Stamps? Servers? Regions? Everything I have figured out

  • Captain Coel
    Captain
    Insider

    TLDR Explanation of Regions, Stamps, and Servers Before update.

    Right now matchmaking is a little weird for the Hourglass Fights. Its tedious, time consuming, and boring. Here is a little info that might help you understand everything I have figured out. Including why new players are getting hit with curse wielding sweats. We know matchmaking is bringing same-faction fights and that will be awesome. It will help with the fact that the Ghost Curse is desired way more than the Skeleton Curse. BUT we are ignoring that. What we are going to focus on is the organization.

    There are REGIONS, these are real world locations like North America(NA) East, NA West, EU, OCE. Inside of the regions are STAMPS, a collection of single instances of the world these are called SERVERS. The issue lies in the fact that battles can take place with people on your SERVER and with people on your STAMP. STAMPS do not have a large number of SERVERS, im estimating as low as 4 or 5. For my example we will use 5 SERVERS per STAMP.

    If there are 5 Servers, with a mix of boats. Lets say they are all the same 1 Galleon, 1 Brigantine, 3 Sloops. If you are a Galleon, there are 5 other boats of the same size on your STAMP. If you queue in and get stomped, and keep queueing, even if everyone is still there. Chances are you will see that same crew again very quickly. This is true for all boats, because even though sloop is a very popular boat, its split between duos/solos So its very easy to have a mostly dead stamp. This is why people run into the same opponents over and over again. This is why I recommend hopping servers if you get stomped, this way you might end up on a different stamp.

    All servers within a stamp will have identical, sometimes different matchmaking times. When asking opponents what their hourglass said, it was almost always what mine was.

    So now lets talk about why the Sweatiest of players are getting matched with everyone from experienced pvpers, to moderate players, to complete noobs.

    The matchmaking is based off of a modified ELO system that takes into account the ratio of Wins vs Losses of the crew. So someone who is 200 wins 100 losses and wearing a curse has the same rating as someone who is 10 wins and 5 losses and just getting started. To add to this, when you dive it starts looking for opponents. But imagine matchmaking looking like an iris opening. As it opens wider and wider, more people are acceptable opponents. This means that is someone with a 100/0 w/l has been searching for a bit, their matchmaking could be so wide that when someone who is brand new or even has a negative w/l can be paired with them. This is because STAMP population is so low and matchmaking is based off of factions as well. It also applies the other direction. If someone is new and can not find a match and has been sitting there for a few minutes and a super sweaty crew jumps into the queue they may receive them as an opponent because their matchmaking has opened up wide.

    If you sit in matchmaking for more than 10-15 minutes. It means one of two things there is no one on your stamp fighting or the only other two people fighting in your ship configuration are actively fighting. If the other person on your faction wins and their opponent quits. You have a dead stamp and no one else to fight. These issues can be resolved by hopping servers by starting over. Also if you keep queuing into the same people and getting stomped, try a new server.

    I hope this helps. Any questions let me know. I'm just trying to help people understand and alleviate frustrations while we wait for an update. This information was gathered by me and my friends in our grinds past 200. We know we are on the higher end of the food chain, but we want everyone to play this mode and are very (im)patiently waiting for the update ourselves. And again to close, I hope they add some sort of daily incentive, some sort of "gold rush" to allegiance battles, and more rewards before level 100 and after 200.

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  • Ninja Naranja
    Legend
    Insider

    Good, easy to understand information here. Good job putting this all together!

  • Captain Coel
    Captain
    Insider

    @ninja-naranja said in Stamps? Servers? Regions? Everything I have figured out:

    Good, easy to understand information here. Good job putting this all together!

    Thanks mate! It was exhausting. I kept notes as well. Also trying to get people to chat was tricky sometimes.

  • Elk37k
    Castaway

    @captain-coel You sir, are a legend. Thanks for that - Rare should give you a job!

