Does FlexMatch support StartMatchmaking where the team is already big enough to satisfy the rule used?

Hey @REDACTEDUSER

Please let us know if you have any more questions as you continue integrating GameLift and FlexMatch into your games.

Sorry -- I was more optimistic about our rollout times than I should have been. I anticipate this being in all regions by end-of-day tomorrow.

Ah, so the confusion here is that you think there are multiple teams. The game only has 1 team per instance.

When I do the matchmaking, I am passing in 1..X players for that 1 team. In some cases, the team is already full of enough players before I start matchmaking (maybe I've invited enough friends to fill up the team). In such a case, I still want to use FlexMatch because then I deal with one flow (StartMatchmaking, DescribeMatchmaking, etc.) instead of having a separate flow where I CreateGameSession, CreatePlayerSessions, and so forth.

When I call StartMatchmaking with 1 team of X players, where X == the Min/MaxPlayers in my RuleSet, I am stuck in SEARCHING.

As an example, here is the ruleset I am using for a 2 player match. If I call StartMatchmaking from 1 client with 2 players, it gets stuck in SEARCHING. If I call StartMatchmaking from 2 clients with 1 player each, it moves on to PLACING.

    {
"name": "match-by-questId-2",
"ruleLanguageVersion": "1.0",
"playerAttributes": [{
"name": "questId",
"type": "string"
}],
"teams": [{
"name": "players",
"maxPlayers": 2,
"minPlayers": 2
}],
"rules": [{
"name": "SameQuestId",
"description": "Only match players when they're trying to play the same quest/game type.",
"type": "comparison",
"operation": "=",
"measurements": ["flatten(teams[*].players.attributes[questId])"]
}]
}

That all makes sense. The case I'm having trouble with is 1 team, and I know all the players. (See below for my ruleset)

Also, thank you so much for all the help.

Awesome, it's good to know that it's not a known limitation (aside from the case of N=1, which sounds like is going to change soon!) Very promising. :) Thanks again for the help.

Re: 1 player matches, that sounds great, thanks.

For the second part - it sounds like you are saying I can't use matchmaker to start a match if my team is already the correct size? But that I could use matchmaking by splitting the start call call into multiple calls (one per team member)? I suppose I would then match them back together via some player attribute (team id)?

NB: My confusion is that if I have a 2 player game, and call StartMatchmaking with 2 players listed, it also gets stuck in SEARCHING.

I am saying the opposite -- if you know all the players that you want to be together on a team, you submit all of them on a single ticket, and then the matchmaker will find players for the other team (assuming you have a match with 2 teams).

If you have all of the players you want for both teams, FlexMatch won't be able to put the teams together in the same match -- you would need to just start your game session by creating it and the player sessions directly.

Does that help?

How many teams do you have in your ruleset? Two teams with 1 player each? If that is the case, then submitting a single ticket with 2 players will not match (and should return an error). If you send me your matchmaker name and rule set name, I can better help you out.

Ok, got it -- thanks for bearing with me here!

You should still be able to have just the one flow because all of the players passed in on that ticket will all be placed into the same match. If you start the match with maxPlayers, it should start immediately.

My thought here is that you might be hitting the 'nth' case of the min=max=1 case that we addressed today that I mentioned earlier. I will investigate and see what's going on here.

We investigated, and it turns out that it is actually due to a confluence of three things:

1. You are making party requests (multiple players on a ticket)
2. questId is a string
3. You are using a comparison rule The issue is itself is that to compare tickets to each other via the comparison rule during matchmaking, we have to reduce each ticket's playerAttributes to one value per attribute. If there are multiple people in a ticket (a party) then we have to know how to combine them which is controlled via the "partyAggregation" field for the comparison rule type. The default for partyaggregation is average.

Right now, you when you send in two players on the same ticket, we try to take the average of your two questId strings and do not handle that well.

While we fix that, you could override the default averaging for partyAggregation to do a min or a max operation instead, since those operations are valid for string comparisons.

See "Comparison rule (comparison)" in our documentation.

We will update the documentation when we decide how we want to handle taking the average of strings, but in the meantime, can you work around the issue by doing a min/max operation for partyAggregation instead?

Sorry for the inconvenience here!

@REDACTEDUSER

My ruleset there looks like this:

    {
"name": "match-by-questId-1",
"ruleLanguageVersion": "1.0",
"playerAttributes": [{
"name": "questId",
"type": "string"
}],
"teams": [{
"name": "players",
"maxPlayers": 1,
"minPlayers": 1
}]
}

Ok great, no worries, I know how that goes. :)

Just wanted to follow up and say that 1 player matches are now working for me as well. Very happy that I can use one approach on all of the match types. :) Thanks again!

		"teams": [{
"name": "guardians",
"maxPlayers": 3,
"minPlayers": 3
}],
"expansions":[{
"target":"teams[guardians].minPlayers",
"steps":[{
"waitTimeSeconds":10,
"value": 2
},{
"waitTimeSeconds":20,
"value": 1
}]
}]
if its not a joke, then just read very attentive to rule set expansions and make something like that

Glad to hear we were able to get you unblocked! Let us know if you have any more questions.

Hey @Matchmaker, I think we reached max reply depth. :)

I tried your advice to use playerAggregation="max/min" and am now getting into PLACING for games where I'm submitting a team of players equal to the min/max of the ruleset. So thank you! :) Once the N=1 case works in my region (I'm in US-EAST-1 fwiw), and I solve some issues with my game server startup process, I'll be good to go.

Thank you again for your help!