Yeah, I have to agree. Lots of people from AoE2 know they aren’t all that good and they wanna play other players around their same noob level, but there are people who are even newer to the game and just don’t know even half of the stuff we know. I’m like that myself, ik i’m not even remotely good, but I at least have a gist of how stuff should work, so I do at least the basic right to some extent, but i’ve meet many players who just aren’t familiar at all even to the basic (I can’t tell exactly what since I don’t have the match replays and I couldn’t waste my time seeing what my allies are doing, but for many matches I ended up being the one with the most score from the team and even the game sometimes, mostly because of eco + scouting, but I still lost matches to others around my score because of some feudal rush, still trying to learn how to deal with early rushes properly).
I think this is what scares some people from playing multiplayer, like yeah we’re noobs and we know it, but in what layer of noob we are? I think this is one of the main reasons we need a proper “unranked elo” so we know if we’re playing someone around our level or not.
Just make it a ranked lobby with a different ELO than matchmkaing. It’s pointless to have an unranked lobby. Allow users to make a game non-rated if they want.
Ranked lobbies can easily be exploited to inflate people’s elo.
Here’s a video that explains how elo works and how people end up being able to use it at their own favor in a ranked lobby system.
I’d just like to chime in and say that I also like the new map pool. I’m all for changing the rotation frequently. I have been able to play a lot of new map styles that I wouldn’t normally be able to find matches at. I’ve even played some Deathmatch which I never play… but finding it to be kinda fun. Really tired of Arabia Arabia Arabia on the old ranked system anyways. Auto matching is clutch… especially for team games.
Having said all of this, I still think we should have individual rankings per map/settings.
I can repeat that if it’s confusing. I think it would give players more opportunities to rank well with multiple ranking boards. And at the same time I like the map pool because nobody would play the weird maps. If the map pool changes every month or so then we could start looking at it like a season and during that time getting the best ranking at Steppe map type or Mega Random might be important because we’d know the map pool will change next season.
Why do people keep bringing this up? Give me a situation where it matters?
First, ELO doesn’t matter. This isn’t college admission. This isn’t like the SATs. Why does it matter if someone artificially gets a high ELO rating playing niche settings? ELO is just a fun way of keeping score.
Second, the higher someone’s ELO gets, the harder it will be to find games with someone of the same rank on niche settings. It’s not like you’ll ever have a bunch of Tiny Island players anywhere close to the top 100.
Third, if they do inflate their ratings with niche games, they’ll just give the rest of us more points when they play us in normal settings. Thank you.
Fourth, if there was some normal settings tournament based on ELO and someone got to 2k+ playing tiny islands, they’d likely not play, but if they did they’d lose in the first round. Alternatively, profiles could show which maps someone is playing(like Voobly) on and if they only play on niche settings don’t invite them to the tournament.
Fifth, I think it adds to the diversity of the community and makes it more interesting. Look at The Legend of FatSlob. I’d love to see him be 2K+. He’s 1700 right now on Voobly and I think that’s great. He’d likely be 1300 in Arabia but I’d love to see more 2k+ niche players. It adds to the fun of the community. When I played AoE there was a guy who was the best 1v1 Tiny Islands player he was like 2k2. It’s like a side quest to try to beat him. I was able to play him as a 1600er and I got 32 points for beating him. It was an awesome memory as a kid. I want more of these Legends!!! DE has killed all these legends. Only NPCs are the only ones who like to play without rankings in the unranked lobby.
Maybe because it’s ranked?
What you want is pretty much an unranked system that has elo, and honestly having a system like this separated from ranked isn’t a bad idea.
Because it all falls into the same answer. Ranked is generally supposed to be a competitive scene, aka more serious games, what you just described is an unranked system where elo is still calculated regardless.
And tbh? I kinda agree with some stuff you’ve said there, especially related to having legends rising up like fatslob, I just don’t think this system should be called “ranked”.
