They got one significant nerf in 3 years. Lets just say they get siege engineers. Do you think its going to change anything at mid and lower elos? Their unpopularity is about being unable to adjust the build to account for the starting resource deficit and having to play with more than one type of military instead of a single unit spam.
Its already been made extremely friendly for the newer players. Sheep are visible at the start of the game, extra sheep aren’t too far away, boars spawn in open and at a limited distance. Each player gets at least 3 big forests almost always, even 4 quite a few times. Gold and berries are within a 10-tile distance from tc. Used to be much worse a decade ago.
And ultimately if you never want to make military till 30 mins nor want any kind of aggression, why play open maps and ranked games. Ban Arabia, Nomad and the other open map and set star on black forest or Arena. Or Create a lobby and play with 500 elo opponent or have a 30 min treaty. There are plenty of options like King of the hill, wonder race and a bunch of other custom scenario modes for the casual players. There are several easy and relaxed campaigns - find anything from “The winged hussar” in mods, the easiest and most new player friendly campaigns.
I think this is a problem with starting elo. It might be a good change to make players start at 500 elo or have an extended art-of-war for common ranked builds and defense. Scout rush or openness of the map aren’t an issue when you’re playing opponents of your skill level.
This doesn’t work. The elo system is designed to make the starting elo become the average elo over time, so by moving the start to 500, you will eventually just make 500 elo the new 1000 elo, only without a 500 elo space for players that were previously there, who are now forced into a really weird position.
Pro players obviously don’t ruin the game. However, there is a conflict when it comes to certain design decisions (mostly map design, civs to a lesser degree):
Should the game be fun to play or exciting to watch?
These two goals are sometimes at odds with each other. I’m not talking about generally open vs closed maps, but more specifically about stuff like hills around the starting tc, key resources on hills, terrain you cannot build on, hunt with high damage output (elephant instead of boar), etc. These are explicitly there to force mistakes and that creates kind of a frustrating experience.
no need to include the 1v1 elo into the match up.
cause if it does, it will be a mess to the TG again. because there will be lot of ###### account created intentionally, dropping their 1v1 elo, try to lower down the TG match up.
if you ask me, set a rule to match up between premade teams first. or set up a seperate ranking between solo and premade TG. this is a fact that those premade teams always beat up solo players.
and people always saying they will eventually reach to an elo and start losing, this is logically wrong because:
they are not matching up in one team every single games.
some of the players will solo queue sometimes. (these are the worst solo teammates because their elo are over rated)
they very likely beating the solo players for elo up, and then lost to the other premade team.
if people still not understood what i have said above, just simply check the TG laddar and see how many solo players over there.
if this game can be remake again.
just cut off the ranking option of 2v2 and 4v4,
fixed the TG into 3v3 only.
2v2 or 4v4 can be opened in some spevial event.
this action can:
increase the queue pool player numbers
decrease laggy
no longer boring stragegy that one pocket supoorting one flank.
increase the gmae balance difference between flank and pocket
and most importantly, make the smurfs pay, not just creating different smurfs account freely.
No one force singleplayers to go on multiplayer. It’s not because they buff or nerf this civ or this one through what they say, that i wont be able to win a campaign or beat an IA
AoE 2 was always centered around both Single- and Multiplayer. Sadly, numbers weren’t tracked in the 90s and 2000s but from what I’ve heard AoE 1 and 2 were hits in MS Gaming Zone.
This will be true only if they reset all elos and start the game again with everybody’s elos starting at 500 or if they reduced everybody’s elo by 500 and set starting elo to 500. Right now the current 1k won’t fall to 500 elo to move the average. When they start at 500, players who are returning to the game from the 2000s might take longer to reach their true elo but such players will be quite low and their number will continue to reduce over time. While those who are complete beginners will take sooner to reach their true elo level. Its only going to make movement in 900-1100 elo range less fluid while making it more in the 400-600 range.
No, over time, because there’s less elo added to the pool each time a new player joins, the average is slowly forced to move down. It won’t be fast, but it will happen. Doesn’t need a reset or anything, reducing the starting elo will move it.
Mathematically speaking, lets take 1000 as the starting elo, which it is. Then, lets imagine we have 100 players. The average elo will then be (1000x100)/100, or 1000, like you’d expect. Now, keeping those 100 players at their current elos, lets say we change the starting elo to 500. Now, lets imagine ten new players join. So the average elo is now (1000x100 + 500x10)/110, which is 955. Obviously you aren’t going to have the population instantly increase by 10% after decreasing the starting elo, but as the player base increases (even if people don’t stick around, the simple act of playing at least one ranked game begins to change things), the average elo moves closer and closer to the starting elo. And consequently, the average players (1000 elo right now) congregate at the starting elo. Only now you don’t have that 500 elo space for players that used to fit there. So things are actually worse for the < 1000 elo players, not better.
Not to mention - if you play your placement games, the game will match up you against a broader range of players, so you may start at 1k but could get an opponent down at 700.
I can understand that numerical average elo will eventually converge to 500 when lots of new players get added. But that will happen because of the number of newcomers to the game. And the skill level of the renewed “average” will not prove to be too challenging for the newcomers unlike today and they won’t get wrecked as they do today. We really don’t care if the overall average elo of all aoe2 players is 500 or 1000. The problem is the skill gap difference.
The problem is that once the average converges on 500, the average players will also have reached 500 elo. And that means that the current 1000 elo players will be at 500 elo instead. Which doesn’t fix anything. And now, all those players who would be in the < 1000 range are cramped into a 500 elo range instead of a 1000 elo range, making their matches actually less balanced.
You can still wall on the new Arabia. I do it, and you can see pros doing it in their matches. Look up some gameplay from Yo or Hera and search for Arabia matches. They wall. Sometimes they fully wall early, sometimes they work on the wall slowly in dark with houses, barracks, maybe a short palisade on an opportunistic part of their map. Then in Feudal, they continue walling while defending or raiding their opponent. Eventually they form a full wall by early to mid fuedal, unless they are dominating hard and see no need to complete it.
You can also make a very minimalistic ugly wall that is kind of cramped but will repel early scouts easily enough. You’ll need to delete sections as you begin expanding for more resources though.
Absolutely not true. Balancing around the “pros” consistently produces endless power creep and anti-fun mechanics (which very effectively put off newer players) being promoted over actual sticking to the principles of the game and good design.
I have seen this across countless games I used to play MP. The games that respected their casual playerbase remained consistently enjoyable for everyone and are still doing great, without a “remaster”, after 15+ years. The games that decided to focus on “espurts” always become a self-parody (and then a parody of that parody), where everything always has to be faster and more aggressive, and blatantly toxic tactics which everyone with a brain hates remain untouched because big name streamers would throw a temper tantrum if they had to actually learn how to play.
And it’s not a coincidence AoE2:DE has started going aggressively downhill when they started pushing it in the “competitive multiplayer” direction. And things like scout rushing which should have been patched into oblivion ages ago are already parody-tier. “Pro” gamers and esports are the worst thing that have ever happened to gaming alongside corporatization (but they’re very much connected, what a coincidence).