Ideas for an OpenRA Ladder system

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Yara
Posts: 28
Joined: Tue Feb 19, 2019 7:22 am

Ideas for an OpenRA Ladder system

Post by Yara »

As bug is working hard on building the technical environment, first discussion were exchanged on how this ladder could work, how should the rules be, how should the points be created.

This is from my Discord post on the Competitive server:
@ Ladder Rules & ELO
I just checked clanwars.cc again and they obviously have a ton of experience with running ladders and documented their rules in detail, including the point calculation:

In the end ELO pts are calculated as such = K x E x W x O
K - K value (explained above)
E - .01 to 1 (based on if the underdog or favorite won and how close in rank they were)
W - starts at .5 on day one of a new tournament and grows to 1 on the last day of the tournament
O - offset starts at 1 when same clans play against each other for the first time on a day, second match it is .9, third match it is .8, etc...
After 10 matches against similar clans it is .1 and stays at .1

Source: http://clanwars.cc/league_support.aspx?GID=12 (They came up with 15x rules, which apparently was enough for them)
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system

So the best strategy is probably to take their stuff as a basis and adapt it to our needs. I can create later a Forum Thread to properly document our finding as those things just parish here on Discord.

There more I think about it, I guess it would be a good idea to approach the Clanwars.cc Admins, maybe they are interested in putting the rankings on their homepage, as it is another cnc game. Of course we should not limit ourselves to them, but the amount of visibility we would receive would be massive, as the ccg community is still rather active there.
Any further ideas, feedback is very welcome. Also if you can provide examples / links how the ladders are run in other communities.

Yara
Posts: 28
Joined: Tue Feb 19, 2019 7:22 am

Re: Ideas for an OpenRA Ladder system

Post by Yara »

Idea: Usage of the Open Source Game Server nakama
https://github.com/heroiclabs/nakama

If my first intuition is not fooling me, the OpenRA Game Server only needs to forward the game information to the nakama server, and it will take care of everything else. The is a Web API (restful) which can be used for that. We might have to change some stuff to make it work for us, but we could start with the default settings they provide us and see how well it works.


Features we get for free:
  • Users - Register/login new users via social networks, email, or device ID.
  • Storage - Store user records, settings, and other objects in collections.
  • Social - Users can connect with friends, and join groups. Builtin social graph to see how users can be connected.
  • Chat - 1-on-1, group, and global chat between users. Persist messages for chat history.
  • Multiplayer - Realtime, or turn-based active and passive multiplayer.
  • Leaderboards - Dynamic, seasonal, get top members, or members around a user. Have as many as you need.
  • Tournaments - Invite players to compete together over prizes. Link many together to create leagues.
  • Runtime code - Extend the server with custom logic written in Lua or native Go code.
  • Matchmaker, dashboard, metrics, and more.
Maybe, just maybe, all of this could be done in a single day. I will unfortunately not have time before September 11 to test this out and hopefully, nothing new comes in after that.

Yara
Posts: 28
Joined: Tue Feb 19, 2019 7:22 am

Re: Ideas for an OpenRA Ladder system

Post by Yara »

Discord post by Yara on 24 September 2020:


Future of OpenRA Competitive and BADGES (;))


I still want to check out the Open Source Game Server project Nakama [1]. It could solve a lot issues in our ecosystem:
- We run RAGL, Ladder and Cups there, for any mod probably. People can start/manage their own cups etc. They also support "prices" and I assume badges.
- We could keep the "generic" badges we have right now as it is: Bug Reporter, Developers, etc. and move all other badges there and let the "ragl admin" or "cup admin" etc. decide there what qualifies for a badge or not.
- UF and any other forum/community could probably have an UI integration for the cup/ladder etc. if they want to display it on their board as well.
- Nakama looks pretty solid and they have already paying Enterprise customers which shows us that they solved a lot of things, which we don't have to try to solve and we will get it for free. I mean: Paradox Interactive, Zynga, Lion Studios, that should really already speak for itself.

Once the summer ends, I will have a look at it and see what works and what does not. I also have some other big plans in my life, but this seems to be like a fun side-project. I don't mind running it on my own server space without any costs for anyone.

[1] https://github.com/heroiclabs/nakama

Yara
Posts: 28
Joined: Tue Feb 19, 2019 7:22 am

Re: Ideas for an OpenRA Ladder system

Post by Yara »

Discord post by Yara:

@ ladder

For the start, I would keep it simple and just "count" every game being played on it. Lock the map pool so only 1v1 are allowed to be played. If possible, auto-kick inactive players once the game concluded so trolls can't block the server so easily. If people want to smurf around, who cares. Once it somehow works, we can in the 2nd step think about how we make sure trolls don't fuck with the server/ladder too much.

> It would also be cool to I’ve official tournament servers which only played for competitive events and have a competitive ladder

It should be possible to do the following:
(1) <OpenRA Server RAGL> with fixed maps/players -forward game results to-> <Nakama Ranking server> for RAGL rankings
(2) <OpenRA Server Ladder> with fixed maps -forward game results to-> <Nakama Ranking server> for Ladder rankings
(3) <OpenRA Server Tournament X> with fixed maps/players -forward game results to-> <Nakama Ranking server> for Tournament X cup results

More on Nakama: viewtopic.php?f=85&t=21260

Deploying a Nakama Server should be easy, as it is well documented. But forwarding the "game results" of a finished game from an OpenRA Game server is messy from what I have heard, if anyone got a documentation on that, I would be happy to have a look at it.

JustSomeGuy
Posts: 6
Joined: Mon Jan 13, 2020 2:57 pm

Re: Ideas for an OpenRA Ladder system

Post by JustSomeGuy »

I think that bug has worked quite a bit on a comprehensive solution for a ladder, and he even made a preview based on RAGL 9 matches: http://oraladder.net/
He claims to be using TrueSkill to compute the score. That seems a reasonable choice considering it's a score system made for multiplayer games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrueSkill
My understanding is that the rating in the preview is slightly off, so it's currently difficult to judge how good that is.

Since the solution seems to be almost ready and waiting for a new openra release, and since bug said he will release all the code as open source, it may be easier for you to wait until that point and check what he did.

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