High elo team game autohost?

A persistent autohost that only half the players can join risks becoming 'the' big game autohost for an entire evening. In our experience players that want to play a big game will not seed a secondary big game while one exists, even if they are unable to play in the big game. The high elo players will be drawn to the big game that they can play in, while the low elo players will not hang around to play a game of their own. Spectating is fun.

The long-term effect would be a lack of new players.

A autohost for high elo with max players 6 would make it less of a cluster player magnet

You could also infer that the coordination mechanisms were not strong enough.

There is a lot of friction in creating alternative schelling points. If you want to spectate a non-matchmaking game, you have to abandon (and if not an autohost, destroy) your lobby long enough to join and spectate the other game. If you're looking for technical solutions to make it easier to sustain multiple lobbies, the simplest approach would be to change the lobby list interface to add a one-click spectate button which doesn't cause you to leave your current lobby. You could rework the matchmaking game entries to only have this button too, to make it clearer that clicking on a matchmaking game entry won't perform the same action as clicking on a regular lobby.

I don't think the automatchmaking feature is evidence of a preference against small team games. Any attempts to try to use this feature just holds everyone else up. This is because the vote takes the space reserved for other action, blocking procedure to start the next game until cleared. Being perceived as an annoyance to click through rather than a real choice is a stable equilibrium - people won't use this feature, as they know that nobody uses this feature.

I've had quite a lot of success since I started seeding small team games about a month ago. Others have also remarked how nice it is that Small Teams games are available. These often end up being de facto high elo small team games anyway, but it can be quite frustrating when they don't. This has only become more awkward with the recent dearth of 1v1 matchmaking (which zkstats tells me started to thin out two weeks ago), as the workflow for interim spectating without permanently abandoning the lobby looks like: part lobby -> join other lobby -> spectating -> rejoin -> wait for game to load -> display menu again -> part lobby -> rejoin original lobby -> hide menu.

Nonetheless, this shows that it's entirely possible to have a small teams lobby that works alongside the lobsterpots rather than destroying it. I fully expect a high elo autohost capped at 8 players will work the same way.

If you still strongly believe that I am wrong on this point, would you consider an experiment where the autohost's lifespan is explicitly limited to one month to collect data? This should be enough to help determine which world we live in, while avoiding the long term consequences in the event we do live in a world where any high elo autohost is detrimental.

I want autohosts to be treated differently in the lobby interface. Also, I don't think Autohosts are ever spawned by the server? If they aren't they should be. Also, the auto host cycle should be re-evaluated.

I want auto hosts grouped together all the time at the top, with a line separating the auto host games from the private hosts, and I want them grouped such that even when the battles are in progress/ empty with no players they are all above that white line. This would making finding autohosts easier for me. The way they are treated right now is all over the place, and private hosts can be inbetween at any point.

I need more autohosts to go to. That's not in the sence that I feel like I need a high elo autohost, I mean when the teams room is at 16v16 players, I think the only other PVP hosts free are FFA and small teams. If I want to play a smaller 5v5 battle, I'm out of luck and have to make my own custom lobby, which I don't think people will join. When the main teams all welcome room gets to 10-14 players, a second host should show up to try and bring players to another battle, really coming into use once the main room hits 14v14. Ofcourse, empty autohosts should be cleared to free up the battle list.

The autohost cycle (small team game? pick a map. start?) has been around for a while and should be re-evaluated. a lot of people don't like the question to matchmaker teamqueue. and even when they finish their matchmaker game, that's the end, they probably join the teams room again. Our community may be big enough to support a teams 2v2 queue, but people play the 10v10 more often. replace the question with 'would you like to join <suggested autohost>?' where the suggested autohost is the other allwelcome teams room, when that other room has 4+ players. players would have to seed the 2nd room, but once that has happened, players get the notification that there's another room open, and we may see a flow. this can be scaled, where <suggested autohost> is a host with a playercount between 4 and 12 with the least amount of players. give this a test I think.

I agre with Blue, auto hosts emphised always at top is a good idea, or rooms ordered by player numbers. I sometime will extra time scoping around rooms looking where the pot is, or that ffa game or wheres the games are happening.

quote: Just now we had 2 "newer" players which were seriously upset because we wanted to play high elo team games. We had to constantly spec him and tell a red rank (1450 Elo) that he isnt a high Elo player multiple times.

Besides the moderation precedent of allowing kicking for 'poor play', this is why I am strongly against player-managed unpassworded high-elo hosts. I am not sure that allowing room hosts to set lobby-enforced rating limits is a meaningful improvement.

To be clear, I'm not strongly against an autohost but I don't think the current arrangement (unless it is in passworded rooms) can continue in the long term.