I’ve noticed the matchmaking is super slow today. Getting like 4 matches in 1h…
Since this is the last day of S7, can we get faster match making?
Thanks
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Update 3h later: matchmaking is still slow. At this rate, newly uploaded algos won’t have enough matches to gain enough rating to reach top 10 to make the S7 finale.
Matchmaking is very slow, but algos will keep playing games until January 4th. So all your newly uploaded algos will get a change to get into the top 10. Last season you got usually the first 15 games within an hour. Right now it’s like 1 or 2 per hour at most.
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Yeah, it’s quite frustrating, I wanted to try out some new algos as well, but the matchmaking is just way to slow at the moment.
@RegularRyan Can we be given more time to upload our algos? 1-2 more days would be more than enough time, provided that matchmaking becomes faster. It was very inconvenient for the server to suddenly become very slow on the last day before the supposed deadline.
To be fair, I wouldn’t be asking for an extension request if matchmaking was a bit faster. I only got 10 matches for an algo that I uploaded yesterday so I couldn’t really test out any new algos (at some points in time, I had to wait 30 minutes to 1 hour just to get one match). It also messed up the leaderboard quite a bit as the slow matchmaking process gave higher rated algos more of an edge compared to lower rated ones/newer algos. Especially for those who needed to make modifications to their algos, it was very frustrating as there simply wasn’t enough time to try their new algos out. So it’s safe to say that this Season’s ending was definitely not as smooth as previous Seasons’ endings.
The admins/moderators of Terminal have also been relatively inactive lately (I think Ryan has been last seen 5 days ago on this forum?) so pushing back the algo submission deadline would be a fair compensation for that. Other ppl have also voiced their concerns as seen in the replies above, so this could be a majority vote thing.
@Felix Thanks for the clarification, that makes sense.
I agree we should have a vote on whether S7 algo submission deadline should be extended.
During “Terminal Live” competitions, more server resources was given during the last day/days leading up to the final submission so matches would run faster.
Just saw this now. I have re-opened submissions and will investigate server issues tommorow.
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Thanks, when will submissions be closed again?
Currently set to 29th at midnight, arbitrarily
Okay, I noticed that matchmaking was really fast around 1 hour ago but now it’s gotten noticeably slower. I suspect that it’s due to more people uploading algos now that the deadline is extended. Is it possible for the matchmaking to not be as slow again?
The original deadline was midnight on the 27th at midnight ET, and was extended to tonight at midnight ET after concerns were raised in this thread. I don’t plan to extend it again, as this is a season-long competition and algos ideally should be iterated on across the entire season
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Yeah I agree that algos should ideally be iterated on across the entire season but many players have recently started uploading their algos quite late into the season (about 1 week before the deadline if I’m not mistaken). Personally, I think that this defeats the purpose of Terminal C1, not to mention that some of these people copied my team’s layout and even attack. I started noticing these ‘copies’ of my team’s algos only a few days ago so up until then everything was fine in terms of everyone iterating on their algos. Even though I started playing Terminal in Season 5, I personally think that Season 7 had the most people copying algos so far…
I agree with this (as you may have noticed I was also copying). It has always been a valid strategy though, there was even an entire thread of discussion about it:
Maybe we should rethink this in future seasons.
I tried to make my own strategy but due to fundamental flaws in my base-outline I was losing no matter what I did. Then (because I wanna win) I started to copy your superior base (which multiple people were already using)
Respect to @acshikh (and to the person who created the strategy I copied) for making such a unique strategy, I’ll try to do the same next season.
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By copy I pressume you’re talking about the “V” (IDK if there is a better word to describe it, they are vaugly “V” shapped so “V” layout lol) shaped type layout most of your algo’s, that mine’s played against, and other people’s algos I started to see them use. My algos ended up that way starting with the first IDHC, after I tried many different types of defensive firewall layouts, I noticed the main differences between what I ended up vs what a lot of other people went with I deploy starting factories center, then it decides to go left or right each side mirroring the other, based on enemy unit health, or if enemy unit health is equal on both sides it just picks one randomly. As of now the one that’s performing the best waits 3 turns, other variants of it wait 2 turns, or start deploying firewalls on turn 1, the one that started turn 0 just didn’t work out, i pressume becuase some other algos will deploy defenses differently based on how the enemy does it as well.
I noticed some of newer versions of yours started doing that as well, where it deploys center then seems to decide whether to fully commit on the right or left side, and I’ve been working that angle since the start, (like litterally since season 2 when i first started playing lol i always try and do that now) mines been using a similair firewall layout to yours for over a month now though, since I started uploading and running games since day one, and I can’t rember when I uploaded the first version of IDHC, it was atleast a month ago.
