saver, and would also prevent an enormous amount of frustration from loading up replays only to constantly see the desync. The current problem is that there is no way to tell which replays actually even work, so there's no way to know which has a desync until you actually try to watch it.

2. Add a way to sort replays by the number of players. For example, say I want to watch a 5v5 (or any game involving 10 players) game. Currently, I'm out of luck. Sure, I can click through every single game listed until I find a replay with 10 players, but that can take an incredibly long time. If there was a way to search for the number of players (say, a search function that only lists replays with >= 6 players, or something similar), then the person searching can see a list of replays containing exactly what they are searching for, meaning that they can know that which ever replay they click on, they will see the exact amount of players they were searching for.

3. Add a way to search by replay length. Currently, I have to pay close attention to the game time under each replay because there is no way to sort it. A game lasting half an hour can be in between several replays which last less than a minute. Being able to sort by time would make it much easier to find the games with the time that I'm interested in (say, if I want to watch an hour long replay, I would just sort by time and go from there).

4. Add a way to search for older replays. Maybe I'm just not understanding the way replays work, but I don't see any way to watch replays older than a few days. I can see a few by searching for something to narrow the amount of replays (such as by searching a specific map), but other than that it doesn't seem like there's a way to see anything past the first page of replays. What happens to the older games no longer listed? Are replays just deleted after a few days? To give everyone an idea of what I mean, the replay tab right now only contains games from today (5/4/2015), and nothing earlier.

Anyway, that's all I can think of for now. When I can think of any more possible suggestions, I'll come back to add them in. In the meantime, does anyone else have any suggestions for making searching for replays a more user-friendly experience? Does anyone have any thoughts on the suggestions I've already given? I'd love to hear what everyone thinks about this.

Edit:

To give a slightly better idea for what I had in mind with better ways to search, just look at the vaults tab. The very top includes a way to filter results based on the number of players, the map size, and other such things. Those two alone would greatly benefit replays.

[Softly]

These kind of improvements would clearly be a great thing to have!

Unfortunately, there's very few people actively contributing to the code base at the moment, and there's also lot of other things that need fixing first before new features get added. I actually intend to have a go at improving the replay vault when I am less busy (so in a couple of months), but if you're very welcome to jump in and contribute yourself if you'd like a go at it

The faf client code is here if you're interested: https://github.com/FAForever/lobby