In case you haven’t noticed, tournaments ALREADY are like this. Most tournament players will favor winning versus choosing a fun strat/civ. Especially at the top level. Thats why I prefer watching lower ELO tournaments, if I have the choice. It is the very definition of 'High Elo" itself. High Elo = choosing the best civ and the best strategy and best unit combo for whatever map and moving the mouse faster than anyone else. Those things add up to having the highest elo rating.
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No no, I didnt mean like this. When I watch tournaments, I like seeing players picking the best civ and trying to win. Not picking their favorite civ and see what happens
I can totally understand why you do not feel the same, we just enjoy different things.
Actually, this is why I like watching aoe 2 and aoe 3 tournaments and not aoe 1 or warcraft 3: the pro level play style in warcraft 3 (blademaster harass, heroe blocking, tp saving) and aoe 1 (slingers/axemen swarms, or no rush into chariot archers swarm) look dumb to me.
Now that i think about it, I didnt watch much aoe 3 recently, but from what I remember, there was a good diversity and most strats where satisfying to watch (to my liking). I think I didnt watch much since Italy and Malta release. I remember of the hidden cup, the tournament of pre-DE civs (which is very old indeed, as Kaiserklein was still playing), and a few tournaments advertised in this forum by eliteRifleman (maybe 6 months old as well).
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I don’t think it’s actually ‘many’ the people on the forums for example probably are more passionate about balance and watch twitch and tournaments etc. Most people that play this game do so casually and I’d be surprised if the majority of aoe3 players even know the meta or who the best players are currently. Judging by twitch viewers very few people watch the game there. Your average aoe3 enjoyer probably watches the odd youtube video from widgie to see what the latest cheese strat is and that’s about their limit.
Competitive is really an absolutely tiny percentage of this game, even less than usual considering all the players that only do skirmish/single player. Even looking at the top 100 most of the top 100 contains various smurf accounts of top players so it’s not even a true top 100 players.
For those reasons I’m fine with the devs upsetting a few very vocal pro players in order to better balance for the masses. Just because 1 strategy with a civ is op at 2k elo doesn’t mean it is for thousands of players below that and changes to make that strat balanced at 2k elo in many cases have a detrimental effect on everyone else for who the civ was fine.
That’s a very fair point. But then I don’t know if these players really notice the balance changes and complain about a civ being weak.
At least my friends who do not know anything about the meta/tournaments/streamers do not care either about the overall balance either. One plays a lot of Ottomans because “Big Bombards are amazing” and another has no own deck (uses pre defined decks). Their meta is very far away from the pro meta and they just pick civs they like or feel are strong and will never ever complain about civ balance. At worst it will be “This civ suck, I’ll pick another one next time”.
But to be fair, they would be lower than mid ELO in ranked (one are still good enough to win against extreme AI). I would expect most mid ELO ranked players to have checked online for strategies and civ tier lists, but who knows…
So my point is that even though what you said makes perfectly sense, I don’t see it as the obvious thing to do. Hence “it is a complex topic”. It is hard to know what the silent majority thinks or cares about.
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Yeah true, I have a few friends around 1200-1300 elo they don’t really follow competitive or watch the game but they do watch youtubers like drongo back in the day and these days mostly widgie. Mostly for build orders or to see what’s op in the moment not necessarily to abuse for pixel points but just to have fun. I think they are aware what is op just from playing the ladder though, like when hakkas were broken every single sweden player suddenly stopped making caroleans and made hakkas when it was never seen before. You never saw civs like inca or hausa because they were quite weak so people pick strong civs in general. When hausa were released they had that broken rush so all you’d see is hausa constantly.
There’s been another post from our favourite number 1 ranked player on the esoc forums listing various nerfs he wants for next patch and I think most players would disagree with his points. Things like nerfing the ethiopian 2 villager card and giving them a 8% shipment penalty (when they have no shipment bonus) etc. ethiopia for example was rarely seen prior to this patch and only now has become a bit more playable, it’s certainly not widely used. Most players just playing ranked perhaps see ethiopia once a day at the most and I doubt they think it’s op, compare that to sweden that despite nerfs you see constantly so you’d assume they’re a stronger civ and rightly so imo.
Agree.
Italy mirrors and Italy vs China/Sweden/India*/ Ottos* /Ethio* matchups (* they are also serious contenders).
When Revnak only plays British, he posts on forum “british not broken”
When revnak plays ottoman, he says ottoman not broken,
When revank keeps playing italy, he says italy not broken
When revnak’s opponent plays Malta, he posts “Malta broken, competitive player feedback…”
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I agree it does seem any civ that results in a loss for him however unusual that may be seems to convince him they need unnecessary nerfs. The suggestions he’s posted recently to nerf ethiopia which seem way over the top only seem to confirm that. This is again another reason why I don’t take pro players opinions as 100% reliable when such bias exists.
Anyway we should keep things on topic and avoid mentioning certain players or our posts will just be marked as spam again lol.
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Hes been calling italy broken as hell since patch while botting the FI to prove a point. I havent seen him call italy fair since patch
Infact seeing all the pros who normally agrue about everything, accross the different modes and playstles and preferences, almost unamimously agree italy is broken is pretty telling how broken it is. I guess its the best chance of rallying the community is make a uber passive eco age4 civ again lol
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Anyway back on topic, I’ve been looking at current patches civ grid and across all levels there’s an increase in win rate for lakota and a decrease in win rate for malta so the prediction of this post is currently on course. There are still very few games played so until there’s a lot more we won’t know for certain but currently there is a correlation across all elo levels that lakota is stronger than before patch and malta is weaker so it’ll be interesting to see if that changes as the civ grid gets updated.
I don’t think so, the first and only game I played with revnak was in the pup, he used italy, and at the beginning of the game he told me that italy was OP with its FI broken. and he proved his words.
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Five days have passed since the last post here, and what happened: Lakotas are a top 3 civ and Maltese are a bottom 5 civ. Also Chinese are still OP and Portuguese are still the worst.
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Where did you find the stats for this?
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1gZcpbvgOdLII4lv6GQEdSnKtgsktqpw7Dq_0byT0Csc/htmlview
Take it with a grain of salt though. It’s a work in progress
interesting part about the data is u can see italy jumping up from mid to top 5 pretty fast. Too bad higher level data is probably limited but might be intresting to see if Italy really is like china in aoe 2 where the power just spikes at 2k above elo
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British is now trash tier, who would have thought lol.
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I’d think you would be right, just with the rate the top players play games we will never get enough data to see definitive results
It is funny when Lakota has high winrate is OP, Haude has low winrate is strong, Malta has low winrate is UP.
Sweden, Otto is not OP?
Only take with the specific period winrate when it benefit for self. What a shame.
Brits have absolutely no chance with any rush civ. They are the slowest civ to get off the ground in the game now.
I always believe “making a civ start faster/slower” is a bad approach because it covers up a lot of design flaws (both the very strong ones and very weak ones) with a seemingly “balanced” result.
Especially in a game with civ designs like AOE3.