Party Finder is your true blacklist. Everything else is luck of the draw.
I'm sure matchmaking is already a resource/bandwidth hog; it having to constantly store everyone's order of entry, pull up everyone's blacklist, check it against everyone else's blacklist, then requeue the person who entered latest if there's a match is a lot of resources spent to solve something that isn't really a problem. I'm sure the main thing it would get used for is to block any new players you run into when attempting to farm DF content.
There's people I've met in instances that are on my server that I'd like to be able to blacklist to this day. Except I have to wait for them to say something in chat outside of the instances they were trolling, because SE likes extremely convoluted illogical systems.
You sound like someone with vast programming knowledge. Please propose a sound resource alternative for the queue system that incorporates checks for blacklisting and queue order for the 20k/hour players in every data centre.
Unlike checks for language preference (J,E,F,G) and ongoing party (Yes or no), which in turn are the only 2 variables that can alter queue orders (Unsync, Minimum Ilevel, Silenced Echo all require a preformed party), the number of variables PER PLAYER the game would have to check for a blacklist system is equal to the number of players queieng for a particular duty at the same time, while having to resolve queue order in real time (A queued first and can be paired with B, but not with C who queued before B and can be paired with D and E, but D can't be paired with A because it doesn't have the duty A is queueing for unlocked, and E queued before D and can't be paired with B because they are both tanks, etc.,etc.,etc.).
Last edited by lezard21; 07-02-2021 at 10:48 AM.
I don't really have a horse in this game but I figured it would be fun trying to make a contextual system.
So if we're to operate under the context of fairness to the majority which is how the games queue currently operates and anyone that isn't solo queuing can basically skip the entire queue then I believe the alternative system I'm hypothesizing would work something like this.
Blacklists would work as normal and there would be another blacklist that would function similar to the HUD upload and character upload section before you select your character that you would upload to the SE servers.
You would however still simply add said person to your regular blacklist and then there would be an added option to either remove them from your backlist or up it to the special new blacklist, then you would logout and upload it to SE servers.
This blacklist would probably be half the size of the normal blacklist(100) to save space, time, and in general reduce overall wait times/issues.
Usually not being able to see what a blacklisted persons says is enough of a safety net but if you really don't want to be paired with someone either because A. they play on the level of a troll and being called afk is a compliment or B. you simply have bad blood with them you can put them on this new blacklist.
Once uploaded SE servers will look over your blacklist and categorize your black list into a series of 0's and 1's this will tell the game to do a few things namely it will tell the game to remove visibility of the person you blocked similar to how it removes the visibility of their text not much difference yet really.
Now we go onto the next function and the most important/costly/time consuming function. Never being queued with said blacklisted person.
Firstly you have to specifically select this option as for most simply not being able to see their player model and what they're saying is already enough.
Who this works on will also be decided when you upload to SEs servers and will be saved under the same file.
The next thing the game will do is add a brand onto your player data if you have someone on your "Do not queue with this person" blacklist.
Every time a person(s) queue from then on the game will take your unique brand(lock) and add it onto whichever instance(cart/queue) it puts you in while waiting for other players.
Each player with a the special black list enabled will have a unique brand so the cart will probably end up with a few brands(lock) on it.
The branded cart will deny anyone you have blacklisted entry to the instance(cart/queue) and will be put in another one parallel to it for the process to start all over again.
Should it take longer than 3-5 minutes for the instance(cart/queue) to begin because of removal of said person(s) the game will then prompt you to either accept queuing with said person(s) or it will remove you from the instance(cart/queue) and put you in a different one, as the groups quality of life is mort important than yours as an individual.
This will most likely happen if said person queues up with friends.
Should the blacklisted person get removed from the instance(cart/queue) they will then have priority over the next instance(cart/queue).
Should they run into another person with the same level of priority it will be decided on chance and should they be removed again their priority level will increase so should they run into the previous person who had their level of priority they would now win the instance(cart/queue).
Now should the person who got kicked out of the instance(cart/queue) because they didn't accept queueing with said person they will simply be put in another queue at the same priority as when they first started it.
If you're in a party or using party finder people making parties will be given the option to allowed blacklisted people into the party or not, nothing to complicated.
If you want to avoid being put into parties with blacklisted people you have to make your own party.
Most if not all of the above functions would happen in the back and the only person who would know anything is going on is the person who accepted queueing with someone they special blacklisted.
Basically you would put a 'lock' on whichever instance/party you're in and the game would let the correct 'keys' in and the other ones would simply be left outside until eventually the game starts kicking out the minority to 'save' the majority.
This is a cheap copout to avoid having to deal with deadlocks.
Please blow holes through this thing I'm actually interested to see how badly I incorporated the idea, this took maybe 20-30ish minutes of contemplation.
Originally Posted by Someone
Originally Posted by Someone 2
Would work for queieing into individual or a group of instances, but that are the minority of queues. The majority happen through roulette, and from that point on it would get a lot more complicated because Roulette seems to prioritize filling up parties factoring in available roles and longest elapsed time, but it also seems to go down a list of "viability" since often times you'd queue as a DPS, get a queue pop, but one DPS fails to respond in time, which in theory should immediately pop back again since DPS is the most readily available role, but instead the Tank and Healer end being sucked into other queue and you have to wait again for another Tank, Healer and DPS to become available.
Which is also another factor to throw into the equation, that is, people failing to respond in time leading to the game having to recheck all the previous criteria you mentioned.
e: To me sounds like a lot of backend work for something that could easily be resolved by simply ignoring said player, and if the problem with said player is due to griefing and trolling in dungeons/raids, kick him and report him.
Last edited by lezard21; 07-02-2021 at 12:30 PM.
That sounds like an absolute nightmare haha.
From this alone I can see why the black list has some of its limits.
But... I'm not all that experienced with other MMOs... do any of them have the kind of "true black list" OP is asking for? Is there precedent for this working? Or has it only been realized (if ever) in MMOs that aren't as instanced centric as FF14?
MMOs? Not that I can think of and I've played plenty, though I've never been one to add people into blacklists, my feelings are not easily hurt by random people on the internet, so maybe some had such a feature that I never end up using. The only times I've used any sort of blacklist is for gold seller bot chat spammers.
It would bottleneck the matching system while it tries to sort out who has who blacklisted.
It also wouldn't be able to prioritize you by who queued first unless you had both queued in the same role. Matching is determined by role waiting list number, not waiting number in general.
It should be extremely rare that you're getting matched to someone you've blacklisted. If the player is acting in ways that blocking their chat messages isn't sufficient, then I imagine the rest of the group will be happy to vote kick the player with you once they start causing problems.
If the rest of the group doesn't want to vote kick, maybe that other player isn't the problem after all?
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