I have recently experienced more and more unbalanced 1v1 matches. In quite a large portion of my 1v1 games, I am either am forced to play against someone 100 Elo above or below me. 100 Elo may not seem like a lot, but if you have ever played against someone with that Elo difference, you will realize that it actually is. Furthermore, I never had such a problem with matchmaking before Update 87863, regardless of what time I used to queue up. After the update, though, it seems to not really matter at what time I queue up; unbalanced matches can always happen. The biggest problem with this is, as stated, that it used to work fine and the developers, for some reason, had to change the system. In the patch notes for Update 87863, they state
"We’ve heard your complaints about long queue times and have taken action to shorten them! This change will affect everyone whose queue times are shorter than 7 minutes. On average, you’ll notice a queue time reduction of around 20 to 30 seconds (20 seconds around the 1000 ELO mark, 30 seconds for the higher and lower ELOs).
After evaluating our initial results, we may tweak this a little further to shorten it by 45 seconds to a minute!"
I haven’t seen a single thread about the queue times, and I also haven’t had any problems. I would rather wait one and a half minutes, knowing that I have a chance in this game, than wait half a minute, somewhat already knowing the result of the game.
Viper discussed queuing times in his latest video about the map pool posted in the other thread. He said he prefers it way better now because now he doesn’t have to wait anywhere near as long for a match. I think what they really need to do is set it up so that the difference in ELO expands as you get closer to the top of the ladder. The difference between a 1000 and a 1100 player could be quite significant but above 2k ELO, a difference of 100 ELO is less noticeable. Which makes sense when you think about it because 100 ELO is 10% of a 1000 player vs. less than 5% of a top level 2k+ player.
I think the most elegant solution would be to match you with players who are no more than +/- 75 ELO but then for anyone in the top 200 players (or above 2.5k or whatever) they just remove the ELO limits and just match them up with anybody above that minimum Top 200 or 2.5k threshold.
Or have it staggered based on how many players there are in your ELO range. 1000 ELO range has the most players, so anything at say, 1100 or below they could be matched at +/-75 ELO, then it gradually increases by say, +/- 25 ELO every 200 ELO. So 1200 would be +/- 100 ELO, 1400 would be +/- 125 ELO, 1600 at +/- 150 ELO and so on. Because as you climb up the ladder, there are fewer and fewer players, so the ELO range needs to expand as you improve, otherwise you’ll be waiting too long for games.
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It ain’t the patch, this capture was taken 4:53 central time from the dashboard, look how little good players in the ranked competing, but clearly the game is just fine and the match making doesn’t require any attention.
With low numbers like that you might find a 2200 being at 1700 within 5 mins of waiting, aoe2 is not doing ok above average levels.
*go to dashboard and browse games, filter ranked games then list them for elo, you are welcome.
That’s not how ELO works. With a 400 ELO difference you always have a 90% chance of winning.
But at the same time, super-high ELOs need to accept higher ELO differences because there aren’t enough of them up there, so the proposal to allow higher ELO differences at ultra-high ELO is sound.
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Disagree - I, as a 2k2 player, usually found most of the 2k~2k1 players to make tons of mistakes (just as how a 1k1 player view 1k player)
