I didn’t wanted to do this topic. I only do it now because I see that we’re still stuck in basically the same communicative issues as we were when 3K was released. For a variety of reasons there was no real convergence between the parts of the community who disliked 3K, the developers but ALSO the parts of the community that like 3K.
Whilst I would have liked to see approachable concepts from the people who disliked 3K - unfortunately I couldn’t find them. There are existing enounce concepts, but they would only result in a worse situation than we are currently in my opinion. And there are approaches but they never got to the state of an enounce concept. And I don’t want to pick them up also because I think this should be done by the people who dislike 3K. I am not a representant of that part of the community and I don’t want to impose like that.
(Note that I only haven’t seen an enounce concept that will work YET. I don’t want to claim it wouldn’t exist.)
The enounce concept i will present are only my personal reception of what I personally think and what I think to have read out of the different conversations I had with people that dislike 3K. I don’t claim to have an ideal solution or whatever and I don’t cliam to be objective.
First point:
There are currently too many civs in Ranked for beginners / casuals. The civs also have become increasingly complex to utilize optimally. And the “easy” OG civs have exploitable weaknesses, have lost their iconic identities that made them popular.
My solition concept:
A) Rework the european AOC civs in a way that preserves or re-establishes their “easy identity” as well as possible and also covers up their weaknesses. This may sound difficult. But for some civs like especially Franks or Teutons this is acutally not that hard and I already have worked out rework concepts that could potentially bring them to that state.
B) Implement “ranked Lobbies”. This concept I utilize an Idea of @TheTowerDefender who proposed to implement a new ranked ladder/mode. I don’t think a new ranked mode would work here. But ranked lobbies could. It’s also something that was continouusly asked for from various parts of the community.
The idea is to “split” the existing civs in like 3-5 “groups”. How exactly needs to be determined. This allows the players to chose and face only civs of that selected group. So if you don’t want to have 3K civs, just don’t join a lobby that uses this group of civs where 3K are part of.
Thanks for the shout-out, but that’s not really the idea i had:
My idea is that when queuing you can enable DLC (or groups of civs), the same way you can queue for 1v1 or 2v2 or 3v3.
So if you want nothing to change, you queue for 1v1 all civs, and the same maps you currently queue with. If you want to play only AoK arabia, you can only queue for that.
The advantages of this are: nobody needs to play civs/maps they don’t like.
I hear people saying “but this will split the player base”. This is only true if people are currently unhappy with what they have to play. If everyone is happy with what they are playing, no queues should be affected. Those unhappy will limit their queues and will have to wait longer.
please nobody touch the AoC civs. The current devs’ idea of “uniqueness” is ‘slap some gimmick on a unit and call it a day’. this makes not just the civ, but the game as a whole, worse
I know. I just used the inspiration I got from your Idea.
I think a ranked mode just is doomed to fail. Like it happened in the past. But it’s ok you present your concept here aswell. I don’t think it “splits” the community or whatever. I just think that how the matchmaking currently works there is only one ranked mode that can run without hefty delays for a longer time.
You haven’t even seen my concepts yet. Maybe the word “rework” is irritating for you.
But I said that I want to re-establish their iconic identities and cover their currently exploitable weaknesses.
This is easily achievable without the addition of any gimmicks - and I didn’t had any gimmicks in mind for my reworks. So maybe you should give it a chance before preemptively dismissing it?
And I agree, I don’t want gimmicks added to them either.
Definitive (all civs without 3 Kingdoms and Chronicles)
Legends (only 3 Kingdoms for now)
Chronicles (only Chronicles)
All civs (including 3 Kingdoms and Chronicles)
If you choose Classic you only face other players that also choose Classic.
If you choose Forgotten you can face players that choose Classic and then you are limited to Classic civs.
The only issue is that if you want to play like Armenians for example and you get matched with a Classic player you can’t play them. Maybe there should be an option to not be matched with people that have a smaller set but this would split the player base even more.
The main idea is to allow people to choose who they want to play against while at the same time still trying to not separate the player base too much. If the lists would be completely separate then you would find a lot less matches.
If course you could separate it by every single DLC but that would bloat the UI and split the player base way to much. I also don’t think splitting AoK and AoC is really necessary. Maybe there isn’t even a need for an Forgotten/HD playlist.
The other civs are separated based angry posts on the forum or nostalgia. Of course modern DE civs are made to be played against AoK civs but some people want to have a more old school experience with all the quality of life of the Definitive Edition.
AoE3 and AoE4 released with 8 civs, AoM released with 9 Major gods (but with 12 player support) so yeah 8-9 seems to be a good minimum.
No in their current state, everything else would be too much work and I don’t think people that like playing all civs want to sometimes play a different version of a civ just because their enemy doesn’t like Fire Lances.
I wouldn’t make different ranked modes. As i exlained why earlier, I would prefer “ranked lobbies” instead.
And I also wouldn’t work with different data sets either. One key aspect of my proposal is, that you can learn the different civs with this grouping better than in the current ranked system. And if you done learning you should have a way better experience in the completely random ranked queue.
Reading the different inputs in this topic I would even suggest to have at least 2 ways of splitting the civs (potentially in 3 similarly big sized groups each, so a total of 6. And each civ is in 2 different ones. One could be the chronological order of “added to the game” and one other could eg be regionally split, or split after certain map groups, civs that have similar strengths and weaknesses).
That would allow to allways pick a group that contains [your favorite] civs and exclude the civs you don’t like [to face].
There will probably be no ideal solution there that satisfies everyone, but at least we could achieve making most people happy to a certain degree.