Your suggestion is equivalent to infinite bans, it’s only a UI difference… When you queue for, say, the Arena-only and BF-only queue, all that you’re doing is joining a global queue where you have banned every map but these two.
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It’s not the same because with infinite bans it would have to keep rematching you with people who have the same map. Having separate queues there would be no need to re-match players based on ELO.
Infinite bans = match found then scrapped if no map is available. If there is a common map then the game can start. This would lead to crazy queue times, then players realize they need to ban less maps to have shorter queues, then we are back at the current situation where players don’t get to ban all the unwanted maps.
Separate queues for top maps = match found means the game starts.
I don’t think the current system is great even for 1v1. Because the Clowns are sort of left out.
Here is the breakdown of how terrible infinite bans could become. Even with players only banning half the maps 1v1s are negatively impacted. We need to stop asking for infinite bans.
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You need to stop thinking in bans, that system needs to go away for team games, otherwise it will never work, cause of all the reason explained before and in lots of topics.
New system you can choose 3 maps and prefer one, either way the system chooses the preferred option and look for it the first 2-3 mins, after that time it also searches for the next maps you choose, the advantages of that is that even if you didn’t get your first option the rest of the maps would have been of your preferences, instead of something you couldn’t ban before.
All players win with that, only small minorities would have to wait longer, but its justified, they have already pretty low play rate, there is no reason to keep forcing innocent players to spend their time in non competitive maps.
With that system you can keep map voting, map pool diversity but with only one exception, players are free to choose where to spend their beloved time.
Sorry but this sheet makes no sense. Queue times don’t work like that, and neither does matchmaking, it doesn’t throw you somewhere randomly then wait for an arbitrary 3 minutes. What it does is create “pools” where only players of compatible settings/Elo/location can be put, then it puts you into one (or more), and wait until the required number of players to start the pool is achieved. You could sort of view this “pool” as a “separate queue” but I don’t like “queue” because it implies that you wait more when there are more people, which is the opposite of how matchmaking works.
Think of it this way: let’s say you queue for EW 4v4 in US and you are 2k Elo. The game won’t put you against random players from Asia 1v1 then restarts if that doesn’t match your mode/ping/rank/player count , that would be stupid, because the chances of getting matched against someone else with the same settings are obviously small. So what happens is that the game will create a queue for your settings (EW / 4v4 / US / 2k Elo) from the start and only look for players in these settings. You can still queue for multiple settings, eg. both 1v1 and 4v4, it will just put you in multiple pools at the same time and remove you from all when you found a match.
Now, adding unlimited bans is just adding a an additional “map” constraint. If you ban all maps but Arena/Arabia; the game will put you both in the (EW / 4v4 / US / 2k elo / Arabia) pool and the (EW / 4v4 / US / 2k elo / Arena) pool, what happens in the other pools (eg. EW / 4v4 / US / 2k elo / Megarandom) has no effect on your pool. As a result this system effectively creates multiple “queues” behind the scenes and is strictly equivalent to what you suggested.
The queue time is not determined by the algorithm, or the implementation of the algorithm, the only variable that controls queue time is how many people want to play the same settings as you. Say you queue for Arabia 1v1. There are 1000 players live in ranked 1v1, let’s assume 10% of them are in same geographical area / Elo range, and 30% ban all maps but Arabia, then assuming a match lasts 20 min on average, that gives 30 players / 20 minutes, = 1 player every 40 seconds. So queue time for Arabia 1v1 should be around 40 seconds.
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Think of it like this. 7 maps have 7 queues behind the scenes. You can join all 7, or you can ban 6 maps and join a single queue. Unlimited map bans could literally be the split queue you propose, just with the ability to multi-queue and take whichever map pops first.
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That makes sense. If unlimited bans means that unmanned maps are treated as separate queues that works. But it’s not how the queues work now. Now it finds a match then a map.
This is a much better explanation of what infinite bans means. Behind the scenes each map/mode/player count gets its own map queue.
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The matchmaking in its current state does not handle map bans this way indeed but it should be rather easy to adapt, since it’s just one more constraint like ping, game mode etc. In fact they already did that in quick play (I’m not sure if it works)
In any case it’s a blight on the game that the users are so fed up we are arguing solutions on their software.
Reasonable change. Essentially what floydroid proposed except that instead of grouping all maps other than arabia and arena it splits them out.
They already do something similar for team games of varying size, empire wars. etc. I personally am in 4-5 queues when I join up. (3v3 and 4v4 RM, 3v3 4v4 EW, and occasionally 1v1 RM). I’m not picky on map preference (just one ban usually), so I wonder what the resource load would be if it had to track me in 35 pools at once with your proposal? (With Floydroids I would be in about 10 roughly?)
I don’t know exactly how much of a deal that is, but it is something to think about at least as one potential reason why devs may pick one of those two options over the other.
Very interesting conversation indeed
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I hope whoever proposed this solution and implemented it burns in hell for making me spend my AOE2 time (already fairly limited these days) playing Arena or Islands. Love the game and the DE version of it but this is unbearable. Don’t care about Arabia woodlines or hills in front of my base just please don’t make me play Arena ever again.