I’m not a fan of the ladder system in this game. It feels like it punishes players who are actively trying to improve by matching them against significantly stronger opponents just to ensure a game happens at all. I’ll get matched with someone 100+ points higher than me multiple times in a row, and it’s simply not fun. Meanwhile, someone else who’s climbing gets several opponents below their rating and suddenly they’re shooting up the ladder with ease.
The system ends up rewarding players who are already about 100 points higher than their opponents, letting them climb with relatively low resistance. For example, I just played a Hades vs. Oranos match that lasted about 45 minutes. My opponent was roughly 150 points higher than me, and despite the fact that I was largely winning for most of the game, none of that mattered—I lost, and the system treated me as if I were clearly the worse player. It was literally the fact they got a titan out is the reason whyt I lost…
Meanwhile, others get lucky by repeatedly facing significantly weaker opponents and benefit far more from the system. I understand that at a certain point ELO starts to matter less—maybe somewhere in the 1400–1700 range, where skill gaps are smaller and anyone can win—but as someone who’s only aiming to reach 1500, this experience has become frustrating.
With the new DLC coming soon, I honestly doubt I’ll get there at all, even though I’ve owned the game for about two months. Day one is almost certainly going to be extremely unbalanced, which just adds to the problem. I dont even look forward to it because I just want to get to the rank I want and never play ranked again.
Oh yeah, can they nerf Atlantians favour generation too. It’s clearly busted and needs nerfing. They’re the top civ, second which is Japan, for generating favour. I know greek late game is good but come on. Infinite sky passages… Id argue its too damn cheap those sky passages and they get troo many of them. Greek equivlance costs 200 favour for ‘two sky passages’ .. Oranos, 8 favour AND 25 wood… literally the amount of favour they generate makes the sky passage basically free.
Its just how an ELO-based system works. It doesn’t favor stronger or weaker players, ELO’s main purpose is to estimate player’s skill level as accurately as possible, not to play favorites with anyone. And it’s entirely decided by whether a game is won or lost; honestly idk what do you expect should have happened based on your Oranos vs Hades game description, a loss is a loss no matter how it happened.
Also, getting weaker opponents, in general, is a double-edged sword: its good for climbing if you can win against them consistently, but any loss hurts a lot.
The real problem with AoM’s ranked is the dwindling playerbase. With a healthy playercount, ELO system works quite well, and at an average-ish skill level you shouldn’t have ~100-150 ELO diff matches at all. But these days: lower playercount makes ELO less accurate in general, huge ELO diff matches are way more common, and to top it off there’re quite a lot of smurfs which undermines ELO even more. And its much much worse at higher level. And yeah it makes climbing harder for almost everyone. But really there’s no truly good change to be made here unless ranked playerbase suddenly grows by a lot (it won’t), it’s either enduring very long search time or enduring uneven matches.
Ok actually one quite simple change to be made - they can at least change the way family shared accounts work with this game to make it harder to create new smurf accounts. Because with low playerbase each smurf is actually pretty damaging to the system. But I don’t believe they’re gonna do it, or that they care about multiplayer at all at this point.
I haven’t had any problems like this in AoE 3 in the last 2,000 hours I’ve played it. Apparently, the 3,000-player count is fake, and only 20 are actually playing at any given hour. It’s simply impossible to play. Even in an abandoned game, there are still some good matches. Meeting a 1900 player in a 1200 3v3 game is a real rarity.
is not accurate. 1250 , 1000, 1000 vs 1300 1300 1300, if the 1250 loses lose about 15 points, and this match is about 98% of times a lose game for the 1250. It has nothing to do with the playerbase. 1250 should not lose points if defeated, because has 98% probability to lose. 1300 team should not gain elo. Its not the playerbase number but the elo gained or lost. 1250 should not lose elo, 1300 should not win elo. If the 1000 elo player wins then he wins 20 elo, the rest of players do not lose anything. If the ranked elo system keeps affecting the 1250 player the number of players searching ranked will never increase.
if you’re talking about teamgames its irrelevant to anything I said (which was about 1v1). Teamgame ELO calculation is fucked in this game and there’re several threads about this already.
There’s something to be nitpicked about here. The system encourages early quitting. Because you get the same number of points for 120 minutes of play as you do for 15.
May actually uninstall the game. Everyone plays Tsysukomyi on the ladder 1300 onwards and its just frustrating to come across the 5th Tsyukomyi player in a single day as a Hades player. ‘oh just get good’ Nah you’re just trash if you have to say that. Apples to oranges. Just get lucky and get higher then 50% win rate to win. Yeah whatever.
Oh btw. 25% win rates against that god alone. So I can objectively BE the better player yet still lose the game because again Tysukomyi and Hades are not the same .Tysukomyi early game is sollid. His late game is better then Greeks. The only downside is the SUPER EARLY GAME. yet you need to get lucky with map seeds for a super easy win.
Work hard for your wins while the Tysukomyi player wins in all counts of the game. Yeah really fun game. Convincing me to uninstall genuienly based on that. how long have they been out now. Months? Yet still not balanced.