The current matchmaking system often matches players of vastly different skill levels against each other. This can be incredibly frustrating for players who are trying to improve their skills, as they are constantly getting stomped by players who are much better than them.
For example, a player who is ranked Gold 3 might be consistently matched against a player who is Conqueror. This is simply not fair, and it makes it very difficult for the Gold player to continue playing.
The matchmaking system also does not consider the fact that players can queue up in groups. This means that a team of three players who are all ranked Conqueror can be matched against a team of three players who are all ranked Gold/Plat. This is obviously not a fair match, and it makes it very near impossible for the lower players to win.
The developers of Age of Empires 4 have acknowledged that the matchmaking system is a problem and promised to fix it. However, until the matchmaking is fixed, Age of Empires 4 cannot be considered a truly competitive game, instead it will be considered a toy game not worthy of tournaments.
Dude, it is stupidly broken.
If the game doesn’t have enough active players to support balanced matchmaking they need to close the team brackets and consolidate their withering player base to solo games that actually stand a chance of being fair.
Its impossible to create fair matches on demand due small pool of players and this won’t change unless game gets more popular which is unlikely to happen.
Best thing that can be done to help with situation is to make single pool for matchmaking which means either removing QM or ranked entirely or copying SC2 match pool system.
The bigger the team sizes the harder to get fair matches.
In a 1v1 you only need to find 2 people and you only need to match their ranks.
In a 4v4 you need to find 8 people and get all of them to be in a similar rank.
Considering that there are also more people queueing for 1v1 it makes it even harder.
If you don’t like the matchmaking for team games then it’s your decision to only play 1v1 games.
Telling them to close team matchmaking is a little extreme.
There are still many people that enjoy team games and are of with some differences in ranks and it’s not like all those people would start queueing for 1v1.
But whatever.
Go to the forums of any popular multiplayer game with ranked matchmaking (lol, Dota, CSGO, SC2, etc.) and you will find the same complaints.
Also anything that is based on luck (like matching) will always result in some people having bad luck and getting multiple bad matches in a row.
The more players you have the higher the chance to have someone that is unlucky.
So anyway.
It is very unlikely that any popular multiplayer game has an actual bad matchmaking system that actively picks bad matchups.
If the matchmaking system would wait longer to find better matches everyone would complain about the queue times.
Is this enough evidence that the matchmaking is broken? Or that it needs to wait A LITTLE longer? All of these matches were matched within 2 minutes. I got matched against someone 900 rating better than me, TWO GAMES IN A ROW! Each less than 1 minute queue. Other match the player /&- is 500 rating higher, I’ve matched with them dozens of times. Other example is a premade team that I matched against. I don’t play vs premades, I dodge immediately. I requeue and the very next match - same ally, same enemy premade.
I don’t care how good you think it’s designed. That should not happen in a game. I shouldn’t be forced to play people that have an advantage. They shouldn’t be forced to match with someone that immediately dodges and doesn’t want to play with them. It should mix the friggin teams up, separate premades vs individual queues, limit the rank difference to 200 max. So many easy solutions to improve the system just a little, but it’s fucking useless garbage right now. I’m willing to wait 10 minutes for a fair game since it currently takes me 30 minutes of dodging to find one.
I agree this matchmaking is bad. However i think aoe4 ranked is too fragmented. There are still many players on quickmatch. The 2v2/3v3/4v4 matchmaking is split. That means the players pool for each particular type is very small.
Another important thing to improve, certainly also the addition of yours, would be to spawn the players, with the elo more similar, against, in some maps, happens to have random spawns, which is second wrong, from the fact that if you have the highest elo but your teammate is facing, against the highest enemy elo, but he’s not, you’ll find yourself losing to your teammate’s surrender, when if it had been you at his, you might have had more chances to win.
Well these complaints are in literally every single competitive game I’ve ever seen. AoE4 hasn’t seemed any worse than usual really.
Especially for team games because there’s so much more fuzziness in determining an individual’s rating.
There’s always room for improvement though.
One thing to note is that ranking is somewhat irrelevant and it’s hidden elo that actually matters. They do not seem to be perfectly tied together (which I don’t like, but many games do this).
