Infinite Map Bans, Forced Random Civ on Ranked and the deskilling of this game

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
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Can we please make ranked playable again without Civ Picker Build Order zombies that do the same every game no matter what map and abuse the best civs. Can we please have a system that doesn’t reset 7 players just because one player dodges?

Can we finally have a matchmaking lobby hybrid in which all players are put in a lobby without being able to pick civ, preset Settings (no host basically) and random Teams?. Any player that leaves gets punished (because we have infinite map bans, you can’t dislike the map) - and promptly replaced by another player waiting in queue.

Do you want to grind with your friends? Yeah but not in Ranked, or if so under harder conditions. It’s just guaranteed unfair Teams else (unless playing in a party increases your opponent Elo - or Team vs Team).

Every Game is the same, the maps have been brought in line. Nomad is Coastal now every time, no more Land Lock, no more middle Lakes, no more uniqueness, perfect resources for everyone.
Arabia - yay everyone spawns in a perfect Circle with exactly perfect Forests and perfect Resources - how fun. Or anything that breaks the “perfection” like Cliffs and small oasis?
Arena? - Nope no more Tower hop, but be sure to bring the civ with the best Unique Unit.
Inconsistent Wolves? Shush, you might prevent dark age walls, away you go.
I am curious how you will “perfect” Arabia next patch.
Land Nomad? Yeah just halved the resources killing the FFA Land Nomad Community.

But sure, if people can’t adapt that the map might look slightly different each time, we gotta help them.
After all, In my dream Job, I want to do the same thing every time too.

Could you please make this game as it has been for 15 Years and stop with your experiments. Give Hoang Random Civ every time and watch him lose 100-200 elo. This just has nothing to do with skill, it’s just whoever knows his build order and perfected it with that 53% winrate Civ wins the game. And even Streamers said they hate playing against Hoang - it is just boring.

Tower Rush to level the Battlefield giving bad civs a chance? → Killed in DE with -33%! HP Watch Towers in Feudal. But I am sure you took notice since all of a sudden Turks, Koreans, Byzantines, Portuguese, Teutons and, soon, soon Spanish were bad enough to get buffed.

I mean I could have told you, but you just couldn’t resist touching a fundamental building that made the game messy and APM heavy. Remember Vivi’s all-ins and forwards that made the game an utter chaos and was exciting on any stream? Sure those games were disliked by some players, but disliked by who? Those who can’t handle it and only know build orders - having no macro apart from that.
With the removal of Inca Trush (who was the same since 2013 and even got worse in DE already), you are in the final stages of deskilling the game and making it nothing but build orders - the “meta” decides your elo, not your skill, not your adaptation, not your decision-making.
It is fact that most games on open maps are decided in Dark / Feudal. Where the build order ends.

This game isn’t about fun or skill anymore. It is about constant grinding with one civ. And with smurfs, unfair matchmaking TG is almost unplayable. Even Pros rarely play Team games anymore.
Oh, you know every civ and are decent with 39 different settings? Yes, but this one dude plays Franks Pocket each time so he just wins against you. He is just better with half the playtime as you - deal with it.

6 Likes
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Allowing people more choice in maps would be great for preventing dodges, however it would be completely negated if you force random civ. Now people will just quit every time they get a civ they don’t like. The only way to keep people in a game is to allow them to choose how they want to play.

That being said, I agree that players always picking the same couple of civs gets old. Improving civ balance is the only solution IMO. Even if it means slightly overbuffing an underdog civ for a few months , it would incentivize one-trick ponies to try something different and add variety to games over time.

And yes, bring back cliffs and oases. It doesn’t feel like Arabia without these.

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Well, they would get punished. And even if so, they would lose elo and get in the elo where they should probably be. They can still pick civ in Quickplay.

It would also help if I just see what my opponents picks, and who they are so I can see their civ history and counter pick accordingly. This is the least they could do, picking civ is already so strong, why not allow counter picks?

Introducing an minimum games played (or play time) for ranked would also prevent smurfs to a certain degree.

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Taking intentional losses does not place players where they should be. It means their Elo ends up lower than their skill and they just stomp worse players. Many wouldn’t even mind this, I’ve seen players on this forum admit to auto-resigning often so they don’t have to play against opponents of equal skill.

