I’ve noticed strange aspects in multiplayer games in AOE2DE that do frustrate player and team experience. This comes from my experience in 4vs4 plays.
- My notice for readers *
The thread takes time, but a problem that is not solved overnight requires mature approaches and no childish excuses of the sort “it always happens, we just deal with it”. Every functional thing in society, gaming comunities being also aspects of society, requires rules and enforced rules, otherwise you’ll get chaos anarchy and nothing works.
I understand chaos and anarchy are appreciated by scumbags, bullies and hypocrites in society - and some of these are actually very present in gaming comunity who use gaming to project their poor behaviours towards others - but in normal life, sane people and law-abidding comunities, people with dignity and integrity, like to make their business and daily lives in respectful environments where there is some order. These people like to know that game offenders get punished, so that they know they are not the good law-abidding idiots while the scumbags get away, in this case ruining the game-play for sucessive teams in the gaming comunity.
If I play a game, friends or any normal person, I like to have a few rules because no rules or “everything is allowed” is not a game I respect. Right now, from what I see with just a few weeks of multiplayer in ranked ao2 , there are too few rules and abuse becomes rampant.
There are two ways do deal with these abuses. To make a blind eye and assume to be part of the problem or make a real effort in addressing the solution to this problem. Failing to to so, or resorting to making a blind eye will only add more frustration, and many honest players will simply opt out of the game.
Anyone is free to join, play or leave the game at any time, but the moral stain, the loss of confidence - just like in any business - bears a price to pay for the business. Sure. A business can act arrogant, in denial, immature and say “whatever, just leave the game whe’re better without you”, “keep quiet”, or understands that its reputation will become more and more harmed with increasing negative honest feedback.
I don’t care if there are ao2 honest players who have not witnessed the problems I am about to describe, if there is such thing as honest players who did not see any of the problems I will describe. Which I highly doubt. This comes from my real experience, not from “I have heard, I have been told”. I think if there is a highly negative situation, the cause of the problem needs to be addressed by ao2 comunity or negative feedback will keep pilling up, and lead to irreversible loss of confidence in the franchise.
We all live in a world and those who chose to make a blind eye just live in denial, repeating lies to themselves, their problem. Some make real effort to solve the problems, others just keep making the problem worse.
There might be even be other game platforms addressing the problems I will describe next, but the question is what is ao2 doing to solve this problem. Frankly, if nothing is done, leaving the game will be my choice, because I refuse to promote platforms where poor dishonest behaviour is rewarded and honest performance is bashed down.
If no one talks, nothing comes out. So I’ll talk for those who claim “you’re the first to complain in ages”.
1. Early quitters.
If in a team of 4 at least one player quits too early, the team in 99.99999% of the cases has automatically been sentenced a loss, and all team players suffer a penalty decrease in their rank.
I understand you leave the match when the rest of the team mates are already been wrecked by enemy, or when they are not providing any help or don’t tell you to wait a bit. Impatience is no excuse for quiiters, so if you are beinf under attack and even if the team mates at that moment can’t help you but they are building an army to come to assist, it is your team duty to wait.
Some will claim. Oh, but my team is not building anything or “they just have 5 elephants or 10 knights”. No my quitter. If they started having 5 elephants each 15 seconds, you know in 2 minutes you have 80 (1542). Don’t tell me with 80 elephants after two minutes you couldn’t wait. If you’re told wait 2min before bathroom you die because you can’t take 120 seconds? Quitters and bad players always find excuses for their lack of sportsmanship and poor conduct. This is no different in every gaming community online.
There are situation where you know you’re dealing with abbuse:
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either because he quits before 20min and everyone is doing ok;
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he quits unexpectedly and not because of bad wi-fi connections or "critical emmergency reason, or quits too often unexpctedly from gamesm and no reason is provided (accidental disconnect cases not considered);
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because he suddenly leaves the game when his base is still intact and the rest of team bases are still intact even if with fight;
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because he complains to the rest of team saying “you have no army, where is your army!!!” and does nothing to try to resist and help the team, while on the countrary bashing and verbally attacking team members, demoralizing the team instead of helping to fight;
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because even if his base is wrecked by the enemy team (let’s say 3 attack him), while the rest of his teammates’ bases are intact and preparing to counter-attack, if he doesn’t move out of the old base this is a tell-tell sign he’s not willing to put a fight, because he doesn’t understand that sometimes a team member needs to be bantha fodder and “stalk” the other team, while his team builds up a deadly counter-attack.
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if he’s rushed in feudal age and - just because of the rush, a rush that does not destroy TC or any critical support infrastructure - decides to quit, as an early poor excuse.
2. Smurfs
Ok. Smurfing happens. It’s bad, It’s sad and again it is real. There are veteran skilled players artificially abusing the ranking system loosing too many times on purpose so they can get noobs in their rank bracket, either to steam-roll them and give them a bad time or, and this is also the point, prevent reasonable players to actuallly improving in the rank system in a position reflecting their skills, because the smurfs are there to make sure no one, but a skilled veteran crosses that rank “barrier”.
The point is not just, your rank can’t increase, but your rank will artificially decrease each time you play, every time you face a smurf. Now how do you know you’re facing a smurf? A naïve approach would be “look at their ranks and the number of matches they played”. A more mature approach, would now that such numbers can be rigged:
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a smurf can create a fresh profile with 0 games played and starts at 1000 rank, just because;
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having a few games played does not necessarily tells the story of the player, a noob player who plays often can have 100 games played and a veteran who appears here and there may just have 20 games;
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a same player can have different profiles violating game rules, a higher ranked profile (i.e. +1600) and many lower ranked one (i.e. elo +300, +500 etc…). The first to try to prove he’s good, the other to artificially decrease the ranks of other players and stop them from getting a fairer rank, creating extreme unequal ranking distribution (i.e. player with +500 elo should be +1000 elo, had he not played against smurfs).
