Weighted Slotting

[Doubleumc]

About the pull request

The order in which players pass through the roundstart slotting system is now weighted.

All players have a base weight of 1.
New players under 2 hours human playtime get +2 weight, 2-5 hours get +1 weight.
Each round after the first two a player fails to get a slot, cumulative +1 weight. Resets to 0 upon getting a slot.

Players are still picked randomly, with higher weights having a higher chance to be picked.

Explain why it's good for the game

Right now, on average, every player has an equal opportunity to be picked. But it doesn't feel fair when you're on a 10+ round streak of not being picked.

With this change, on average, every player will still be picked the same amount of times as before. But those rounds you get to play should be distributed more evenly, so you don't hit a 10+ round dry spell.

Testing Photographs and Procedure

Screenshots & Videos

Put screenshots and videos here with an empty line between the screenshots and the <details> tags.

Changelog

🆑
code: changed slotting - new players and players that got skipped previous rounds have a higher chance to get a slot
/:cl:

[Doubleumc]

Want to confirm the database stuff is sound before letting this touch the servers.

[messagecypher]

just a little criticism
people who don't manage to get in the server and ready up before round start or entirely miss the operation seem to be at a little disadvantage: they don't get their +1s since they don't manage to join during round start and ready up.

the new player weighting is great, since it allows new players to get into PVE further by getting their hours in
but the +1 for every round you don't roll seems a little bit unfair to people who can't get into the server

while the streaks of not playing 10 rounds in a row is painful, its also just as bad as playing one round and coming back in a week only to have 10 more people with 2+ roll weight because they didnt get picked four times in the day before

(theres also the concern of multikeying/making an alt for the +2 weight but thats a non-issue since the PVE community isnt that bad)

[Doubleumc]

Thank you for your feedback. Weighted slotting isn't perfect and can't possibly be perfect, but its trying its best to bring a little fairness to a random system.

people who don't manage to get in the server and ready up before round start or entirely miss the operation seem to be at a little disadvantage: they don't get their +1s since they don't manage to join during round start and ready up.

the new player weighting is great, since it allows new players to get into PVE further by getting their hours in but the +1 for every round you don't roll seems a little bit unfair to people who can't get into the server

People who are late or miss the operation entirely are already disadvantaged -- you cannot get slotted if you're not there to be slotted. That's not the kind of "missed slot" that weighting can do anything for or against. Not being there for roundstart is going to have the same outcome.

while the streaks of not playing 10 rounds in a row is painful, its also just as bad as playing one round and coming back in a week only to have 10 more people with 2+ roll weight because they didnt get picked four times in the day before

I agree that missing 10 rounds in a row would suck, and only getting to play once a week and missing the roll would also suck. But a more appropriate comparison would be missing that weekly roll 10 weeks in a row -- that would really, really suck. These streaks of missing rounds is what the system is intended to prevent.

(theres also the concern of multikeying/making an alt for the +2 weight but thats a non-issue since the PVE community isnt that bad)

If someone were to multikey and somehow not be detected, they already have an advantage of getting two random chances to be in the round. The weighting system is tracked per-ckey and would not change that.

"Fairness" is a nebulous concept. What form it takes and how it's measured has many, many potential answers. I won't pretend that this is the answer. Its simply an answer that is workable, implementable, and measurable with the tools available.

Should people who aren't there for roundstart be favored? By how much? Which roundstarts count, such as a test session vs "real" round? How are they determined? What about rounds with different slot counts (FORECON vs Blackstone)? Do they count more, less, the same? Is that more or less fair to the person who is there at roundstart?
Not being facetious. I don't know the answers either.