Quick play is a terrible system that leads to unbalanced matches. It also has longer queue times to find these worse matches. I don’t understand why it exists tbh.

The blind civ pick system is fine. Nobody wants to go back to the days of counterpicks and visible civs. There’s currently a random option for anyone who wants it, and it even lets you pick a civ vs a pick or go random if the opponent chooses random.

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Your suggestions has an infinite loop of game loading, infinite bans can’t co exist with current MM, cause remember the system picks the players for their elo, not their preferences, if team A are BF/nomad players and team B arena/arabia and both teams have the rest banned, the game wont start.

I am getting tired of saying the same, but a ranked lobby offers: random civ pick again, a map of all players preference, FMT or fair teams(what we actually need desperately), smurfing becomes noticeable and preventable, your waiting times will be according the number of players willing to play your settings(no more forced settings picking innocents dudes cause of the waiting preference in current MM), rematch, yeah you are reading it well once you fill a room you can play vs the same people again, you can choose the server, no more 250 ping vs people playing at 50 ping cause the devs coded the server location in a way it benefits some players, you can kick out guys that breaks the common rules like a vill fight on nomad before min 5 oh and guess what…no more 5k players cause people simply can refuse to play vs them.

Ranked lobbies are big win for everyone but stackers and abusers of current system.

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well ranked rm should be random maps not people who pick arabia or arena only and i dunno about infinite bans but thats only one problem beside stackers smurfs the current lobby

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Do ranked lobbies allow treaties? It sounds like you want a treaty.

I do agree with most of your points. Ranked lobbies would be a nice option, and could easily replace the pointless “quick play” system.

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Hidden pick civs is a wonderful addition to the game for both ranked play and lobby play. If you want a random civ queue, replace empire wars with it, leave the pick civ queue alone, and remove mirror while you’re at it.

Place all extra modes into the ranked lobby system including nomad, empire wars, regicide and death match.

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Random map random civ would be amazing for ranked. Or maybe just random map. But it’s true that picking map picking civ is kinda dull.

Also, Voobly Era Vivi❤️

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Petition infinite waiting time as design mindset change so infinite ban is a possibility. Let community decide if infinite waiting time is good or player base drops. If Player compatibility is so important for people, swing the entire community to that direction should solve the problem. /s

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I disagree with your suggestions regarding matchmaking:

  • Infinite map bans cause long waiting times.
  • We already sort of vote every game for Random Civ. This is fine. Enforcing random in your way may scare new players away who do not know the bonuses of 39 civs.
  • Premade teams are as strong as other teams they face after playing enough games together; the matchmaking system does its job in this regard.

However, I agree with you that maps have been made more boring. Not only Arabia and Nomad, even MegaRandom itself! And in my opinion the Tower and Inca nerfs went too far.

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I’m not going to bother responding to most of this (It’s not about your post, more that I just can’t be bothered thinking that much). However, I don’t think that forcing random civs is very nice. However, I do think that it would be reasonable for ranked games to force each player to pick three civs, and the system randomly selects one of them. This might change up the meta a bit, and if a player doesn’t chose all three civs, then it randomly fills in the blanks before picking. Alternatively you can just pick random civ and that fills all three slots. Picking random civ could then be incentivized by having a slightly better elo gain, or slightly decreased elo loss if you go full random civ. Overall though, I’m not really a fan of removing civ picking as a total thing. I think that buffing towers a bit might be ok, maybe give them back the health? They can still be battered down, and most people have adapted to not really using towers anyway, so the meta shouldn’t change too dramatically. That’s part of how I see it.

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Wow, congrats, you described gaming at the highest level…

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This would be very unfair. I want to continue abusing Mayans, Franks and Burgundians.

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No, adapting is (and should) also be part of it.

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For 1v1, I will have to spend minutes arguing with others about servers…

You are assuming everyone will cooperate, but what if some trolls decide that he will not start a game unless it is 50ping Socotra?

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It is… You’re simply being hyperbolic.

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I dont think hes hyperbolic he thinks the same as me that rm strafed to far away from random maps maybe not random civs imo but that infinite bans is only in the majority of the 25% who wanna play arabia or arena and that in the whole context it wouldt make sense