Blocked Players & Matchmaking

[(PSN)Horrabin]

Hello!

 

Not sure what the situation is in the other platforms but, at least on PS4, the game ignores the user's blocked players list in as much as they keep being considered for matchmaking.

 

Shouldn't they get filtered out? Blocking someone is a fairly involved process for the average user, so the intent is there: "I don't want to see this guy anymore". It's a bit galling that we might still have to be matched with them right away, adding insult to injury.

 

If this is indeed implemented, then there's a bug; it caches the blocked player list on login and it doesn't account for changes to it during the session.

 

Cheers,

 

[(PSN)Pharen]

The problem here is not that they don't filter the people out, rather that we don't have a "block" player option, we only have "ignore", which only stops them from messaging you. I've been asking for an "avoid player" option for ages. Sadly to no avail... :(

[(PSN)Horrabin]

Actually, I was talking about the PS4's own player blocking function. There is a console-level block that, in my opinion, should be respected by the game.

Cheers,

[(PSN)Pharen]

Actually, I was talking about the PS4's own player blocking function. There is a console-level block that, in my opinion, should be respected by the game.

Cheers,

I think that's because Warframe is F2P so they run there own servers, which means that the Playstation blocked players list doesn't apply.

[(PSN)Horrabin]

Hey,

 

I think that's because Warframe is F2P so they run there own servers, which means that the Playstation blocked players list doesn't apply.

 

That's not quite true. Functionally, it's implemented with the friend lists in PSN and those *are* imported into the game; technically speaking, the game already has that information available, it just doesn't do anything with it.

 

It would need some server work to factor that into the matchmaking, but I don't think it would be a major undertaking. Currently, the playerbase is split in starmap-node buckets anyway; you never try to randomly matchmake so it's a small pool to check in the first place. Potential problems... the blocked lists can be rather large, so there could be an added load burden on the server if these are too frequent.

 

Something not clear to me about the above is whether the game already uses friend-list information in a similar way. Friends are a lot easier, since the relation is symmetric - you don't need to correlate two sets of data to find commonality, if I have you in my friends list then I am in yours.

 

Another way is to do it client-side. I'm not sure how matches are reported back to the client (perhaps they're just connect-to-this-host), but adding the present players' names is only up to 7*16 characters payload (talking about an almost full raid, not available on PS4 yet). The joining client can decline the match if one of them is in the blocked names list. On the other side, the host can gather people's block lists when they connect and, when a new player tries to join, it can match its onlineid with the block list and turn them away if one of the squad members doesn't like them.

 

This should work for co-operative. Whether and how to do it in PvP is a bit trickier. It might be fine to have blocked people in the opposing team, but I can imagine some people's reaction to cheaters is to just blocking them, (not a huge problem... yet?) so that needs a bit of thinking from DE.

 

Cheers,

[(PSN)Pharen]

Hey,

-snip-

Warframe collects and updates your friends list, that much is true, but I don't believe it extends to anything more than that, personally I think an in game avoided players list is needed. We already have the ignored list, I don't see why it would be any harder to implement than the ignore list, and yes it should also incorporate your PSN blocked players list.