Get this mod banned from ranked games? (buildings range indicator)

The graphics of Age of Empires 2, especially on DE, are just incredibly beautiful! Some people enjoy to create lovely sceneries in the editor ([POLL] Works of Art - Beautiful Scenario Designing), and also the campaigns mostly look like this. The woods appear as real forests, untouched for thousands of years!

That’s one aspect of the game. But on the other hand, there is competetive play. Here, every action of the player must be as efficient and exact as possible to achieve the best results. Therefore, many players have decided to reduce the beauty of the graphics by adding a grid and reducing the size of the trees. Now, there are no ancient forests anymore, but only tree nurseries. And because woods are nearly everywhere, you will always have this uglier graphics, no matter where you look. That’s why I say, small tree mod is very intrusive, while e. g. Age of Mandala only alters some buildings, and everywhere else it still looks beautifully, so I consider it to be less intrusive - other players might think differently about this.

Some people go one step further and remove the useless plants, because they look too similar to the small trees. Some even use Age of Cubes to make the trees more reliable to click on and reduce their variety.

At the moment, every player can decide, how far he wants to go this way from a beautiful game to an efficient one. I myself have decided that it is not important at all for me, how it looks. So I created some local mods that change the graphics to my personal preferences. Most players might not want to play with these graphics, because they are ugly. But for me, it is much more frustrating to lose a game to a single hole in my wall, that was impossible to see.

Do these mods give me an advantage? For sure! My Elo is probably about 10 Points higher than it would be without. But who cares about Elo (outside the top 100)? And also remember: No matter what your Elo might be, your winrate will be 50% as soon as you play enough games.

How can this be considered to be unfair, if every single player can decide how much he wants to improve efficiency at the cost of beauty? Is small tree mod unfair, because someone might prefer the original look and therefore doesn’t want to use it?

None of these mods are necessary to play competetively, but they all might help preventing some frustrating experiences. That - at least in my opinion - is a good thing!

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