Aoe IV is having the very same issues and losing players, it seems that the guys in charge really want to impose their ideals rather than accept failure, adam isgreen if you randomly read this or Will the guy with the numbers, please is time to go with the system that was proven to work and satisfy the big majorities, newer systems doesn’t mean better.
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I agree with your overall sentiment but I’m not sure it is the developers’ ideals or philosophy that is the issue. I think it might just be that they are not capable or have the right skills to make changes to the more programming intensive things like matchmaking code, pathfinding, anti-cheat, community api, etc. I’m hopeful that its not just hubris or some nefarious motive keeping them from fixing these issues.
I think its plausible that their relatively small staff might be weighted heavily on creative and artistic side of things (hence all the artistic events, penguins, etc.) and they may not have the programming specific skills to really address these more challenging programming issues. Just speculation on my part but I think it is possible that its not that they don’t want to fix these things but just that they don’t have the right resources or skills to.
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I guess something we should all ask ourselves, is what’s more important? The integrity of the ELO system, or letting players play ranked matches on whatever map they want and give them control over the players that are allowed in their game.
I don’t think you can have both. You can’t measure a players overall skill level if all he plays for the past 3 years is Black Forest NR 45.
You’d have to start having Map specific ELO levels.
I personally wouldn’t mind it, if everything went back to something similar to how it was on AoE2 HD.
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You have your point here, but please note that we are talking about team games here. We can’t ignore that premade teams got 3 extra proper bans over solo players. Normally we might want to ban more than 1 map, a total of 4 proper bans would be enough and fair for most of the playerbase.
On the other hand, nobody really want to control over others in this case, but nobody should force anybody to do anything either. We just don’t want to be forced to play on some of the maps. The system can just remove the alt+F4 guy and keep the rest in the queue. otherwise the unhappy map picker might be toxic or resign early and this will waste everybody’s time.
Since the premade teams are allowed to play against solo players, the team games can’t be absolutely fair.
IMO, the team games are considered as something only for fun instead of hard competitions. Making players happy and keep them in the game should be the primary goal of team games.
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For the majority of players, ELO is simply a tool for getting to balanced games. If you only play BF NR 45 then the most accurate representation of your ELO in a BF NR 45 lobby is your ELO from playing on that map with those settings not your 1v1 Arabia Elo from the 10 Arabia matches map you played 2 years ago.
If you’re truly concerned about the official ladder and want an ELO purely for tournament purposes or status and bragging rights, then have two ELOs. One official ELO for the official ladder based on random maps or whatever you think settings represent the best overall judgment of skill; and a second ELO just for balancing purposes, like “unranked” elo but that’s visible in the game so it can be used to balance games.
The community did not have too much trouble discerning who the best players were for tournaments when Voobly was the main platform and you could pick maps back then. However, I do understand that some players take a lot of pride in their ELO and if it makes them happy to have the ELO based on random or alternating maps called the “'official” ELO, by all means, let them have it. Just give everyone else the ability to pick their map and get balanced games too so this early leaver issue ends.
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This was my solution from a previous topic. It’s almost as good as infinite bans and also kind of addresses the issue of single map players. Perhaps we could also have three ELO ratings for each category which are averaged out into a total overall ELO. I think this or some variation of this would massively reduce the quitting problem.
That there’s your problem. And a lot of people’s misunderstanding. You don’t need to measure someone’s overall skill. Where does this fallacy come from?
From overly competitive players who like to compare their overall skill to others. But it’s meaningless and is contrary to how most people enjoy the game
On top of that, elo still doesn’t do that, because you can game the system
Mentioned it multiple times already, the game already favours playing minority maps (Eg socotra) by simply banning the majority favoured Maps(Arabia and arena) and favouring the minority map.
This forces the system to give you the map you want and by no means gives an accurate representation of anything
When it pits a majority Arena player against a socotra only player. Elo is nearly meaningless in this case
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Who does this benefit?
The single map players still won’t be happy and the people who think that an accurate representation of your skill can only be determined by a combination of all map types wont be happy either because how do you get a comparable average if someone never plays open maps or closed maps, etc. I’m sorry but it sounds to me like an alternative system that just pisses everyone off.
On top of this, allow players to either control a leavers civ, or let AI take over.
