Elo bridge. And or lowering QM elo before allowing the queues to face each. The game has a small playerbase. It’s about what is the lesser of two evils, because the playerbase simply isn’t there for the perfect world. You want to wait longer for matches and face lower elos in ranked anyway, or you want a larger playerbase playing together with higher potential for fair matches due to numbers?
Hopefully it’s like player color and hotkey. Things that only get added with time or hopefully the playerbase increases and this isn’t an issue anymore.
Look at any given point i have not been against idea of getting higher quality of matches and faster, but I don’t believe unifying QM and Ranked while having different elo pools is good idea to go. It may not necessary cause that many problems in 1v1, but it would in TG’s and creating constantly new systems to different modes and if 1v1 has option to QM and Rank play then if TG’s only have Ranked to avoid abuses ppl are going to complain that why there is QM in 1v1 but not in TG’s.
Same way like they did with ranked mode begin with. Ppl wanted it to TG’s without considering what will happen and developers listened this and I highly doubt devs are actually going to fix matchmaking and all the ways to abuse matchmaking in TG’s when ranked comes out.
Simplest solution is usually almost always the best and leaves a lot less chances on someone finding way to abuse it. So essentially removing either Ranked or QM and putting players into one pool would be most optimal and ppl who would like to play both modes ranked or TG would be only ones to give up on something if they play QM just to test random stuff even tho its not really problem because what works in QM wont necessary work in Ranked.
Also manipulating elo isn’t necessary. Reset elo and have players play 5 placement games and this way they’re roughly placed into right spots.
In general I think you raise a lot of good points. No solution is perfect and more complexity always means more room for error. I do want to clarify that it would have a single ELO pool (this is necessary to avoid potentially messing with the zero-sum ELO system), Ranked ladder, and queuing pool. You would just have two separate identities on the ladder / in the ELO system (one for QM and one for RM). The only difference between the two would be that the ELO for your QM identity wouldn’t earn you rewards. And maybe some behind-the-scenes logic for deciding maps / prioritizing matches.
Ok so one pool of elo for 2 separate matchmaking types. Just clarifying right?
So what do you think happens to top tier players when something like this would happen? How would you solve minimum elo gained and minimum lost in case they get matched with someone who is QM and happens to be somewhere around 1.5k elo which they btw constantly play against.
You would have to hard cap elo gains and losses so there wouldn’t be situation where players get -1000 elo if they lose game for some reason
This also brings another problem when having single pool. Lets say I play myself to 5k rating and there was no hardcap for how much points I might gain. Now I could sell basically conqueror rank to low level elo player by losing the game intentionally. Ofc there is issue with the getting matched with right player, but we could keep trying and that player would get massive boost to elo if there was no hard cap on how much elo can be gained and lost.
Then there is issue with actually matchmaking. Elo is used to determine players skill level. If you got 2 modes with 1 pool of elo and someone happens to win against high level opponent and gain massive boost to their elo which puts them way higher in league where they don’t belong to.
Also you wouldn’t be able to determine someones skill level if they kept playing QM most of the time and winning there but would be in silver in ranked.
So in the end devs would spent countless hours creating multiple different systems to protect the integrity of matchmaking and ranked and even then something might slip up and whole thing may fall apart. So yeah I still stand for 1 mode which is simplest and easiest to do also fastest and would also work with TG’s as long as they make adjustments to premade vs solo situation but thats another issue as whole.
Also forgot to mentions. Math behind how much elo is gained and lost would have to be completely changed. Now essentially players get anywhere from 0-30 elo per game. Since there would be much bigger difference it would be extremely useless for someone with like 3-4k play a game if its against 2k, because amount they would lose is always max and amount they get is 0 or 1. So essentially they would have way higher risk of losing. Ofc now im not talking about losing because lack of skill etc, but something may happen. I have won game against beastyqt once in 2v2 and after that I have never won again, but it was just my strategy happened to play out such way that let me win which was FC into FL backdoor on blackforest and I had hidden all my FL into corner between me and beasty so I proceeded to snipe him once he pushed into my base.
Wouldn’t this also create inflation of elo. QM players give elo but don’t lose elo meaning there is always more elo coming to ranked pool and eventually more ppl would just get conqueror for free?=
QM players would only get 1.5k ELO if they can beat RM players all the way up to 1.5K ELO. They wouldn’t be able to play only against QM players and artificially inflate their ELO because they are still subject to random matching at their ELO.
This wouldn’t be an issue any more than it is in the current system. You can only match with high ELO players if you are yourself high ELO.
They would lose ELO. The player would have two identities in the same ELO pool, but each identity would have a separate ELO tracked. If they continually lose then they will eventually have the lowest possible ELO (and as a result, wouldn’t be able to continuously provide benefit to others and unbalance the ELO pool - as I said before, it remains zero-sum). If they continually win they will eventually only match with top tier pros.
Basically, the goal here is to avoid a lot of the complexity you’re talking about and essentially give everyone a free smurf account that they can only use when they click QM. If the current ELO system has solved a problem, then the merged pool should also avoid that same problem.
This is never the case with matchmaking in AOE4. If you look at beasty’s match history then you would clearly see that he gets matched up with players who are way below his elo. Anywhere from 500-1000. Even played against below 1k. So it would happen. Because its poorly made and should be fixed.
This would only work with 1v1 and not in TG’s. The reason why it wouldn’t work is simple. Like you mentioned this would give players more leeway to play more casually if they don’t feel like playing ranked, but moment you put this into TG’s it becomes mess.
If you got player who has 1.5k QM elo and they’ve reached it by playing with either premade or just simply soloing and eventually gotten there, but chooses the QM over ranked on match and they might be feeling like what ever I wont try hard while rest of team are ranked. And because QM player has overwhelming advantage over ranked players in TG’s in this situation where they can just ruin someones rank because they would lose less valuable elo.
Would be essentially same if you and me made a bet. You bet 1000 euros or USd and I bet 1000 yens. If I win I get quite lot cash and if I lose I loose literally nothing
Haha, fair enough. I’m not good enough to have this problem. But I think we can agree this is an issue that should be fixed independent of whether they unify the queues.
I think you raise a lot of good points, and TBH I don’t know enough about TG to have a good discussion. That’s why I would suggest keeping this change to 1v1 for now. It seems like TG matching has a lot of problems that should be addressed before thinking about queue times.