So, as the title says I don’t understand why tutorials are an option.
Of course I understand clearly that some young or elders just want to play quickly or without any restriction concerning the “skill cap” that they need to play multiplayer “decently” but since many years lobby browser are filled up any times with random titles mainly including “Noobs” but when you enter them, you can have a gab from 700 to 1200/1300 elos, sometimes even more ( I include people that haven’t played ranked matches too ).
So here’s my thought on it, why aren’t you making “Art of War” tutorials or a number of games against good IAs required to play multiplayer ?
It’s a real problem, people ( my self included of course ) just flip a coin during those lobbies due to lack of information about whether or not people have done any “work” before coming to play. So most of those games are one-sided and It’s frustating people that have done the tutorials but aren’t good enough to compete against 1400/1500 elo players but lose most matches when playing with new people or inexperimented ones.
And also, having losing streaks may scare some due to frustration too and toxic communication.
Thanks for your time reading my post. I hope It’s readable.
Drag
Imo lobbies are “noob traps”. As weird as it sounds, the most balanced and fairest matches are played in ranked. I know that some people have certain associations when hearing the word “ranked”, that it’s sweaty and what-not but after being through your placement games (which are the most frustrating ones), you have good and fair matchups.
Solution: Only play ranked games and only play team games with people you already know 
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Leave this site if this is the only contribution you’re doing.
I agree and i’ve played ranked but, you need to understand that unranked needs to be possible, so there’s a REAL problem that needs to be address towards unranked and lobbies, and finally as I’ve mentionned earlier tutorials restriction.
All right, I’ll leave this site 
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Personally, I see unranked as the place where games don’t neccesarily have to be balanced as you can play with your own settings.
It is ironic that in my experience, the queuing time of Quick Game is always longer than Rank Game. I think some action can be taken to merge two queue. For example one can hide their rank so that no one can see their rank. But the match making system will still work with the hiden rank
Ok, so i’ll explain mainly why AoE II has a huge problem :
New players for some don’t have any clue on how difficult the game can be and I assume that the “Art of War” tutorials were made for them especially BUT why bothering making tutorials that are making “ready” the new comers to play multiplayer why you’re not forcing them into doing the tutorials, for instance when you look at League of Legends or Counter-Strike, those games are forcing players into placement matches or/and tutorials so the player can still enjoy multiplayer, that is for me a HUGE problem since we lost people during this process, of course Ranked Queue is a solution to “flippy coin” matches when you want a “balance match”.
But to me it’s like a huge dissapointement to see that in this community it is normal to see un-ranked as a sort of jungle of traps and non-balanced matchs. We need to be able to play unranked to try startegies and things until we’re ready to go ranked and not frustating new comers into losing streaks so they can finally find out their proper elo/place in the game.
The way people have answered this topic and already the two before that i’ve made on Steam Forums is horrible, it’s some kind of bourgeoisie that is not acceptable.
I’m hoping that developpers sees this topic just to at least provide at text box that appears when as a new player you click the multiplayer button and the chat box says something like : “Are you sure you want to play MP since you haven’t done tutorials, your experience and your teamates experience might suffer doing so ?”
Also I don’t want to make this game a casual one but I hope that the community grow and we don’t let down people only because “some knows” what Aoe II is.
Actually, if you start DE for the first time and click on Multiplayer, the game has a pop up where it recommends playing William Wallace + Art of War. You can of course click on “I’ve done this before”
Its a little confusing but are you talking about unranked lobbies? You can always play ranked ladder. You’ll initially lose a bunch of games but eventually you’ll reach your true elo and you can take it from there. Plus there’s a ton of content for new players starting from hotkeys setup, economy, build orders, units and counters related information, formations etc. You can checkout pro player channels like Hera’s if you feel those are must trustworthy or you can just go for mid elo players’ channels if you feel that’s more comfortable and pro player content is overwhelming.
Play lobbies only when you have friends and you want to play amongst yourselves.
So maybe we need a different way to interrogate the level of players:
- play a certain number of unranked games to move into ranked ones
- manage to get gold/silver medals on tutorials.
- defeat a certain number of difficult IA in order to move on MP.
I’m tallking about public lobbies, unranked queue and ranked queue, as you say we lose a bunch of games before we achieve our true elo but this frustration of losing in ranked might be possible to stop or at least to reduce by making some arrangement previously in the player’s mind. The content of build orders, hotkeys etc is obviously in the tutorials but i’ll give you a quick example : the friend that i’m playing with is a grown man and has a family but due to this informations he cannot spend that many hours into content that aren’t in the game so he only spend a few hours a week on quick unranked queues or public lobbies. And I’m betting he’s not the only one in this situation, so as players we might take a part for the devs to understand that they are losing players and of course some money, of course not a huge amount but i’m sure that is a valid question to ask.
@Drag are you ever happy ?
You suggest something, someone gives a solution
Rant
You suggest something else , someone sais " it’s already in "
Rant
How bout you just let people be as they are xD
Not everyone has the same " skill " level as you. They just want to play and be happy.
If you can’t deal with that, I personally think, that you are the issue here, and not the people playing MP for fun.
So, i’m addressing the issue that unranked wether it’s Quick match or Public lobbies are sometimes unbalanced and you’re turning this into : “someone gives a solution” : yes I agree but does the devs take this in note ? Just look at T90 and all his recommandation that are for the most usefull and HEALTHY for the community and the game.
Second half you’re saying : “Not everyone has the same “skill” level as you”, Have I mentionned anything about MY skill or have I mentionned some people and one of my friend ? There is a real issue on how MP is provided in this game for new comers.
You’re currently not even talking about my suggestion, you’re talking my persona… I assume that maybe we can provide something better in this particular game rather than being sarcastic to each others ?
Unranked games should either have its own ELO system or it should use the players’ ranked ELOs as a reference to make fairer matches.
I do believe that it should have it’s own elo but I think that’s it’s already the case but not shown to the player.
I bet you’re taking this example from games like Rocket League ?
I play alot of unranked lobby team games. Its not that bad
70% of games are fine. 30% is unbalanced stomps
Just play “semi noob” or “semi” lobbies. Where you want lower level players but put an indicaton that they have to be somewhat competent and not complete beginners
In my experience those are decent games where you get 900-1400 elo range. But a 900 safely boomed on blackforest can hit like a 1200 in spots so even if its unbalanced its not that unbalanced
Also balancing teams at the start is good. “P1, p4 split” ive done that a couple times when you see their elo and its led to generally a positive lobby experience