Every RTS has the same problem with “leavers” , it’s not something that will never exist, but theres so many ways to incentivize staying or make it less punishing for the people who are left
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You have your point here, but please note that we are talking about team games here. We can’t ignore that premade teams got 3 extra proper bans over solo players. Normally we might want to ban more than 1 map, a total of 4 proper bans would be enough and fair for most of the playerbase.
A pre-made team of 4 gets 4 map bans right? 1 per player. Whereas if you solo queue for a 4v4, you get one map ban each for a total of 4. That’s the penalty you pay for flying solo, you don’t get to coordinate your map bans with the players you get teamed with. I don’t see how giving 4 solo players 4 map bans each would make any sense, since the total amount of maps in the pool is 9. You would frequently run into situations where it’s impossible to set up any matches because the solo players in the queue (when put together) have all 9 maps banned. One solution for that would be to throw them back in the pool and make them wait longer, however we just don’t have enough players in general for that kind of thing to work unless everyone is cool with waiting 30-45 minutes at a time to get what they want. At that point, I’d just make my own unranked map, and those usually take only 5-10 minutes to get started.
On the other hand, nobody really want to control over others in this case, but nobody should force anybody to do anything either. We just don’t want to be forced to play on some of the maps. The system can just remove the alt+F4 guy and keep the rest in the queue. otherwise the unhappy map picker might be toxic or resign early and this will waste everybody’s time.
I almost always hear the word “forced” thrown around in discussions on this type of topic. Being “forced” would imply that you’re being made to do something against your will, when there are no other alternatives. In the unranked lobbies, you get to pick your map, the settings AND the players allowed into your match. It doesn’t get any better than that does it? That is your alternative.
Since the premade teams are allowed to play against solo players, the team games can’t be absolutely fair.
IMO, the team games are considered as something only for fun instead of hard competitions. Making players happy and keep them in the game should be the primary goal of team games.
Pre-made teams have always been allowed to play against solo players, and the pre-mades have always had an advantage. It’s the solo players fault for diving into a match, that is meant to be played with a team.
And Please tell me if I hear you correctly for this part…You’re basically saying that, for example, in a game of basketball, the players that are part of a team are just there only for fun and the “team” composed of all solo players are there for the hard competitions. Wait what? Since when? Isn’t the team of solo players SUPPOSED to get crushed by the pre-made team that chose to do it correctly?
I also disagree when you said that the primary goal of team games is to make players happy and keep them in the game. Does this mean that includes map dodgers and quitters? I think it’s better to ban them, or timeout them, than try to keep them happy when they are the ones wasting the time of others.
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That there’s your problem. And a lot of people’s misunderstanding. You don’t need to measure someone’s overall skill. Where does this fallacy come from?
Because the computer program responsible for matchmaking only understands numbers. Yes, you do need to measure someone’s skill if you want to create fair matches. The ELO rating system is currently the best way to do this. If you could come up with a better way, I’m sure game development teams from all over the world would love to hear your idea of how to do this.
I’m not blaming you for this but how does this nonsensical argument keep popping up? What is this theory even based on? DE has way more concurrent players than HD and Voobly ever had and on those platforms you could pick your map, get a balanced game and never had to wait 30min+ unless you were trying to play something super niche. This theory is completely broken and I don’t understand how it keeps popping up in all these threads.
Do you know what strict adherence to a 2 - 5min matchmaking metric gets you in the current system? It gets you extremely lopsided team games because the system rushes to find a match and maps that players don’t want to play leading to early leavers and threads like these.
I already knew what you are talking about, so please don’t repeat these obvious stuffs unless you think everybody else is stupid. The matchmaking right now is just incompetent and all the arguments here are based on the game’s fault, not players’.
Online games are not popular in many countries nowadays so it is not easy to find players to team with. At least I can’t always find 3 players everytime when I want to play. Now I have 3 options left. Don’t play the game, play against my will sometimes, or leave early when I see the game that I dont want to play. You can see that all these options are bad for the playerbase.
IMO, the devs should rework the matchmaking first instead of giving us uncommon civs with stupid units that got a chargeable bar on their head.
The matchmaking system right now is exactly forcing players to play on the map that they dislike sometimes. The alternative solution you offered is very awkward. I have to check other players’ ELO, internet speed, and the performance they preferred myself. I assume the unranked lobby is not popular because the players are separated too much by voobly, steam, ranked, quickplay, and lobbies.
