Coming from RE and TAD, I have trouble finding any intersting game in 3v3 4v4 because no team we are facing is “good enough”. There is plenty of noobs and no way to tell who is a noob and who isn’t.
I miss the old Sergent - Lieutenant ranking system. You just pick a game that is your level and stick to it. With my friend we played like 20 games and there is no fun winning too easily
Any tip ?
Hit the ranked button instead of browsing casual lobbies with plenty of noobs in them.
We did that a few time but can’t find any room. Or should we wait for more than 20min for a game ? It used to be quick in TAD finding the right game
This is actually not a solution. If you are a casual player (who can only play 3h max per day) ranked lobbies will pair you often with noobs as well, since you dont have the games to have a decent rating.
A clear unranked system (with more tiers than the one happening now) should be made, so that unranked lobbies can have proper matchups
As I totally agree there NEED to be the old rank system for the casual lobbies (cause the one there’s now doesn’t work at all), you can totally have good team games on the ranked games.
Exept if you are on the top20, you will have no trouble finding any games. And if by lack of chance you match nobody your lvl within 7 minutes, the game will give you the first team they find.
I strongly agree with this request. I play often, and find it difficult to try and balance teams in DE vs legacy. The old ranking system was a quick and easy way to determine someone’s skill level and you could also view their profile and see their home cities, decks and their win rate. Getting unbalanced teams creates a very negative game experience for all, on both teams.
I do wish there were more people in ranked pool. I have waited up to an hour at times never to find a ranked match.
I have the same experience so I agree to bring back old ranking system.
have to say i totally agree. the ranked pool currently is really bad for 3v3 and 4v4s, waiting for around 1hour for a game in some causes is annoying and then coming into a game against lower ranked players who don’t have knowledge of how game modes work and incorrect decks for treaty or rush. I personally think that going back to the old ranking system would be best.
Also I noticed there is this ranked system they tried to used but it’s ready hard to understand it. The just changed military grade explicitly named to icons saying the same thing but being less obvious. If they want to be less ‘oppressive’ as they removed every word that could trigger people (even when being historically correct) use numbers or something that is easy to get. We already had lvl 0 to lvl 50 and it was perfect. I’m 23, pretty average. 
It’s also impossible to sorts games according to ranks (the rank filter is clickable but doesn’t seem to work). But I bet this would be fixed in some next patch.
Well, the more I play the less I enjoy it, while I kept enjoying TAD for years. Trying to make the game better, it made it kinda worse to me… Despite the good improvement in some fields of course (The experience and fun I have playing it is worse ATM)
Yeah, this new ranked system isn’t working. I believe it’s due to the fact that there’s 1. not enough people, and 2. players haven’t settled into proper ELO ratings to make it fair.
The initial burst of players at AOE3DE’s opening didn’t hold. Steam used to show like 20k people online at open, but due to so many crashes and bugs at the time, only an average of 3k manages now. With a smaller pool of people to play with, it’s already harder to even fill ranked lobbies, especially for team games.
And most people seem to just play casual games (due to long wait times), so they don’t play that many ranked games to get properly settled into an accurate ELO score. I’m a average supremacy player, and I barely play that many ranked games, so I’m at ~1100.
Even at this level, I can get matched with good/decent players (not insane) but also with people who are clearly new to the game, still in Age 1 at 8:00. The system does work better for 1v1ers who don’t need to wait 30 minutes to find other players, but for team games, it’s trash.
AOE3 TAD was able to manage just fine in ESO. Hosts could actually balance lobbies and player satisfaction was much higher. Nowadays, you will always have a noob that will drag the team down.
Back then, even newer, unskilled players back then were satisfied online because they could play balanced games with other newer, unskilled players. This multiplayer environment is not it.
I think the devs are thinking that it will simply just take more and more time for people to properly settle into ELO ranks for fair games, but maybe that will only work for 1v1s. I strongly do not think that will happen for team supremacy games, just because there’s not enough people to readily make 3v3, 4v4 lobbies.
Thus, I say again - Bring back the old ranking system for casual games!
This is a lot of the community’s fault. Majority of players said they didnt want the ranked back at a time where devs were still making a lot of patchs.
See the answer of that topic from oktober, when me and few others tried to alert the community about the only qs for ranked team 
Now that there’s not 20K players anymore, everybody realize some days you need 7min+ to get a game in qs…
I was rereading some counterarguments into that post.
I. One guy was half-wrong with one of his predictions - “Over time, player ranks should stabilize and it should be sorted so people are more fairly matched.”
