Hi, in the following topic I’d like to discuss the posibility of enhancing the current multiplayer overall experience in order to make it more attractive for the general player.
Currently we have some decent features in game such custom games, ranked games and rematch (only worthy on custom games)
However we are missing some important features or the ones we have are not properly implemented. Most obvius example would be the friend / invitation system, ingame (lobby) chat among others.
Here I list some features that could be implemented in to the game, for the shake of giving ideas to the devs and open a public discussion:
- In game-lobby chat, quite simple, you should be able to chat with friends / recently played users in a LOL/Steam look a like chat, with instainvitations and such. Preranked game chat would be cool too.
- Restore ranked game team, let’s say I’m playing 4vs4 ranked game with some friends, after a game i should be able to go back to the qeue with the same guys and easily search for another game, with the posibility of inviting someone else / changing players. Having to reinvitate all my team mates and ban/unban the maps is kind of… awkward. I believe this was sort of implemented a while ago.
- Invitation system, the current one at least finds the players, but is far from being up to date, quite clunky (many clicks don’t work, such as in the typing box), proper friend/frequently played/lately played find system.
- An official working website for rankings, players, civs, and maps stats. We currently have different webs, but none of them is an official one and they lack one feature or the other, the gone aoe2-net use to work fine. A nice adition would be tournament calendar/announcement implementation on such website, to easily know wich events are happening. Kind of a Age of Empires hub.
- Ladder enhancement, this is probably the most interesting and hardest thing to implement. The game could have a yearly (or once every 2 year) season, which resets the ladder to the starting point for all the players, with different ranks (would be just visual, no real difference in the matchmaking system), such as in other games like LOL. This would help motivating the players to reach certain goals (the different ranks), and keep the games rolling. This could also be implemented for team games. I believe AoE4 has some sort of season mechanic.
- Improved game/spectator search, the game fails too many times to seach for a certain game. Spectator and play lobby could be the same, but there could be options to be spectator/player from the beginning, even before the game has started, of course once the game is full, or allready being played the option to play should be grayed.
That’s kind of everything I came up with just now, this is not a rant about the game, but different ideas that me as an experienced player would be gratefull for. This would have a positive impact on the overall game experience.