amen we need a solution that helps all sides. we cant just throw the altf4’s to the dirt and expect them to except their fate
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Some feedback based off of what I’ve seen/read regarding how the timeouts have been implemented:
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It’s silly that if one player drops when the game starts that other players who subsequently drop are also punished, at that point the match should be considered done and over with as far as ranking goes.
- I am guessing that there is just some check that says if a player quits within X minutes of game start, it is counted as abandoned, but if one player drops and gets a penalty, other players should not have to stay in that game until after whatever arbitrary time in order to be able to quit out of the game safely.
- If a player abandons a match shortly after it starts, it should simply allow everyone else to quit as well, without awarding any elo gain/loss or queue penalties to the remaining players.
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If a player purposely resigns to dodge a map, other players in that person’s party should receive the penalty as well, to avoid parties of 3/4 the ability to rotate through their short penalty timers in order to circumvent longer timeouts.
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I appreciate the effort, but instead of fighting players who queue dodge, Devs should just give them their own matchmaking options so they can play what they want and not bother the rest of us. Give players who just want to play all Arabia/Arena/etc their own matchmaking sets, and let the rest of us play the normal variety without having to deal with the Alt+F4 crowd. I’d rather wait longer in the lobby than get dodged 4 times before I get to play a game, and I’m sure they’d rather just jump into the game they want to play than Alt+F4 until they get the map they want to play. Now, we deal with early resignations or unenthusiastic opponents or teammates, and that’s really no better. I think separate matchmaking would be an easier and more effective fix overall.
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Unless we make ELO different for different map types, this makes ELO even less useful than it already is.
For the record, I’m totally okay with this fix so long as ELO is reworked and reset to supplement it. Doing it alone is a no-go. And if doing an ELO rework/reset is a no-go, I’m firmly against the lot.
Copying my response to this often-given solution, for visibility:
This is a fairly standard feature for games where the player base is several orders of magnitude larger than AoE2’s, which is why it works for those games, but wouldn’t work here.
At least, I think this is why the devs are against it, here is a good article from the developers of awesomenauts that can be applied to our scenario: Joost's Dev Blog: Why good matchmaking requires enormous player counts
There are in fact tons of articles exploring the kind of math required for matchmaking systems if you just do a quick google on the topic, but the short answer is that for this to work properly AoE2 would need a ton more players than it currently has, especially given that not all of the ~18,000 or so concurrent players that the game sees on a daily basis are partaking in matchmaking.
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I disagree. The fact that Alt+F4 and try again worked for so many players indicates that the matches they want are available. There are other players in their elo range willing to play the same maps. The only change with more map bans is that they wouldn’t need to close and load the game to get back into the queue after an incompatible match was found (no overlap in allowed maps), this would just happen automatically behind the scenes until a game could be formed.
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Suggestion:
Introduce additional matchmaking options including Standard Random Map (including our normal system of favorites and bans) and All Arabia or All Runestones or All [Arena/Islands/Nomad/etc] (Or whichever are the top 5 or so most popular maps people are fishing for).
Rationale:
Instead of fighting players who queue dodge, give them their own matchmaking options so they can play what they want and not bother the rest of us. Queue dodging has been an issue for some time now, and while I appreciate the new update attempting to address this issue, I feel that it misses the mark by not addressing the root of the issue. The fact of the matter is, some people simply don’t want to play a wide range of maps, some people log on, want to play one round of Arabia or Arena or Nomad or whatever their favorite map/mode is. Rather than forcing them either into games they don’t want to play or over to other games because they can’t play what they want, give players who just want to play all Arabia/Arena/etc each their own matchmaking sets, and let the rest of us play the normal variety without dealing with the Alt+F4 or early resigning crowd. I’d rather wait longer in the lobby than get dodged 4/5/6 times before I get to play a game. I’ve started banning those maps just because I know those are the ones people fish for. Rather than giving more bans or favorites or trying to punish players that want to just play a certain game mode, let them select that and play with other people who also want that and let the rest of us keep playing as usual. This is a fairly standard feature on many games now and has been used to address similar issues before, and I think it would be just as effective for AOEII as well.
yes this is a much better solution then just banning a third the playerbase
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i think alot of people would not mind longer que times to fix this issue. by alienating the playerbase the devs have gotten all the downsides of mutliple ques without any of the upsides
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I think that alongside longer queue times you will also see more unbalanced matches, longer wait times are only part of the problem, and I think we may be underestimating just how much longer the queue times will get for a lot of people.
That is true, but queue times would be a function of how many maps you’ve banned. Anyone with 0 bans would experience queue times similar to today, while those with 6/7 bans would be causing their own queues to be longer. That in itself is an incentive to minimize bans for less downtime, probably would not need a punishment cooldown.
