On aoe2.net, there is a concept of unranked ELO, which implies that even unranked games have their result stored in a database somewhere.
Is there any way to opt out of this and do a truly unranked game? E.g. suppose I want to play against a friend, and neither of us wants the result recorded anywhere. Or if I want to test something by playing in a lobby with two PCs at the same.
Two possible options (i dont know if they work):
Those might be options to try out.
I think I have managed to answer my own question. I played a game today between two of my own accounts in an unranked lobby, and I set the lobby as private. Having gone to my profile on aoe2.net by editing the url to put my steam ID in, it doesn’t list any games as having been played, so making a lobby private seems to prevent it from going into the results database.
I feel like these sites aren’t too fast to update, so you should check thel again later to make sure nothing was recorded.
Thanks, I’ve just checked again and there’s no games listed, however as you said “these sites” I thought I should also check if any other sites show anything, and ageofempires.com has recorded the result. So it seems like the result of a private lobby still goes into a database, but maybe it’s flagged as private and aoe2.net is choosing to not process it whereas ageofempires.com is processing it.
I strongly feel there needs to be a way to play games that are truly off the record. Imagine if when you bought a chess set it came with a legal requirement that every time you put pieces on the board you must submit a result to an official authority. I feel I can’t reasonably ask a friend to play a casual game of Aoe2 with me, as a game is no longer casual if the result is being recorded somewhere.