Players' Self-Balancing Act / Competitive Civ Pick & Ban System in ranked games

Age of Empires IV IV - Discussion
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People of AoE4, of the great game we all love and cherish. I present you a change I believe our community is in dire need of. The Civ Pick & Ban system in ranked matches.

Now to the point. AoE4, despite many issues, is a pretty balanced game. Sources such as “aoe4world” show us that often the difference between the best and worst civs by winrate is ~10% (best - ~55%; worst - 45%), and I consider this quite a feat by the devs for the game so vast in playstyles and mechanics. By this, the credit is given where credit is due.

Despite the surprisingly good overall balance we see in statistics, some players are often eager to inform others about “cheese” strategies, “op” civs, and unfair units. So the question is, how can we make the competitive feel fairer for the average player? I believe the answer is to give them the ability to balance their games to some extent.

The Pick & Ban system is old and reliable, proven in the pro-play scene of AoE games and in other popular competitive projects. Players get an ability to ban certain civilizations they don’t feel like playing. This will eliminate the next problems:
1) balancing patches from the devs take time to release;
2) Stale scene where people get to play 2-3 civs from 22 almost every game;
3) Counter civs picked by pure luck.

The system is pretty flexible and can be implemented in various forms (a system similar to map bans in ranked; separate from the ranked game mode; etc.). As mentioned before, there are also a lot of references out there in the competitive scene to find the implementation that will work with AoE4 best.

TL;DR
We shall be given an ability to ban a few civs for our personal matchmaking. This is a way to self-balance one’s experience, which has proven itself as reliable and positive change to competitive scenes of various games.

2 Likes
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This will lead to a significant decrease in the purchasing power of DLC.

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A ban system is a good idea. Btw balancing isnt that great right now. If you look at sengoku, there are a lot of match ups, where the winrate is 60% to 40%, which is strongly unbalanced. 1vs1 platin+

3 Likes
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A wonderful idea, for which there is really no reason not to implement. That allow us not waiting for hot fix if some civ have exploit, just ban it. That can help us to play some civs without most terrible counter pick. We can ban mirror civ(someone love play mirror?). Perhaps it will push someone to explore some other civ if they play one civ 8 thousands times. And finally its just same as map banning - we downvote maps which we don’t like. That simple. We will ban something we don’t like. Some quick civs, or 2+ TCs, or knights whatever. Its like choice play or not to play naval maps. We already have separation for player base by this filter but for some reasons on lower-middle ranks games starts almost imidiately. So, I can understand why dev or their bosses who pay them salary can be worried about such changes, but I honsetlly can’t figure out why we have players who literraly don’t want have some cool OPTION. Its maybe the most important part, its just a option, tool which you can use or don’t. Try to convince me I’m wrong))

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