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So I agree with your point 100% that matchmaking requires a large player base, (and I really enjoyed reading the article you recommended) and that is why I think they current solution is unsustainable. By instituting holds/bans, it inherently lowers the player count, both through the hold itself and now that the people who were logging on specifically to play a certain map or mode know that they can’t queue dodge their way into the game they want, I think they’ll stop playing all together, further lowering the player count. But you’re right that if there are too many options that it would diminish the number of available players, so maybe rather than having the top 5 or 6 fished for maps, it gets reduced down to top 2 or 3 or something like that to try to mitigate the shrinkage. Or even bundling them by similar game styles so that it would be lets say [Runestones/Arabia], [Arena/Hideout], [Islands,Archipelago] to try to make it more of a viable option for those who want maybe a little more map variety but similar style. Either way wait times are going to go up, but I think by doing something like this, it gives a better chance that once you find a match, you get to play that match- in other words the total wait time would be less, because you’d be waiting in one longer queue rather than 3/4/5 shorter queues because the queue dodgers would no longer be an issue.
True, but I did not say that it is the case. My statement is that it is POSSIBLE that the majority does not want to play exclusively Arabia or Arena although the majority of matches are on those two maps. That is all I have said. No more and no less
I knew I should have added an additional remark to my statement… I agree with you. And I didn’t say I’m in favor of the changes (nor against them). I just tried to point out why one should not deduce that the majority wants to play exclusively Arabia or Arena soley from the fact that those are the most played maps. Maybe this is the case, maybe not. I don’t know.
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You may be right on this but I think this is unfortunately something that only time will tell, I personally think that the number of people that actually alt-f4 constantly is smaller than it seems (at least compared to the playerbase at large), and that even if they all suddenly stopped playing you would not see a drop in queue times, at least not one comparable to what would happen if the queues were fragmented further than they already are by implementing unlimited bans or separate arabia/arena only queues as has been suggested.
It certainly does suck for those players, though, but as someone who likes to play a variety of maps I sure do wonder why there are so many so-called diehard fans of the game that only enjoy playing such a small subset of what the game has to offer, especially when it comes to hybrid maps or maps with specific gimmicks like valley/golden pit that I personally think are quite fun to learn.
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Not necessarily. It depends on whether the behavior of the banned people caused a greater quantity of different people to stop playing. For example, I think we can agree that if cheating mods were allowed, the player base would shrink significantly. So, banning players that cheat is beneficial.
In this case, did Alt-F4 people cause more people to stop playing, than the quantity of Alt-F4 players that will now stop playing due to the delay penalty?
Honestly, a 5 minute timeout for Alt-F4 or quick resign (or an unfair network glitch or game crash) is not really that bad. Take the time to go to the bathroom, stretch, or grab something to drink.
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Its not 5 mins and its cumulative without a cooldown, i tried a game in the morning one player dropped so i quit now i got 60 mins penalty.
I only dodged the previous guys who were surrendering, you can’t clap such terrible implementation without even thinking how poorly they did it, they ended up affecting more players and wasting even more time than i predicted.
Also MM penalties affects all game modes, even single player, i expect this topic to get intense by the end of the weekend of this week, where the majority of users plays the game, i am going to enjoy the mayhem, cause there are already lots of false positives, without counting those get affected by the actions of others.
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You’ve got a 60 minute penalty less than 24 hours after the update dropped
Consider, just briefly, that you might be the problem.
don’t see why this is a thing though, imagine that’ll change pretty quick.
Edit: I’d really like to see what the total number of games completed looks like today as opposed to, say, four days ago (or a day after a similar sized patch, etc). If this is more common than uncommon, we’d expect the total number of completed games to drop as players are being stopped in large quantities… though call me a skeptic, I expect the opposite.
If you bother to read my first post about this pathetic system you wont be discussing pointless stuff, 2 times in a row my random allies dropped or resigned, i got punished twice cause of them at the moment i also left those games…the third time i got paired with those guys again so i left before the game even started, that was the third strike and today after 10 hours the same ■■■■ one player dropped during the loading screen so there you go 60 mins punishment.
If you you think i am the problem you should be signing for a developer spot here.
If two of your random allies jumped off a cliff, would you do the same?
Seems unreasonable to blame them for an instant resign, hoping to avoid an alt-F4 penalty, three times in a row.
So, you have this massive trouble with people leaving every game you play and then making life hell for you, and you are going to blame the system, and not the fact that you apparently had 12 leavers in 4 games? Sounds like you need the system to prevent these people from ruining further games, and you should be grateful.
That’s assuming you’re being honest about the nature of your circumstance, the odds don’t seem likely, but even if I give you the benefit of the doubt, I see this as a net win, those players you speak of are not going to ruin any other games for a net total of almost two hours where they certainly could have done much worse.
If you want my honesty however, it sounds a lot like you spent a game or two testing out how early you could resign without the game catching and punishing it, and are now trying to blame the system for it. >.>
Still, the Single-player thing shouldn’t be a thing.
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I’m loving this.
I feel most of the hate around this change is from people who openly admits of queue dodging.
I understand you want to play a specific map you like because you want to have fun, but this should not apply to ranked.
Ranked is for competitive players who don’t mind which map they get. Your ELO should be the result of your skill and flexibility across all maps.
If we add infinite bans on ranked games, then ELO’s lose all their meaning and would only apply to an specific map.
“oh, my ELO is 1800 but I only play Arabia. On the other maps am like 800 ELO” That doesn’t make sense.
Maybe infinite bans could apply to quick play and people wouldn’t mind waiting 10 minutes for their specific map. But if we apply it on ranked, then AoE2 would stop being a reputable E-Sport.
Also, I don’t like the original poster of this thread. But that’s off topic entirely
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