Whether its single player or team based, Aoe4 seems to match players from entirely different ranks on a consistent basis.
In previously successful RTS games - after the charm of “newness” and curiosity wear off, many will stay to compete on the ladder.
Starcraft 2 did this well. At any moment i could check my standings and compare them against hundreds of other players. If i was a low tier diamond player. I’d see a platinum from time to time. If i were a high diamond, i’d occassionally get a low masters player.
If Stacraft 2 had AOE4’s matchmaking system. From mid diamond i’d be seeing a Grandmaster player at least once every 20 games, and likewise a bronze every now and then.
These one offs are unnessecary. In fact, these games are better left unplayed. As they break the competative spirit of the players involved. The grandmaster player who’s looking for a challenge is left wanting and the diamond player feels hopeless. That occassion bronze player may quit the game before even getting started if he’s stomped to oblivion before even reading the context of what a unit does.
Unranked could be conqueror, you never know. It’s just for current season.
The game match you with people that are available. Asking to be matched with people that don’t exist doesn’t make sense. No one wants to wait 2h for a match.
This is not how AoE4 matchmaking works. Unranked means just unranked for this season and not automatically a new player of the game. When somebody already played in an old season then his Elo rating doesn’t reset. This means even when a new season starts high Elo players will still have their high Elo rating and be matched against other high Elo players even for their first five games. In your example it is highly likely that the unranked player played in an old season already and was at least gold rank there.
Regardless of the rank, there is a real problem with the matchmaking. I’ve posted the examples several times showing the ELO of players in matched games. Frequently there are elo imbalances in the triple digits. Some of the worst cases there was over 500 elo difference. If it only happened once in a while I could forgive it, but this can happen in back to back games.
I was having to dodge imbalanced matches for over 30 minutes before finding one where everyone was reasonably even. That’s a problem with the game being dead as hell, but I’d rather wait 30 minutes for the game to match me properly one time and have one good game than have to play through 3-4 unbalanced matches, wasting a ton of time, just to get to one match that’s a reasonable match.
It’s definitely not win rate based because I would dodge constantly and rack up more losses than wins, and still get matched with people with 80%+ win rate.
I think the fact your “rank” isn’t really tied to your matchmaking Elo is confusing.
I.E. this season I began with a 5 game losing streak (Byzantines, Grand Winery, no idea what I’m doing/kind of rusty as not played seriously for most of a year).
I show up in Silver II. And then I lose another 5 games (seriously, buff the Grand Winery pls) and I’m down to Silver I.
But partly this loss streak is that I’m never playing Silver (or Bronze) players. It was all Plat IIIs, then Plat Is, and finally Gold IIIs.
Now I’ve switched to a strategy that vaguely works (Hippodrome, 5 Cisterns all in) I’m fairly confident I’ll have a 60%-70%ish win rate into Gold Players and quickly get back to mid Plat III/Diamond I (where I was about a year ago). But as said, it does seem like the game has gone “you can be as bad as you like, you can’t go below Plat 1”.
I dont agree with that. If im matched with higher player i see it as opportunity to learn and improve (those replay are the best to watch and see your mistake after the game). They are the games i learned the most from. I think for me it would be more a waste of time to wait 30 min for matchmaking.
The wait time is exponentially longer also (not linear), because many people will just leave the game instead of waiting 30 min.
There are so many ways to directly observe better players in game and on youtube if that’s your fancy. You can choose to play against a way better player if you want to in custom. Hell, make it an option for masochists like you who want to volunteer to be slaughtered by high-level players. It’s not fun at all for the majority of people. At a certain point you’re not learning anything other than the fact that you’re never going to click as fast as a Korean teenager. Matchmaking should be what it says - matching. Instead it’s pairing golds with conquerers; it’s broken. Fuck 30 minutes, can it wait just 5 minutes?? I was getting matched to people 900 elo higher than me within 2 minutes, 2 games in a row.
Im diamond 1 and never got matched with conqueror ever.
Im only matched with plat and diamond, sometimes even gold. (thats like 300 elo difference, not 900)
It’s quite rare i find a better player in the ranked 1v1 actually.
I get diamond 2/3 occasionally like once every 4-5 games. Rest of time it’s plat players.
I really think it’s just based on who is available.
Watching games you didn’t play doesn’t help you improve because you can’t spot the error you’re doing.
The best replay to watch are your own against better players.
