A simple question about Voobly

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
1

Did Voobly have an auto matchmaking system? Or was it just ranked lobbies?

1 Like
2

Just ranked lobbies. 20 characters

1 Like
3

Thanks! (20 Characters)

1 Like
4

Which implied that you could see your opponents and (ingame) settings and map before launch.
A property which is lost.
And with the new patch you get a requeue penalty, if you resign against smurfs.

5

I guess the matchmaking in DE was one of the great things that could happened to AoE2
I know that the ranked lobby system keeps the game alive for a long time but the matchmaking system revolve the game to its actual state

6

I think it’s selling Voobly short to say it just had ranked lobbies. There was a huge infrastructure built up around this lobby system to help people find games. You could see which games your friends or clan members were playing then jump in to spectate them. Lobbies persisted between games, so you could easily have a rematch after finding someone who wanted to play the same settings. And it was easier to spectate tournament games, since you didn’t need to hunt down the players between each match. There was streaming integration, so you could see if someone was casting a series or streaming their PoV. Spectators could chat with each other while watching games together. A “host” could create a lobby for a community game, then swap to be a spectator while 8 other people played.

I think the term “ranked lobbies” is often misused in the conversations about the matchmaking system. Ranked lobbies are just one part of a large ecosystem of tools that Voobly had.

One thing that stands out to me is that top level players pretty much don’t play 4v4s on DE. They don’t use the matchmaking system, and they instead have their own Steam group chat for organizing games. But the games can’t happen “organically” like they did on Voobly. If there are only 10-11 people who want to play certain settings (be it top-level TGs, BF TGs, LN FFAs, etc.), then they could spectate an ongoing game and swap out for another player when it’s over. DE doesn’t have any analogous system for supporting “smaller-population game modes” like these.

12 Likes
7

Voobly had an infrastructure built for its community, whether if you were competitive or casual, you could play CBA ranked, DM, etc, the devs there were always willing to add new ladders on demand.

The social interactions were the most important part of its success, you could play with anyone you wanted, rematch him or ban him, in that regard DE is inferior, you get ertug in the game, you have to play him or now resign and get punished 11

I really miss the +2k tgs that were happening daily, where the actual pro players were in the top and not a bunch of point traders and hyper inflated guys cause of stacking, the elo on that ladder used to make sense.

Sadly people just look at the visual of the outdated skin that voobly had and think it was bad.

4 Likes
8

A simple question about Voobly → official forums explains flaws of DE, love it

9

Honestly tho I have bad experience on Voobly ranked lobby for 1v1

  • Setup in voobly took forever (people also argue SQ vs MQ, civ…)
  • Waited for ages to have an opponent and had to keep promoting my lobby (Rm XXX 1v1 Arabia…)
  • “HUNS WAR or gtfo”
  • People who literally refused to play with others with more rating than him and was kicked
10

I dont think that is an issue - SQ or MQ - is an outdated decision and I think even MQ is standard on Voobly now

Is a strawman argument imo, in all my hundreds 1v1’s i played I always got random and if Hunwars it was visible in the room info/title

11

Notice that

  • It is my personal experience - your experience may differ
  • SQ was preferred in 2015-2016 era I think
  • Huns war were definitely preferred in 2015-2016 era.
  • It just took more than 3 minutes for me to START a game previously.
12

Also if you were playing with friend, 2v2 TG FT were a nightmare to setup as people quitted as long as they realized it is fixed team.

13

Thanks for all that info, everyone talks about playing on Voobly but little information like that is passed over. I feel like with this thread alone I learnt more than in a year.

A lot of that infrastructure sounds fantastic, is there a reason we aren’t pushing for those systems to be implemented in DE?

To me it seems the auto matchmaking will never be able to replicate that in a practical way, but that shouldn’t mean we can’t have those systems in lobbies.

That would be cool for sure. I don’t know the practicalities but out of interest what was an example of the smallest ladder? like 20 people or 100 people?

14

With Lobbies they would actually need to moderate the game because of wintrading, + probably additional cost and they probably want to show off their fancy backgrounds/fonts and cosmetics and you can’t do this if there is a windowed lobby system like on Voobly.
They want to attract people, not please current ones. The new main menu and all those fancy stuff makes people buy the game, that it hinders current players (due to less functionality) doesn’t matter cause they already paid. The old main menue was still faster, better and had a better overview - but it didn’t look as good as the new one + you now need more clicks to get somewhere

1 Like
15

200-300 players playing daily in the CBA ladder, much more than dm and empires wars together, the devs on DE didn’t do their homework.

1 Like
16

So you are saying point trading is non existent on DE, i wonder how we got 5k elo people 11

On the HD where most of the users from here come they were playing in ranked lobbies with 0 moderation, check mate.

1 Like
17

Why do people, who like the ranked lobbies of Voobly more than the matchmaking of DE, play DE instead of Voobly? This is a serious question, since I have basically no idea of Voobly. I just did a quick search and found out that there a still some people playing Voobly. Is it “only” the bigger playerbase? Why did people move from Voobly to DE in the first place?

18

I think it’s important to step back and remember that loads of people played the HD Edition (I’ve heard the sales numbers were over 6 million copies for that game) and enjoyed it. It was a buggy mess, with constant lag and disconnects in multiplayer, horrible pathfinding, and overall was a much worse experience than the patched version of the original game. But Aoe2 is such a good game that it can be broken in a variety of ways and still be fun to play. Being available on Steam and being simple to install and setup were very important to that version’s success. Now DE can do most things better than HD (campaign voice acting and mod support being two exceptions), so it’s the obvious place for many people to pick up the game.

Another reason is that there were tournaments on DE. We even had hosted tournaments on the HD Edition (and went through hell to do it) even though it was far inferior at the time even to UP 1.4. And players played in them, even though they clearly were having problems with the game. DE takes many steps backward from Voobly’s lobby system but takes steps forward in other areas. So when there’s already a large playerbase on DE, it’s harder to go back and find games on Voobly.

3 Likes
19

We absolutely should.

As for why there aren’t people pushing for it, well, the most obvious symptom of the lack of these features is Alt+F4ing. And it’s easier to have an argument about that symptom than it is to discuss the underlying causes and flaws in the matchmaking system. And when someone has to restart the queue because their TG gets Alt+F4ed, that’s clearly annoying, so the posts end up focusing on that. You could say the same things about people who leave the queue around 6 minutes and then immediately rejoin it (because after about 7 minutes they get matched with a much wider elo range and can have very unbalanced games): it forces other people to wait longer in the queue or to get even worse matches. But leaving before a match is found isn’t visible to other players, so there’s no precise event to target in a complaint.

Also, many new players come to DE without having played on Voobly before, so they aren’t familiar with many of the social features or game modes players had used in the past. It’s hard to suggest something if you’ve never used it before.

1 Like
20

Especially since the QoL features makes you addictive to DE and prevents you from going back as you are getting lazy because of them - which is probably another reason why they introduce them in the first place

1 Like