Before anything, for the future of this game fix Team Games

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
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team games feel unplayable right now due to a few things. They need serious attention before any update/DLC/civ balance. I can feel people in the community giving up on TG’s (many already did, long ago) and that just exacerbates the problem even further.

I have sat for 2 hours tonight trying to enjoy a game and I have either experienced ALT F4, disconnect, or crazy team imbalance leading to 20 minute games. I haven’t had a single good game, and this has happened a few times recently. It doesn’t seem worth putting the time into.

  • ELO calculation causing constant inflation.
    This isn’t news to anyone, but a complete restart of the ladder needs to happen with a better calculation in place. I’m sure this isn’t easy, but I’m sure there are people in this community that could work it out. Makes high level TG’s impossible and leads to a constant imbalance. Maybe a consideration of 1v1 elo could help.

  • Cannot find game under 1200 TG Elo.
    This may be caused by the inflation, meaning the game can’t find anyone near your elo. I have sat in a 30 minute que a few times before giving up on that account.

  • ALT F4.
    This just causes obvious problems and makes the long wait for a game, even longer.

  • Team imbalance
    I am not sure if this is due to the dropping TG player count or the inflation not correctly rating people’s Elo. But I really feel that recently its been harder and harder to get stuck into a balanced game.

Everyone is aware of all of these, I know. I just needed to echo it once again in the hopes that the dev’s eventually do something. This time last year team games were so so enjoyable for me (when I’d been playing a few months) because the user experience was near seamless with great matchmaking and mostly very balanced teams. Team games are in a really sorry state right now, and if I was just picking up the game I’m sure I’d have been put off quite quickly.

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Oh yeah more topics about the current issues are great, they have been ignoring us for so much time, that the last update brought a sever error that seems to be affecting most players, i don’t know if it was because of it or if it was because people can’t stand more failures from the game, but this is great, much better than reading new civ concepts.

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I’m personally more of a fan of 1v1s due to them tending to be faster, but as a team-game fix, I definitely think that this a good way to go. The problem is, if people only play team games, that won’t really work.
How to improve early 1v1s:
Maybe if for the first 10 games of 1v1, you only play against other people with less than ten games, that should be the matchmaking priority for the first few minutes, if it takes more than 5 mins, then it just matches you against someone with similar elo. This should help stop new players falling afoul of people who are now getting good at the game and are on a 50 win streak coming back from 800 elo or something. For these first 10 games, team games could be locked.
Introducing early team games:
Once the ten are complete, it now unlocks team games, where it matches you with teammates and opponents within 50 elo of your 1v1 score. You then gain or lose elo points at the end, based on the average of the two teams, which theoretically should be very similar. They matchmaking the team games this way for the first ten games.
Progressing Team Games:
After those ten games, there should be enough data that they start matchmaking with people of a similar team game elo. If the matchmake process is taking too long, they can add players who have a 1v1 elo score similar to the average of all players currently found. In that manner, all players on the team should be of a fairly similar level, leading to a better chance of victory. Naturally this would require a complete reset of the team game rankings, maybe save the current elo’s in case a new system fails.
How other issues might be resolved:
As another couple of things that would be useful to implement to stop people just quitting and ruining the game for everyone, would be team surrender. For this, all players on a team would have to be willing to resign before the team is defeated, otherwise you can end up with a 4v3, or an even less fair match. If people use Alt f4 to quit anyway, it would count as an automatic vote towards the team surrender. It should also do one of another two things.
How to deal with players who have used Alt f4:
Either, any other player the team can now control the resigned player, this is not they take over totally. Instead, this control is shared between the rest of the team, so that they can all share control or resigned players, as well as controlling their own base. The other suggestion would be to have an AI sub in for the resigned player. The Ai could either be an extreme AI, or the game takes the highest AI level ever beaten by any player on this team, which shouldn’t be too hard, seeing as there is an achievement that could be checked. It then adds one level of difficulty to this and subs that in in place of the player, Ie. if the best AI anyone in the game had ever beaten was hard, a hardest Ai would be the substitute. Although giving the remaining players shared control of the resigned player would be more fair, it would be harder for them to manage, and even agree on a course of action. If an AI was subbed in however, it would be almost certainly worse than a player, but it would be able to receive commands from the players to give it instructions on how to play, and it would allow the players to run their own bases.
Other suggestions regarding elo for players using Alt f4, or teams dealing with it:
Players who use Alt f4 in the first 5 minutes of the game, or before the game starts should also automatically lose a set number of elo points, regardless of the actual result. It has been suggested that this could be 14 points. If they use Alt f4 at any point after those first 5/10 mins, they could instead lose 7 points. It could also be implemented that if the team with a resigned player loses, the amount of points they lose is decreased by a fixed amount, such as 7, so that they don’t suffer as much for the loss. Anyone who uses Alt f4 should also be effected by the outcome of the match if possible, in addition to losing the set points.

That is my suggestion.