  • LordQulex
    Master

    This all looks feasible from a technological standpoint. We call then n-ary trees: a region (trunk) will have n stamp nodes (branches) that will each have n server nodes (leaves). 5 servers per stamp isn't unreasonable, but without knowing Rare's server architecture there's no real (legal 😉) way for us to determine what the number is. One detail you may have left out though is, how many stamps are there per region? The answer is, of course, how many does Rare want to pay for?

    If they use AWS or GCP (or whatever the Microsoft equivalent is, I don't know anyone who uses them), then auto-scaling with load is likely active and the answer is "as many as they need at the time they need it." That would be much better than paying some old server farm for 20 stamps and only 3 of them being needed at any given time. But this is Microsoft here, I would not be surprised if they're in some server farm some place with machines to spare.

    The other thing you missed is the 20 minute cool-down. If you just finished a match, an engineered match not an organic one, you allegedly have a 20 minute timer before you can be invaded again. That means if ship A and ship B just finished a match, and ship B hasn't enqueued again, you can't invade ship A for 20 minutes. And that's not even accounting for the chance the ship that won shares your faction. The challenge also is, if the ships that just won are far away from your MMR, if ship B joins the queue again they may match with ship A again before you because they're closer.

    You did a fine explanation, all you're missing is the actual technical names for the data structures you're trying to describe. I don't want to turn this into a CS301 course. But what you've done here is do an excellent job of explaining why a SBMM based on W/L ratio is a terrible idea compared to a true Elo rating system. Someone with a 5-5 W/L ratio is not likely to be as skilled as someone with a 500-500 record, but just as likely to be matched. That is quite possibly the biggest design flaw in the entire system.

  • Captain Coel
    Captain
    Insider

    @lordqulex Thanks for the technical names. I work in the liquor industry so computer code isn't my thing.

    I would say a 5-5 and 500-500 could be similarly skilled, one just has wat more play time.

    I'm fairly certain Rare uses Microsoft Azure servers, because Microsoft owns them. Scalable makes sense, I've seen atleast 5 different combos of hourglass timers while mindlessly hopping for this info.

    But my goal was to help people understand.

  • OndrejBakan
    Ship Mate
    Founder

    I'd really love to know, how big those stamps are. I imagine it's a container of Servers (instances of game world, not real HW), something like Docker maybe.

    And yeah, Microsoft uses Azure and PlayFab specifically.

  • HiradC
    Commander
    Insider

    I'd be interested to know if anyone has tested whether portal hopping is also restricted to same stamp. If that was a way of swapping stamp but keeping supplies it would be worth it.

    I've said elsewhere but honestly the inaccuracy of the estimated timers feels like a self perpetuating yoyo.

    It says reaper long queue and athena short, so all go athena, so reapers get short queues and athena long, and this feeds into next estimated time updates and the yoyo continues

  • Captain Coel
    Captain
    Insider

    @hiradc using the tall tale to swap is the same stamp in my experience.

    I can try and test more thoroughly tonight/tomorrow.

  • a10dr4651
    Captain
    Insider

    I've tried portal hopping, the timers changed for me when I left the portal but I guess that doesn't really mean I've changed stamps, just refreshed the timer. I did find that portal hopping puts you at risk of bugs though, I was unable to vote on the war map once and had visual bugs with clouds forming at sea level rather than in the sky.

  • CoffeeLight5545
    Legend
    Insider

    @captain-coel

    I also have a little information. As you said there are different ships in a single stamp. All the ships combined make up the average, not just a particular class of ship.

    Let me explain, if you have 4 sloops and a gallon on one stamp, the 4 sloops will fight each other with about a minute or so total wait time so the matchmaking says about a minute or two. Unfortunately they gallon has no matches so it will take an hour to match. Meanwhile the average keeps being lowered by 4 sloops.

    Rare needs to look at the matchmaking times and base it off ship size too.

  • Foambreaker
    Castaway

    @captain-coel Wow thanks for this.

    This is the Achilles heal of all matchmaking. The more rules you add the smaller the pool and in any arena style PvP if the pool is too small either match rules have to be relaxed or the queue times soar. If the rules are relaxed the PvP quality for less skilled players plummets and participation follows; creating a feedback loop that usually kills off the feature over time.