As for attacks, mine randomly selects from a small number or possible deploy locations until it’s decided to either commit to the left or right, at that point it has code to choose type of attack depending on enemy player health, number of scouts affordable, and enemy unit health. I don’t think submissions are going to be open again this season, i suppose if they were it would be unwise to give as much information as i did. IDHC, the the different varations of enodev, and notenodev, have slightly different attack code mostly due to being close to deadline and not being able to adaquitly test each one when i made the changes.
This isn’t new though I don’t remember what season, i think i first saw something maybe it was in forums from the previous season when i started playing in season 2, so season 1. Like every top algo was an EMP maze algo. I think I saw soemone from C1 state somewhere, is due to the nature of the game, they can’t really private replays that players algos are in, since part of the point of any game is being able to see where you messed up and fix it. Granted a completly blind season, might be fun, if a little frustrating, where the only games you’d be able to watch would be from the bosses in the playground, since like i said you wouldn’t be able to see specifically why your algo is winning or losing, a specific match, so you’d have to guess i suppose, that could lead to an interesting finally live stream though.
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Let’s be honest, referring to past seasons and other people copying isn’t a good way to justify copying other people’s algos (and if you want to win for that matter). The people you mentioned who were also copying just so happens to include 2x Terminal Season Champion @Felix, much to my surprise and disappointment. He was actually the first to completely copy my team’s layout which eventually encouraged more people like you to copy my team’s algo. The only reason why my team kept quiet about this was because we didn’t want more people to copy our algo (but that obviously didn’t work out).
My team was the first to adopt this layout and it worked for the majority of the season as we held the #1 spot. Fast forward to now and you have half of the leaderboard being copies of my team’s algo (or some other very close variation of it). This not only discourages innovation from players in general but is also a big frustration point for people like myself who spent most of their time in coming up with such a layout and attack. (You can imagine how it feels to lose to a ‘copy’ of your own algo). I think players like @acshikh, @Toastyone, @HOSO and more were the only ones who came up with original algos including my team and I.
Moving forward, I would like to hear @RegularRyan’s input on how this issue will be addressed (for both this season and future seasons) because if it isn’t, it will only repeat in future seasons (as shown in the reply above).
I mean there is always another way to look at it, you have the orginal algo with the orginal layout, make an algo that beats it, you’d need to make sure it could beat other algos as well obviously, so I would say maybe test it by uploading it for a little while, or test some varient of it live, then right before the deadline. Upload it, especially if you notice a lot of very similair algos that are running the same or similair strat. or heck have several different strats that can beat the one that is being copied and upload them all right before the deadline, so everyone who took we’ll say inspiration from your algo won’t have time to really make a counter to it. You could also bake it all into one algo. If you have a base starting defense for it, then wait a couple turns, if it looks like fromt he first few moves going against the algo’s main strat, as a clone, or varient, you can have it pick a counter to it. I know people on the forums here in past seasons have talked about this idea, where waiting a couple of turns with some form scrambler stalls then making a decision based on how enemy defenses have been set up to use a completly different strat.
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I agree with @Toastyone here, copying will always be part of this game. If you want to avoid this, you could try to make algos that cannot be copied, just as @acshikh did or @arnby or @Aeldrexan in previous seasons.
I don’t think there is a way of getting people to not copy…
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I would say aside from a blind season at some point some part of any good algo will be cloned to some extent, people would probably want a few more bosses in the playground for testing though. I think a blind season would be interesting, if a little frustrating as i stated previously. Honestly though if there were to be a blind season i wouldn’t mind contributing some of the algos I have towards more bosses. Or take like the top ten algos from the previous season, or from a few different previous seasons, and making them bosses (with the makers permission of course), but then having actual matches be blind so you couldn’t watch replays.
I think at some point we should draw the line between a straight copy and just being apart of the “meta”. With factories being introduced in S7 and a nerf early on in the season, I think the majority of players have factories figured out. We see that in how players prioritize factories over other defenses etc. etc.
Is copying an algo’s layout OK? Is copying an algo’s attack strategy OK? That’s up to the players to decide. Though in my opinion it’s quite difficult to prevent others from copying you.
S7 quickly evolved towards a “meta” of the “V shape” algos at the end of the competition, rather than slowly building towards that meta throughout the season. This, coupled with the server issues and slow match making definitely frustrated some players as we did not expect the match making to be this slow.
I agree with @Toastyone that we should have more bosses in future seasons. Allowing voluntary submissions for boss algos would be nice, especially if match making becomes slow again.
Also shoutout to Max K’s mint algo for withstanding the test of time in S7 and staying in the top 10 for months without touching it.
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