Its time for a new Lobby System .. before the game dies


That is voobly, you host game room and choose a map and then people join, you can add a rank range for fairer matches, playing team games is more simple as long as you play common maps cause you will be playing what you want and not a map that you don’t like but you couldn’t ban, people used to have small communities like the bf and nomad players.

Voobly wasn’t perfect and the skin looks outdated cause its the same one since 2007, but it was practical and focused on the playerbase, you have the freedom we have been missing on DE to play what we like and enjoy.

Of course some players will be affected, those who play low play rate maps, but come on man in 2 years of this system those maps are below 4% play rate meaning that they are a quite small minority compared to the outstanding +70% play rate of arabia, so if you were a dev why wouldn’t you help your biggest playerbase to play what they want?

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It’s really ironic to call this AOE2 is a definite edition.

I would rather prefer they operate this game like an online game to sell skin or stuffs to get enough money to run. It’s very obvious to see the old coding limited the changes, and limited manpower which making the game is so massy. I really dont see the point of them keep making balance chance on civs and maps blah blah blah, it’s really non-sense to me. Most of them just breaking the game even worse.

I wonder if any of the devs even read this forum anymore … this is just sad

Because ranking determined from lobbies is essentially worthless. It’s trivial to scam the system. Also speed is certainly not a great argument for lobbies, it takes way longer to find a balanced lobby and it relies on individual players to do the balancing. I know some people have rose tinted glasses for Voobly, and it was the best we had at the time, but actual matchmaking that came with DE has been a huge boon for the game.

Don’t get me wrong team game matchmaking needs work, but that’s just because they implemented it poorly and then their “fix” was still not a proper fix.

You don’t provide any reasoning to support any of your arguments. Lobbies can be fast if the player base is big enough. Balancing can easily happen if the lobby has ELO limits

Matchmaking is currently very limited and is not scalable long term … and only segregates the community into smaller chunks. Queuing times will become very long for certain ELO brackets and players would just quit

Matchmaking can always be integrated into a lobby system where players have “open challenges” on a certain ladder and you get matched to their lobbies

I have a feeling I’m about to be done with this conversation.

The player base is what it is. Every matchmaking system does better the more players there are. There is no amount of players that suddenly makes lobbies more efficient at matching equally skilled players than automated matchmaking is.

I don’t know what you’re on about with this. Matchmaking currently allows everyone (at each player count) to be in one queue. This is why queue times are as fast as they are. Literally anything you do that breaks that into more queues or makes it less efficient (lobbies) will hurt overall queue times.

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how is map diversity noob bashing?

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Well map diversity is a bunch of maps with a very low play rate of 3% outside the 3-4 most played maps, so anyone who is specialized in that 3% will effectively destroys a player that plays arabia(64%) or arena (13%), even if their skills are relatively close, the difference is how much they specialize in certain maps, i can show you profiles with +85% winning rate on 4 lakes, a non competitive map that happens to be in the pool most of the time, when a 4 lakes player meets an arena player in the MM, the difference is so notorious that basically translates to noob bashing.

And here is how you manipulate the current system for 1x1 to get your 3% play rate map most of the time, you ban arabia, arena and the water option, then favorite the gold rush variation or megarandom(the preferred option count as an extra ban if well used) the system pairs players according to their elo, then chooses the map in the middle and that is how you get 4 lakes or similar less liked map to be played, you can change the bans and the preferred to even get a map like islands and farm elo from players with non practical skills on those little specialized maps.

Things get better for team games, premades or stackers to be more precisely, they control the maps they get by having more bans, they ban the most played maps to get nomad or the other less liked maps in the pool, by stacking and having more control over the maps than solo players, they force lots of players everyday to play those maps, maps that most of the users ignores(based on play rate), do i need to tell you again how much difference does facing specialized players in not common maps?

