Hey, Age of Empires 4 really brings back the nostalgia of AoE1 and AoE2, but playing online with my friends is starting to get really frustrating. Developers, do y’all actually play this game a lot? I’ve been playing 5-10 AoE4 games with my friends online each week from season 12 through now season 13, and I distinctly remember it took at least 2 months for the Golden Horde bug to be fixed (where you could deploy/redeploy stables and then have like 150 Keshiks at 12-15min into the game). And how are raider elephants faster than knights? I can understand them being faster than any infantry, but seriously? An elephant can run faster than a horse? And can you please allow more time for matchmaking in order to match closer ranked players instead of just throwing games together faster. My friend and I play a lot of 2v2 and during our last 5 straight games, we won ONE game and lost FOUR games, yet I only lost -3 total ELO…because EVERY SINGLE TIME we’re playing against people higher ranked than us, so looking backwards it was loss (-11), loss (-1), loss (-17), win (+35), loss (-9)… it’s not fun to play people obviously better than us and to have no chance. The match where we only lost -1 elo was against a Conqueror 1 and a Diamond 3…for reference, I’m a Gold 3 who has occasionally gotten to Platinum 1, and my friend oscillates from Gold 2 to Gold 3. And the Conqueror 1 was even a smurf account (大麻) if you want to do anything about it…he’s got 126 games played TOTAL only starting in Season 12 between 1v1 and 2v2 ranked and an average 74.6% win ratio? And then even though I like playing sometimes with random team mates, there are so many people who artificially reduce their elo by joining a game and immediately disconnecting? There’s ZERO repercussions for it, you can just queue up another game and quit that one too. I would imagine it’s pretty easy to write code that shows if a person quits in a certain amount of time of the game starting (like 5 min) or if they produce nothing or lose nothing, or even if they fail to connect, there should be a delay before they’re allowed to try to go into matchmaking again. In Dota 2, if you fail to connect or abandon a couple of times, it keeps making your time extend before it eventually bans you for a few minutes, then a few hours, then a day or more. I looked through the match history of one guy who crushed us, and he was on a 32 game winning streak, because a couple of weeks before, he “played” 25-30 matches where he quit 0-4 minutes to purposefully drop his elo. I want so badly to enjoy this game…allegedly I’m at a 48% win ratio and my friend is at a 41% win ratio in teams (only because I’ve done a couple dozen more random team games where the opponents immediately quit/don’t connect)…but we’re truly no where near 50% because at least 10-15% of those “wins” are people just quitting on us. I just want to play a game where smurfs and disconnectors aren’t rewarded. I’m super tempted to just tank my elo down too so that I can eventually get matched with opponents where we can just have a true 50/50 win/loss ratio. I mean we’re high golds, isn’t that roughly in the middle of all players???
Ok, then we login to play tonight and we get matched 2v2 against 2 guys who are literally playing their first Ranked Match ever, they didn’t even have elo…they had 6 Quick Matches before that…it was legitimately easier than playing a computer AI on easy, which is not really enjoyable either to be so ridiculously better than them, we could have done the most troll build ever and won. The average matchmaking time has only been like 30 seconds - 2min, I think most of us would be totally fine waiting 5min or even up to 10min to be placed with closer elo…rather than to get matched quickly so we can stomp or get stomped. It’s only about 20% of the games we play (whether we win or lose) where after we’re like “ok, those opponents were about our level”.
Being new to the game, the ranked games start from way to high elo ranking / rank. It doensn’t make any sense that in your first games you get gold player vs you. You should start from the bottom by default, and during the initial 5 games you play to get the rank, your elo should react quite strongly to your game performance, to get you on your right place fast. It doesn’t encourage to start playing ranked, if you first have to lose 5+ games to start getting players vs you that are closer to your level and finally can enjoy the games. Also, I hope that your game score also affects how the rank accumulates, especially in the bigger team games, your team can win but you might really be the worst player in the game.
Matchmaking is a mess still after all these years
Yup, when I first started playing, it was a super unpleasant multiplayer experience for the first month or two…I only kept playing because it was with friends, but it took dozens of games to even get to like a 25-30% win ratio. Then now as a Platinum 1, sometimes I’ll get queued against Bronzes…and then looking at AoE4 World, it’s not even like they were partied together or I was partied with my team mates. I think they’re just rushing too much to match you, there’s usually only ~10,000, max 15,000-20,000 people playing the game at a time. I’d much rather wait 5min+ for a more evenly matched game then to get matched in 30 seconds - 2 min and far outclass or be outclassed.