Hi! I have a rather odd request I imagine. I really like aoe2 DE, and I like to play 1v1 rated games, it´s really thrilling. I have put considerable time since the release of the game into practising build-orders and hotkeys as well as learning the different civs and thinking of tactics. But so far I have only played some 50-60 1v1´s, and I started in january. The reason is myself really, I find this game to be very competetive and I constantly consider myself to not be good enough to be able to play. It´s my own bad confidence rather than anything else in the game really (my username is UnconfidentLearnerBCB btw…), but anyway…
A big reason to why I don´t play more is the rating. It makes it like a competition, which is stressful to me, and I don´t want it to be stressful, I want to play to relax and have fun and that´s all. The way the match-maker uses rating to find opponents is great, most games I have played have been close skillwise between me and my opponent and that´s exactly how I want it. But this stupid number where I get some points when I win and lose some when I don´t makes me stress out… I don’t want to know about it! And I imagine I’m far from the only one maybe a bit less confident player out there who don´t want to be judged by a number when we just want to have a bit of fun.
So… My request would be to add the possibility to hide the rating. I don´t want to know my own rating and I don´t want to know my opponents. To simply remove the stress from it. Would that be possible? A MOD which does this would be perfectly fine with me. I would be grateful for any help with this, and ultimately it would probably mean I play a lot more - and by then just for the fun of it.
I sympathize with you. There are evenings where I’d like to play a casual multiplayer game, without it affecting win/loss or rating.
A simple solution would be to:
Allow the game host to set a game rule of ‘unscored’. The game would not record a winner or loser.
Allow a player to clear their multiplayer game history.
Thus, you can play ranked games, and clear the history if you are uncomfortable. And, you can play unscored games and never have the history recorded.
The upside is that you can play multiplayer anytime without fixating on wins/losses. The downside is that the other players may not take the games seriously, resulting in sloppy play or unsupportive teammates. The other downside is that experienced trolls may choose play unranked just to constantly dominate weaker players.
You can turn off tooltips which will also disable the elo popup, but this is not ideal.
I believe it might be possible to remove them by editing the tooltip file, I took a look and was able to remove some words but not the actual values. Maybe someone can take a deeper look.
Yes, it would be really good to find a simple way in the UI-files to remove it for me (or move it outside the vissible screen). I have tried to look into the files at widgetui, but I don’t know where to look… There is so much information, and I know very little about computers. If someone knows where to look and how to do, please tell me!
For now I have decided to just Alt-F4 and quit the game before I go to statistics after every match I play, and never check my own profile as well as the my opponents. This way I will hopefully “forget” about my ELO, it is a bit forced though. It is sometimes nice to be able to check the statistics after a game, like how the population looked at different parts of the game and resources gathered and so on. But it is not the end of the world.
Optimally there would be an option to turn off the ability to see any of this of course. I would even like it to be possible to hide my statistics (rating, place on leaderboard and number of games played) from others to see, it is kind of a personal integrity thing imo. I understand there are other matters which may have higher priority for the devs though.
To remove the rating from the post game achievement screen, you probably just have to change the line 635 of “widgetui\screenachievements.json” to something like
Maybe Quick Play in the next patch shall be the game mode for you. There’s a hidden ELO for unranked games. It’s speculated Quick Play will use this hidden unranked ELO, but Quick Play match making won’t care about always finding your closest possible ELO match like match making does for ranked.
Thank you a lot, this works! I didn´t quite find it on line 635 (I don’t know how to see that), but i searched for “rating” in the file screenachievements.json and found three entries, I changed all those numbers on the x-axis to be outside of the screen (I chose 5000, that works, in case someone else wnats this). Now I can watch statistics after the game and don´t need to see the rating or how it changes. Great!
If someone knows where the UI-numbers are on player stats, I would love to know that that too! So that I don´t happen to see my rating by accident…
Now I will play lots of rated games, and I won´t care about how this affects my stupid rating, because I won´t know about it! Hurrah!
I haven’t found the file, that defines the player stat screen, yet. Apparently it is not screenplayerprofileinspector.json. But, as they will change the stat screen in the next patch, I don’t want to put too much efford in it, now. Just don’t click on it until then
Also remember to create a local mod with your changes, as otherwise they will be overwritten every time the game is patched!
Every text editing program shows the line number somewhere. In the standard Windows Editor, it is at the bottom right. I recommend using Notepad++ for modding, as it structures the text very clearly. There, the line number is on the left of each line.
I´m not sure about the UI-changes with new patches actually, I´ve made several UI-changes before and I´ve still got them working, many patches later. I´ll follow your advice though and not look further into this until next patch, to be on the safe side.
