Bring back a reasonable grace period

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
1

There doesn’t need to be a 60-second grace period as there was before, and it doesn’t even need to be unconditional. It just needs to not punish the innocent.

Here’s an example algorithm: If a player disconnects in the first 5 seconds of the game, their teammates can resign without penalty for 10 seconds after that.

I’m sure you could tweak the formula, but even that would be plenty for me. Until you can join games with 90% or better chance of it actually being a game, penalizing rating for teammates’ instadrops during the loading screen just makes no sense.

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2

i think this is a great idea. some algo that recognizes that teammates have done something (dropped/desynced etc) might be the issue though since devs are so busy with “other things”…

but imo having something like that would be a lot more fair and make a lot more people happier regardless of the reason for the failed game

3

Some users were complaining here because players were abusing the grace period to leave the matches if they didn’t like the opponent or the map.

The fact is, that removing it was bad for the team games, i have lost more points because of someone DC before the game even starts.

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4

This seems like a reasonable idea. There definitely could be some discussion on what length of time the grace-period should be. However, I don’t think anyone would disagree with the fact that there needs to be some sort of grace-period in place.

I actually thought that the grace-period still existed? I played a match, I think, fairly recently where someone dropped on the other team immediately, and the team resigned - but my elo didn’t change for “winning.” I wonder if they still lost elo for resigning that early?

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ELO changes are symmetric.

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I think we can extend it to 30 seconds. 1 minute even (I know 1 min was the case before)

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I’m in favor for grace period, but please stop making up that teammate DCs cause you to lose Elo. Statistically they make you gain as much as you lose in the long run, that’s basic math

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8

tbh, for some players DC does happen very frequently

9

Sorry, I meant people pretending that their teammates DC’ing make them lose Elo, not people who DC themselves. (Edited)

As for people who DC early, whether they should lose Elo is debatable. I doubt people would really abuse the grace period to win Elo. And the Elo in team games is already completely busted anyway, so I’m in favor for the grace period to return.

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10

I still think they shouldn’t

Yes, they can abuse this by unplugging their Ethernet but at the same time, there are people who have a decent internet but the game decides to DC for them

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If you suggest to bring back grace period just for people who DC, that’s impossible. There is no system to distinguish between intentional leavers and unexpected disconnections. No need to unplug anything, just Alt+F4 is enough.

But I agree legitimate DC’s are probably much more frequent than Elo abusers (= bring back grace period)

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12

Agreed,
but then again, this is a double-edged sword

13

Rather than grace-no-ELO-loss period there should be a grace-reconnect period.

That means, if a match is found, ELO will be updated.

But, if you disconnect, the game is paused, and you have 1 or 2 minutes to reconnect. One time.

That’s probably hard to implement but seriously can’t be that difficult, we have unique userID gameID and 16x speed replay capacity, just taking back control needs to be implemented.

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14

@Paulnternet
I really like this idea!

Not only would this eliminate the problem of people alt+F4 the game and not losing ELO, but it would solve the problem of when a disconnect occurs for a player mid-game and gives them the opportunity to be able to re-join!

This also goes in line with what has been discussed here: merged-a-way-to-reconnect-would-be-great

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15

No thanks. Alt F4 needs to be punished. No need for a grace period.

I can see we will get a system in which quitter will get time penalties for the best time he joins the queue instead of elo loss. I would even prefer this system.

16

The first person to prematurely leave/DC/Alt-F4 wouldn’t get the grace. It’s the teammates s/he screws over who need grace.

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17

Such rule could be make sense. Still no solution for the annoying quitters. And how would this work for 1v1? Still free elo for other player which makes no sense.

18

As much as I want to support your suggestion… no. We can’t.

People can and will abuse this.

Imagine your team is well known, strong, etc. Many people know you, and they also know that their odds of defeating your powerful team are minimal.

These same people are competitive. Maybe they are so convinced that they can’t win that they’ll be tempted to… not fight you in the first place.

So then, if you are a tad on the amoral side, you’ll be thinking ‘hmm I’ll just disconnect immediately from games where I come against these OP enemies, because I really don’t want to lose my rating to them’.

Which, of course, is unacceptable behavior overall for the health of the game. A person driven to go up the ladder at any cost, no matter whether they deserve to or not, will disconnect out of every game they aren’t sure they have a good chance of winning. They may, even, rig games, by disconnecting over and over until they match up against another team–a team that is agreeing to throw! All sorts of shenanigans could ensue.

No, we can’t have grace period sadly.

However, it does really suck that disconnects do happen.

Therefore, the solution is to continue to talk to the devs and advocate for changes that wil reduce the # of disconnects at the beginning of the game. If you are getting disconnected, report it, document it, help the devs figure out how and when these disconnects are happening. The more information the devs have, the better they’ll be able to finally pin down all the various ways (I’m sure there are many ways) in which players are getting disconnects that shouldn’t be happening.

Cheers.

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19

Is this another feature that exists in other RTS (eg starcraft COH2) which isn’t in aoe likely due to dated engine?

Or are you not talking about the game automatically re connecting in game, if there’s a drop in Internet? (for example)

20

The grace period was remkved because people could quit a game if they hadn’t a favorable match up or the map generation was garbage.
Imagine this: if a player who wants to play only goths on arabia could do this he would just alt f4 in every situation where:

  • his opponent is not mayans
  • his map is not good enough to pull out a drush fc into huskarls to kill that mayans player

What I described was the situation before they removed that grace period

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