Wow, I didn’t realize how much text that actually was until I posted it.

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Great post, agree with everything and there’s a lot to think about!

The idea of how to implement 1v1 elo into matchmaking TG’s is a really good idea.

I really hope they solve this problem,
Cheers for the input.

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it pains me to see this post get ignored. Nothing is more important than this right now.

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A simple Alt-4 remediation:
A player that exits before the game begins or within the first 5 minutes always loses 14 ELO. Those points are spread among the remaining players on both teams. Chat announces the distribution of points.

Don’t like the map? You can exit for 14 points or wait 5 minutes and take the loss for whatever that would be.

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It effects the rest of the team’s chances of winning as well however. I think if player using Alt-f4 was to lose 14 points, and be effected by the outcome of the match as well, it might make them less likely to drop. If a team has a player drop this way, and they lose, they could have the points loss decreased by a set number of points, maybe 7. I’ve added stuff to this extent to my original post.

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For the future of this game ?
This game continue existing very fine without the multiplayer base, this is mainly a Singleplayer game, with a multiplayer function.
See the old game, it was the Singleplayer and modding/scenario creator community that kept this game alive.

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aren’t there even tg smurf accounts? Make it even easier to smurf wouldn’ solve the issue at all, actually.
The only solution is to make it less revarding to smurf.

pretty sure that these minus elo tg players are smurfs to intentionally push other players tg ranking. How do you even achieve a negative tg ranking? 11

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There is a multiplayer base now however, and although single player might be less buggy, multiplayer is definitely more fun, provided it is a balanced matchup. Even if the single player part of the community kept the game alive, the multiplayer is now a big part, and if multiplayer dies, the player base will decrease.

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Do you have any suggestions on how to do this?

Lol

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Solution: Exponanatial Average team game elo. Just need to find the right base.

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Ok. This 20 character minimum is annoying. When you just want to type: Ok, and it makes you do all this other stuff.

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Why do you even bother replying him, this game has got remastered 2 times already and a fan base mod (FE), because and thinking into the multiplayer, pretending this game has survived 21 years because of SP its beyond naive.

According to steam data the player base doesn’t really play the campaigns, it is still below 6% of all the total players, the so called SP users actually play with their friends vs bots or custom scenarios, playing alone is okay if you are 5 years old, but no one plays alone vs bots for several years, there is no fun or challenge, exclusive SP users are short term players.

That guy must be thinking that red bull 5 is about who finish william wallace campaign faster or who can beat 3 bots on extreme :clown_face:

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This time last year teamgames were still in a really bad situation. All the problems that are present now, were noticeable back then, just that it escalated even more now due to passing of time.

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Seems Multiplayer fixes are very down on the to do list, no priority.
Important is to fix bugs that affect the game in general.

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I think they need to hit the reset button on team game rating in general. Every game in solo queue feels like a throw of the dice. Some people not even know how to macro, and premade teams go around stomping. There is also the averaging issue. It feels so bad to lose 17 to 20 points despite the massive disparities!

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Old elo causing inflation, new elo isnt. But we are still dealing with the mess of old elo. And the new elo isnt perfect either and the reason for many smurf account.

This is because of the low number of players compared to higher elo. All due to the inflation of the old system.

This is also the same story. The old system was terrible in guessing your skill. The new system isnt really an improvement either. And then you have the mess of the old system into the new system.

These three points could be fixed by updating the elo rating + resetting the ratings afterwards. There are already some good solution posted in the following thread in how to update the calculation to something that makes sense and which limits smurfing in this thread:

I will suggest you to look into that thread.

Untill they fix these issue, TGs will be unblaanced and all the other issues you mentioned.

Awarding a toxic player by giving him weaker players which he could bash doesnt seem right to me. Lowering the elo means that he will get more easy opponents. The best way to deal with Alt F4 is by adding time penalties. So after a early dodge he wont be able to play the game for a while, like 15 minutes or something like that. This way will be a punishment for the dodger, not a reward.

Great joke! I have had a great laugh about it. This game survived because of a multiplayer community. Otherwise this game was already dead. I would claim that HD and DE would never exist if there was no multiplayer community. If it was only single player, then this game was already dead for years and microsoft never ordered HD and DE.

I wont claim that there wasnt a single player community in all the years. There probably was. But they dont really generate the popularity of the game.

Like i started this post: This is all due to the old calculation and the new calculation both being bad and having their own issues and the mess of both are combined in one rating. Just resetting wont really solve the mess. The current calculation is still exploitable by smurfing, which makes it again a mess. The solution isnt just resetting the ladder. The solution is fixing the elo calculation to something useful and then resetting the ladder.

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+1 I can’t even play multiplayer right now, even if I wanted to. It takes several restarts of the game to actually play a single game

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Tip 1:
Anything between “<” and “>” is not displayed, although you still would have to write up to 20 characters.

Tip 2 for faster responses: Spam periods. If you write OK + 10 periods, it will appear as “Ok…” (only 3 periods)

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