For 1v1s, yeah. I think it has worked for the most part. But for team supremacy games and team treaty, this is obviously not the case. It works for 1v1 because it’s easier to find games, and if you lose, it’s more determined by your skill (not bad teammates). So it better reflects YOU. But for team games, it’s just not like that. It’s harder to find games, giving you less of a chance to properly assimilate into an accurate rating. And weak teammates bog you down. You might have to split pop and play defense all day because you have to help out your noob teammate from bringing both of you down.
So his prediction was wrong, at least, for team games. QS is better for 1v1, but doesn’t solve everything.
II. The other counterargument is that “hosts will manipulate lobbies to boost their own score” (Amazonia versus beginners, Otto on great plains, etc.). It’s true, but:
You don’t HAVE to join the lobby, and they AREN’T hard to avoid. If you see a 1v1 lobby hosted by a guy with a very high win percentage and a famous civ/map combo, you could just scroll on down and find a better game or go QS.
It can’t be helped. In any game, there’s gonna be toxic losers who don’t want to fight fair, and will only fight in advantageous situations. Back to point #1, you you could go QS (not saying QS is the all-ends, perfect solution, however).
There are usually WAY more UNRIGGED lobbies than ones that are. AOE3TAD had success and a dedicated player base for years. In those years, more times than not, many hosts have been put into unfair circumstances, so they are adamant on ensuring fair games for others. That worked and it kept player satisfied and dedicated.
Note: Skimming through the posts, it seems that it’s mainly the 1v1 community who are just tired of rigged 1v1 ranked games, and QS (by design) is their saving grace. That’s good for them, man, but the game has other aspects that have big communities.
III. Smurfs -
Yeah, that was a little problem in TAD. But it wasn’t a gamebreaker. You could easily spot them and weed them out. But you NEEDED the ability to see players stats to do so (player level, win % on the type of games they played, seeing into player decks, etc.).
If they were level 12 with a 75-90% win rate and had a good, appropiate deck, of course you shouldn’t let them play in the lobby. And hosts did do that if they didn’t trust them.
Right now, the opposite is happening - we can’t see ranks to spot noobs, and noobs can’t find other noobs to play level games with. So everyone loses! The good players get frustrated, and the noobs get bashed and terrorized.
I was a level 10 Lance Corporal on TAD, scared to play against level 15 Sergeants. But it wasn’t a problem - the hosts would pit the Sergeant on the other team against the Sergeant on my team, and they would duke it out. And everyone else’s level was around me, so I felt better going in-game. I didn’t have to worry about fighting higher levels until I got higher leveled myself.
Thus, PROPER RANKS IN CASUAL LOBBIES HELPS NEWER PLAYERS by enabling them to find other newer players to play with. Don’t you see “NOOBS ONLY” lobbies in the casual lobby? Noobs WANT to play with other noobs. There is a learning curve that they are TRYING to cross, and you kill their game satisfaction letting them get stomped by good players in these random casual lobbies.
Proper ranks also help PREVENT frustration among good players, because they can more accurately assess a teammate’s skill level before going in-game. Enough said.
So pretty much, if you have the have ranks and the ability to properly see ranks better, you can get better games, weeding out smurfs, noobs, good players, etc.
IV. “If some casual player feels stressed in QS, he will feel stressed in the ranked lobby too. If you allow people set if the room is ranked or unranked, most people will just go unranked. Still, you can’t have fair games in the lobby no matter what.”
It’s just one of those things where a AOE2 concept won’t find its way into this game.
Just to point out if anyone hasn’t noticed,
The 1v1 community seems to have more of a presence here on these forums than the team supremacy players and treaty players. If you read most of the posts about “balance,” you will see that 1v1ers will comment often. You can tell by them talking about the sensitivity of civ timings, changed effectiveness of rush/ff strategies, good and bad 1v1 civ matchups, etc. (things that REALLY affect 1v1 matchups).
Team supremacy players can get away with some of these things, and treaty players don’t have to really worry about them.
So it makes sense why the “community” mainly disliked the idea of not putting back proper ranks in the casual lobbies. But as you can see, multiple posts are STILL being made to this day about putting proper ranks back into casual lobbies, and putting in the ability to see decks (affecting treaty players). The team supremacy players are voicing out the widespread unfairness in casual lobbies. And team QS isn’t solving their problems.
I understand that hosts rigged 1v1 lobbies on ESO by certain specific maps with certain civs to get an advantage (water, TP, some certain nats, etc.), but it still neglects the other communities within AOE3 from enjoying their game.
We all bought this game and should get the most out of it too.