    There is a solution but it is never popular. Force a minimum team size. This works because in say a 4v4 (galleon) the skill levels the crew may vary but the impact is lessened by the makeup of the team. In 1v1 or 2v2 the skill mismatch is really pronounced.

    Personally I would have made this a Galleon feature or even a 2-3 ship fleet feature. 1v1 matchmaking is a fools errand (no offense intended) unless you have 100s of players in the Q. They could also have used this as a chance to create larger galleon crews, IMHO a 10 man galleon crew versus another 10 man galleon crew would be very fun.

  • Blam320
    Legend
    Insider

    @foambreaker said in Stamps? Servers? Regions? Everything I have figured out:

    @captain-coel Wow thanks for this.

    This is the Achilles heal of all matchmaking. The more rules you add the smaller the pool and in any arena style PvP if the pool is too small either match rules have to be relaxed or the queue times soar. If the rules are relaxed the PvP quality for less skilled players plummets and participation follows; creating a feedback loop that usually kills off the feature over time.

    There is a solution but it is never popular. Force a minimum team size. This works because in say a 4v4 (galleon) the skill levels the crew may vary but the impact is lessened by the makeup of the team. In 1v1 or 2v2 the skill mismatch is really pronounced.

    Personally I would have made this a Galleon feature or even a 2-3 ship fleet feature. 1v1 matchmaking is a fools errand (no offense intended) unless you have 100s of players in the Q. They could also have used this as a chance to create larger galleon crews, IMHO a 10 man galleon crew versus another 10 man galleon crew would be very fun.

    Couple of things very wrong with your suggestion. Making this feature Galleon-only, or as you put it, forcing a minimum team size, is ludicrous. It disproportionately affects Solos, Duos, and Trios, and in fact actively punishes them for playing the way they want by denying them access to content.

    A better solution would be to allow matchmaking between multiple stamps within the same region. I'm willing to bet there are hundreds of players out there using the Hourglass across all ship classes; but if the information presented by @Captain-Coel is correct, then the matchmaking is being deliberately hamstrung by limiting it to only matching players within what seems to be a very small server pool per stamp. Allowing matchmaking across an entire region - or even sub-regions such as USA West, USA East, EU West, EU East, ect - will vastly expand the matchmaking pool and guarantee shorter que times, plus much higher chances of more equal matches.

  • BurnBacon
    Champion
    Insider

    Its tedious, time consuming, and boring.

    Sounds like a good day to relax and just enjoy.

    So now lets talk about why the Sweatiest of players are getting matched with everyone from experienced pvpers, to moderate players, to complete noobs.

    Matchmaker couldnt find someone my W/L ratio so it gave me the closest person to my lvl, which would be someone higher wins majority. What so hard to understand?

    So someone who is 200 wins 100 losses and wearing a curse has the same rating as someone who is 10 wins and 5 losses

    Using "curses" doesn't add up. I can join a Galleon crew, Do NOTHING but bail water and repair. Not shoot a single cannon. Earn the curse because my crew Won. Does that make me good pvp with the curse? No.
    It the same as Pirate Legend title.

  • Captain Coel
    Captain
    Insider

    @burnbacon said in Stamps? Servers? Regions? Everything I have figured out:

    Its tedious, time consuming, and boring.

    Sounds like a good day to relax and just enjoy.

    So now lets talk about why the Sweatiest of players are getting matched with everyone from experienced pvpers, to moderate players, to complete noobs.

    Matchmaker couldnt find someone my W/L ratio so it gave me the closest person to my lvl, which would be someone higher wins majority. What so hard to understand?

    So someone who is 200 wins 100 losses and wearing a curse has the same rating as someone who is 10 wins and 5 losses

    Using "curses" doesn't add up. I can join a Galleon crew, Do NOTHING but bail water and repair. Not shoot a single cannon. Earn the curse because my crew Won. Does that make me good pvp with the curse? No.
    It the same as Pirate Legend title.