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steam-rolling noobs or lower ranked players under 1 hour, on ranks betwenn 0-+1100 elo; literally, it’s like a race competition where you break the legs of all your opponents at the backstages before the race starts, give yourself mach-5 jets and try to prove yourself you won the race fair and square against “less qualified players”. They were automatically bound to lose, because it only takes one smurf on the enemy team to ruin an entire team of softer players.
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ego-steam rolling, this one is associated with smurfs too, and can be spot more easily on certain maps like Arena; it is just not enough for them to race steam-roll bases of new or softer player, they also need to own every corner of the previous noob base: i.e. they build all, and I mean all walls exactly in the same location of the noob previous walls just for ego purposes, where they don’t really need extra defenses. It is just a way of humiliating noobs: “look I now even have my walls where your walls stood”. It doesn’t add any fun element to the game play, nor changes the game dynamics, it’s just sad a way of ego-boosting and can act as “approving” bullying behaviours in the game community.
- All hell breaks lose: combining 1 and 2
This is even worse, just like when one and one is not two, but greater than two. Combine early quitters and smurfs and you’ll see a “rank hollocaust” for many players who will be doomed to get to +0 ranks, in sucessive diminishing forced downranking, where for each victory they get, they have to get 4-5 defeats in games with 1 and 2. issues. It’s not just on absolute terms, that these players not falling on early quitters/smurfs categories end up in rigged games, the players on ranks aboves actually secure their ranks because the other lower ranked players are forced to play with much lower elos, elos that do not reflect skills or rank.
So this brings two last issues.
- Penalty for abusive players.
Simple. Effective. Quick. You quit too early, you deliberately screw your team by quitting without having fought anything, you get 5x as much penalty as other players. Ok, but then this can create another situation. The cheater early quitter who is pushed to lower ranks can still hurt honest players in that new rank bracket. In that case, after 5-10 early quits reported for that player the player should be banned.
There will always be people unhappy about penalty for early quitters in team games, because “a voice from the sky” toll them they already know the rest of their 2-3 teamates will lose. Selfish excuses, because the logic of team play is not individual ego-boosting but team-play cooperation. You don’t play team games to show you’re a better player than the rest of the team, but to actually achieve victory through team cooperation and strategy, irrespective of each individual player, for team > player. This is a problem for people who always think on individual level and don’t understand team dynamics and joint-efforts is greater than sellfish egos.
For smurfs it is not as easy, but if they have very few games played and appear to be noobs but their playstyle is heavy rush, boom and steam-roll in less than 40 minutes, for +0-+1100 elo brackets, they clearly are smurfs. If they deliberately loose most matches, sometimes not even fighting, and steam-roll quickly in one or two games they are ruining on purpose many players, forcing them to have as much as 2x, or 3x lower elos than real.
The smurf cheaters should be reported on forums if they “keep loosing strangely” and easily win where they play for real. A suggestion would be to record games to see if the player keeps consistent behaviour, to the point where 1. and 2. can combine. I.e., if the early-steam-roller in other games is an early quitter in a game, you spot a smurf. If a veteran keeps smurfing after being reported in the comunity (i.e. screenshots, game records with players making report in good faith), his profile should be banned. Especially if the player has multi-profiles, he should be banned (one for veteran plays, other profiles for noobs).
- Resign Team-Vote instead of Individual Resign
Undertstandably, there is a point in a game where a team knows it is going to lose and the other is going to win, even with 4vs4. That point does not come early, nor before a fight and certainly not before at least 1-2 team player bases are wrecked. At that time, because the outcome is certain, it makes sense for the losing team to decide if they still want to play the game or resign alltogether.
I would consider the resign threshold in a games 4vs4 if, in the same team, 3 players out of 4 decide to resign. It doesn’t make sense to wait for the whole team members to agree because a team game is about team dynamic, not the last-standing member of the team forcing everyone to stay until the last of his hidden units go away. If other players don’t mind a stalking fight to the last second sure, but the rest of team has no need to stay hostage of the last stubborn player, where the last player refuses to quit when the game was already lost since a lot.
2 players out of 4 voting out means the whole team still believes it can fight, or that soon one more of the two last players still believing the game can be fough, will opt out.
To not spoil the team-competition dynamics, every time a player pushes the “Team Resign Vote” the game should not pause so that team A does not know if a player from team B wants to resign. There should also be a limited number of times to ask for team-resign, i.e. one time each 20minutes for each player and a total of 3 times per player, during the entire game to prevent abuses.
The voting should be quick, instant (7 seconds for max time per player), and not create any disruption on the player’s actions: with hotkeys 1. yes or 2. no. In 4vs.4, if at least 3 quit, it’s game over for that team. Otherwise, the game continues. When the player votes the team should see the player vote for transparency sake. That voting system would work like chat conversations where team members can see the chat (if any of team players have each other blocked/muted, every team player would still be able to see how they vote).
Last but not least, in all team games, the individual resign option needs to go away otherwise, team-resign will remain useless as an early quitter or a deliberate quitter could still force the team to lose by individual resign.
That is it. Thank you for positive, mature feedback.