And that is only talking about maps, cause in team games like i said things get better i mean worse, seriously, really bad, premades have the time preference in the queue, meaning that if the system couldn’t find enough players around the level it will pick someone close and will fill the rest of the slots with very low players(just like the picture above) that is the worst combination possible, low play rate maps+huge elo gaps, noob bashing guaranteed all day, unless you are in the bubble with your friends you may not experience the cruelty of the current system.

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a check box for coop games would be nice. sometimes hard to find regular 4v4 matches anymore

that is the most stupid thing that i read today. There is nothing wrong with that and with more mapbans/mm rework that wouldnt happen and neither do alt f4/ people who resign bc a map they dont like)

You’re telling me that four lakes, a map that essentially originated from a tournament map (Cross) is “non competitive”? That’s quite a stretch, to be honest. I’d say it is the most popular hybrid map available at the moment.

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Your’re certainly not wrong here but at the same time it’s not that easy. A lot of people will ban also ban maps like mega random. But there are instances where that system actually works pretty well, for instance if you wanna play gold rush (although I wouldn’t really call it a niche map but that’s besides the point) as very few people ban this map in my experience.

Dude, you have some very good arguments here but wth discredit yourself in the same sentence by claiming stuff like that? Cross has been the standard competitive hybrid map for ages. It is featured in almost every major 1v1 mixed maps tourney.

Map bans are actually part of the problem (at least within the current system). People that claim all those former alt+f4 crybabies should just adapt to playing different maps overlook that this hasn’t possible to begin with. Some people that wanna play arabia or maps that usually don’t get banned oftentimes in 1v1 (runestones, gold rush, …) can do so while that doesn’t work with other maps.

Imo people should either live up to their claims of competitive map variety so that the game gives everybody a chance to play their favorite map, i.e. no bans at all. Or let everybody just play what they want, i.e. new mm that finds matches based on maps while allowing to ban all maps but one / dedicated map queues / ranked lobbies.

Right now what we have is a bad compromise between these two approaches that allows some people to play what they want while not doing so for others. Essentially, the worst possible solution. Alt+f4 was just a symptom of a badly designed matchmaking and people trying to find work arounds. But the “solution” was just to disable the work around instead of finding a proper solution that solves the underlying issue.

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There was this mangrove tournament with 10k usd prize pool and yet water nomad is not a competitive map, liked or common, tournaments are not always a good indicator of competitiveness since some maps depends heavily on host/sponsor decisions, like pants map on any hidden cup event, the maps is really bad but it will stay and players will have to play as long as t90 wants.

4 lakes is one of the most played maps and if you say that you are not statistically wrong, but when you pay attention to the %, 4 lakes is just another low play rate that happens to be slightly ahead of maps with even lower play rate and not even comparable to the big maps.

What makes a map competitive is the number of strats and civs able to compete in such maps, so far 4 lakes is just a japanese and lithuanian fest, the rest of the civs are insanely behind those two civs, you can add huns as another third strong civ there, but the rest of the civs quickly fall behind in the start, so just like water maps the lack of civ diversity and meta options just kills those maps.

About the rest you are right, i agree that what we got to fix the problem was only to ignore the real issue behind.

Well yeah but that was single event with different than usual sponsoring. And yes these bog maps aren’t competitive although the tourney provided more fun games than I suspected. Cross is a whole different story as it’s one of the standard hybrid maps in not only tournaments for a very long time.

Sure but you don’t need to have high playrate to be a competitive map.

You just have good and not so great civs oon this map like on basically on other. It’s not as balanced as arabia bc of early eco bonus for more fishing ships makes a bit more difference than these bonuses on land maps. Still imo it’s the best balanced hybrid map there is. Especially bc there is a lot of viable strats ranging from land agression, fish boom with several ponds, sneaking docks, fc… Also you can see mobile units and low mobility pushes to a similar degree. And it’s not just lith and japanese. Byzantines, persians, huns and celts are also common. On average there are way more viable civs here compared to something like arena (which still is a perfectly balanced map imo.

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