    I generally do relax while working on the curse. I think you may misunderstood the point of my post. I am just trying to help other people udnerstand the way it works as far as I could figure out.

    Using the curses means nothing as far as skill is concerned. Its simply a measurement of time played.

  • Captain Coel
    Captain
    Insider

    @blam320 said in Stamps? Servers? Regions? Everything I have figured out:

    @foambreaker said in Stamps? Servers? Regions? Everything I have figured out:

    @captain-coel Wow thanks for this.

    This is the Achilles heal of all matchmaking. The more rules you add the smaller the pool and in any arena style PvP if the pool is too small either match rules have to be relaxed or the queue times soar. If the rules are relaxed the PvP quality for less skilled players plummets and participation follows; creating a feedback loop that usually kills off the feature over time.

    There is a solution but it is never popular. Force a minimum team size. This works because in say a 4v4 (galleon) the skill levels the crew may vary but the impact is lessened by the makeup of the team. In 1v1 or 2v2 the skill mismatch is really pronounced.

    Personally I would have made this a Galleon feature or even a 2-3 ship fleet feature. 1v1 matchmaking is a fools errand (no offense intended) unless you have 100s of players in the Q. They could also have used this as a chance to create larger galleon crews, IMHO a 10 man galleon crew versus another 10 man galleon crew would be very fun.

    Couple of things very wrong with your suggestion. Making this feature Galleon-only, or as you put it, forcing a minimum team size, is ludicrous. It disproportionately affects Solos, Duos, and Trios, and in fact actively punishes them for playing the way they want by denying them access to content.

    A better solution would be to allow matchmaking between multiple stamps within the same region. I'm willing to bet there are hundreds of players out there using the Hourglass across all ship classes; but if the information presented by @Captain-Coel is correct, then the matchmaking is being deliberately hamstrung by limiting it to only matching players within what seems to be a very small server pool per stamp. Allowing matchmaking across an entire region - or even sub-regions such as USA West, USA East, EU West, EU East, ect - will vastly expand the matchmaking pool and guarantee shorter que times, plus much higher chances of more equal matches.

    I'm very confident in my info. I also agree that making it galley would have been a bad idea. And hamstrung is a perfect word for what the rules have done to matchmaking.

  • Nex Stargaze
    Commander
    Insider

    @burnbacon said in Stamps? Servers? Regions? Everything I have figured out:

    Using "curses" doesn't add up. I can join a Galleon crew, Do NOTHING but bail water and repair. Not shoot a single cannon. Earn the curse because my crew Won. Does that make me good pvp with the curse? No.
    It the same as Pirate Legend title.

    Bad mindset.

    What you fail to understand about roles on a ship like a galleon is that it's all vital and important to your dedication and contribution to your crew. You don't have to be perfect at killing players, you don't have to be perfect on cannons, if you can keep water out of the boat with your consistent crew, your skill in those heavy situations where you have a lot of holes down below is something worth recognizing amongst other players, and makes you very much worthy of the curse.

    That is the honorable role of the bilge on a galleon.

  • abjectarity
    Captain
    Insider

    @hiradc when I’m playing with a friend on their servers in a completely different region and they decide to get off, I’ll portal hop to get put back on servers in my own region. I play with a lot of people from different countries and my ping is usually double, so if they aren’t on the ship anymore then I want good ping again.

    But when I portal hop in my own region I often get put back on the same server I started on. I might be canceling the tall tale too soon, not sure. I only portal hop when I have a huge cache of supplies but am looking for a different world event or trying to get away from a player that’s bugging me too often. So I haven’t done it much.

    So I do think it can move you between stamps, but it might be set not to do so unless you hit certain criteria.

  • deffex BTW
    Seafarer
    Insider

    @captain-coel Cheers for the info mate, however as someone who likes to tdm. I try to get a few friends to go up against me so we can just purely tdm then afterwards scuttle to re dive. My problem is even with identical matchmaking times and same boat we cannot get into the same stamp whatsoever, havent been able to go up against eachother for over a week now. Any extra info that could possibly help would be amazing thanks.

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