Many games separated solo players and premade teams in order to make their games fair and competitive. AOE2 did not to do so. I think aoe 2 TG is not competitive by default due to unfair and unreasonable environment.
You are correct on that the premade teams got advantage over solo players, but I also have my right to refuse to play in such a disadvantages. The early leavers will always be here if the devs won’t fix the matchmaking
As I mentioned before, the easiest solution is keep everybody else in the queue after 1 guy alt f4 then fill the slot with the next player in queue. Nobody want to waste other’s time on purpose because they are strangers that have no problem with each other before.
Why do you think ban and time out are solutions ? The game is cheap and family share is easy.
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Threads on this topic and related topics have been going on for multiple years at this point and in everyone of them it has been explained precisely why and how the current iteration of unranked lobbies does not allow for balanced games, and therefore it is NOT an alternative to more bans or some form of ranked lobbies, I encourage you to go back and read them. If you have already read them but choose to continue to point to this as an alternative either you’re hopelessly lost at this point or you are being completely disingenuous.
The lobbies are fairly popular but are down a bit very recently primarily due to aoe2net going dark which means no more unranked elo for balancing games. It is awkward to have to alt+tab between aoe2net and the game to see unranked elo and balance teams but it did work at least, now that aoe2net is down, I personally haven’t even bothered hosting lately and my playing time has fallen quite a bit.
Lobbies would gain quite a bit of popularity if unranked elo or any form of lobby specific elo was visible in the game and the lobby browser was improved so you could filter based on map and more settings like population (all features that existed back in HD/Voobly). Also having the lobby browser auto update like Voobly without having to constantly refresh would be a major improvement as well.
Ha ha that is a concurrent fallacy around here, in zone the max concurrent players online were less than 2k, voobly and HD used to have better numbers than zone gaming while definitive edition has even more numbers than both of those platforms together.
We deserve a better system than the current matchmaking we have, cause we have more players than ever before.
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I honestly think there is a wrong insensive that grew over the years that only popular maps counts, and to an ageee yes if you want a good game with enemys be it solo or tg then mostly the popular maps count.
But what i personaly think is that this wrong insensive also destroyed one integrial part of aoe2 and that is there love to their maps because some of them get lost in the void overshadowed over popularity
I think to the other topics of leavers yea leavers are bad and ruin the game experience but not intentional but rather because there is no collective we agree on. I mean we agee to a degree that leavers are bad to a degree that all maps are equal and shouldt be overshadowed but the fact that there is still a discrepency between the playerbase thats whats causing a ruckus over people leaving or people complaining over the map choice
Also i honestly must say kudos to the devs since there is visable vatiety in their map they put up for vote
Single map players still won’t be 100% happy but they will be happier than in the current system and the same goes for the ‘balanced on all maps ELO’ guys, since your total ELO over the 3x categories would suck if you only play in one category. E.g. You have 1500 in Open Land Maps but if you never play Hybrid or Closed Land Maps you will stay at 1000 ELO for those categories, bringing your average down to 1166. This would encourage single map players to play more of the other categories. There are lots of different directions you could go with this. To avoid smurf matchups you could be matched based on your ELO in the type of map you’re playing.
Infinite bans is obviously my preference but my solution was a compromise for the multi map guys. You’re never gonna please everybody but you can make both sides much happier than with the current system.
I think all maps should be played and yea infinite bans wouldt cut it since people could also leave all beside one map on it while other ban everything beside on map and the time discrepency it could cost for queues might be harsh for everyone that dont just play arabia only
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Ok thanks, I get your ELO average explanation now which makes sense and I think it could possibly be beneficial for matchmaking or ranking purposes. That being said, I disagree that the categories for queueing purposes would have any benefit.
If you are a true single map player this will not make you any happier at all. Also there are a lot of other players this would suck for as well, including myself. My favorite map right now is BF, then Arabia, then Nomad and then everything else except Arena. I dislike Arena at the moment more than any other map but if I want to play BF in your system, I’m primarily forced into a queue with majority Arena players.
I think of a compromise as something that makes everyone a bit better off overall and, maybe its just me, but I certainly don’t see this doing that. I’m all for more ELO stats including ELO by map or average by category or whatever but I think these categories as separate queue options just complicate things further and don’t solve any of the real issues at hand. People who want to pick their maps will still not be happy and will just quit when they don’t want to play the map the system gives them.