Call it rated or ranked, it is very competitive. Have you ever played on Voobly? I want a rated / ranked lobby system. I want to play mainly open land maps. If I host a 1v1 Arabia game and I’m highly rated, you better believe that will be a competitive game.
This ranked match making just forces players to play maps they don’t want and due to the variability of the maps and the required civ picks, I think it demonstrates skill less than a ranked lobby system. If someone is highly rated in a ranked lobby who plays BF they likely crush someone in ranked matchmaking who gets a BF map with the same rating.
I don’t mean that you don’t have competitive matches there, but having an official competitive scene is different than just playing competitively in the sense of doing the best of your best.
After reading ur points now I start to see why people keep coming with the idea of having both a MM system together with a rated lobby. The MM system is where the most serious competitive players would clash between each other, and it would have a more accurate general elo with all map styles together (since I believe players like viper and MBL will do mostly good in all map styles regardless, including mega random), and then for the players that only wanna play their fav maps they have a rated lobby system so that they can play whatever they want in their own settings and still having a system that calculates their elo so they can more accurately match each other (and ofc still having huge clashes against each other at the higher elos). The only thing I feel that would be an improvement to this system would be to separate the elo for each map, since as you said yourself, if a player who is good at arabia for example decides to try and play BF and ends up getting matched against a very good BF player he’ll just be completely crushed, having the same elo for all maps would end up forcing the high elo arabia player to only ever play arabia, because if he ever try to play something new he’ll just lose every single match, and i don’t think anyone would wanna give up all their elo points just to try and play something new.
I get your point about wanting a rating for each map but that seems to overly complicate things. What I would do is to change the ELO calcs. For example if you win on a map that you play less than 5% of the time on, you get awarded 2.0x normal and you’d loose half as many points. Same thing if they allowed users to pick which maps they are willing to play in matchmaking as opposed to ban maps. Incentivize cross-play if they think that’s important. Don’t jam it down throats. Ultimately cross play is not that important to me. I’d be fine playing just open land maps and then risking my ELO pts to play on other maps now and then if I thought that would be fun or I couldn’t find a game on Arabia.
I like ur idea, not sure if it would make things that accurate but it’s still a nice start.
I don’t really see a problem abt separating elos for each map tho, code-wise it would be a very simple thing to do, just check the map the player is playing and then calculate it based on his elo of the map. It’s rly nothing harder than checking the map being played be4 running the elo calculation code and having more databases to store the player’s elos.
Well the problem with that is that the most popular maps are often custom with slight variations to fix issues in competitive game play and it would not be feasible to have your ELO reset with each of these maps. For example, there HC2 Arabia NAC Arabia Green Arabia, etc. the devs failed to fix some simple issues in Arabia like starting with at least one sheep visible.
Oh I see now… they could still try and make it so similar maps have a shared elo (or just variants of it, so all arabia mods share the same elo), but I get that trying to detect which maps are similar would be complicated, especially if they end up being mods made by players.
In most of your arguments im not sure if you just havent listened to the community or your just too selfish, you may have been able to find a couple of games fast on voobly once or twice, but it isnt usually, soecially past 1900+. The pool is simply the most played maps overall, and adding steppe (dunno why exactly) the reason for the 3 bans is very very simple, because there is 7 maps so they queue time will never be affected by time. On the other hand although you might think that you want to wait 5 10 minutes more for the game, the fact is the majority just want to play. If you want to spam arabia go on a private game (pro-tip if you want a fair game you can juat put on the title your voobly elo) they need to fix the not being able to know the elo agreed with that, but with time it will come. Times change and right now to be a competetive player you need to be flexible on map and playstyles if you just want to earn points from playing arabia, sad to tell you that wont happen
Little point i forgot, one of the main points of making the new aoe matchmaking was to get rid of the lobbys, and here you are asking for them to come back, all games are not for everyone, you can always go back to voobly