It’s funny how in aoe3 there a zero map bans nor fauvrits map pick and nobody complains about it that they can’t play great plains or deccan all day long (two most popular maps pre de)
Maybe result of giving a finger and they take the hole hand,as said before
Maybe their win rate is artificially low because their teammates quit before giving them a chance.
Good point. So what would an ideal system look like? All x maps unlocked, with x/2 - 1 map bans available? Why does it need to be a popularity contest for the select few maps every couple weeks anyway?
Because rotating maps shows some presence of the game beeing active, while costing nothing.
A contractor debugging and profiling the app gets 100usd/h.
Also x/2-1 for x number of maps in the pool is not a restriction, because it is self explanatory that with more bans someone finds less likely a match.
The natural winrate for someone queuing up TGs on his own is about 43%, because there are many accounts with a much higher winrate.
In practice there are only 2 causes for a high winrate:
Below 40% means that the player teams up with teammates who are higher than him, but not rank boosted. Or it’s a fixed issue from the rating system, were your rating would rise and your winrate sink.
Still these players should get a slot in TGs. So alt-f4 is not the way.
Btw: What you are doing by alt-f4 is rank boosting yourself, because you pick teammates which are not adjusted yet to their rating, but are on the rise. You interfere with the matchmaking in first place.
same, this “fix” doesn’t work
I am not going to take the risk. There must be a reason of getting such a low win rate. I had a troll account still with around 45% win rate because team can usually carry me if i dont team kill or resign early.
Team with low win rate players gave me bad experience over all.
Below 40% is odd, I agree.
Luckily I basically never get matched with those.
As a lover of the game and a player since initial release over 20 years ago. This is a very unwelcome change. I’ve already been punished even though I didn’t queue dodge (resigned from early villager laming on nomad) and I can’t express how utterly frustrating and ridiculous that feels. Almost made me want to uninstall the game.
This change makes the game and the alt-f4 problem worse for so many reasons:
This is a total disaster of a feature in my opinion. Please remove this “feature” as soon as possible. If you want, find a different way to fix the problem that doesn’t punish players (e.g. more map bans). As an engineer who works very closely with designers every day for over a decade, I don’t know where you are getting your design ideas but this is a very poor choice and comes across as narrow design thinking and under-resourced implementation. Sorry for honest feedback but I thought it would be more useful than pretending like this feature just needs improvement.
Hope you take this seriously. Despite this, thanks for the effort put into the game.
there are leaving punishment for any reason in csgo and LoL too so it’s not unheard
Any reason? I like this! Let’s make players play until the last unit and production building are lost, or else they’ll lose ELO for quitting a match before it officially ends. 
Its not working as intended. I just had a 3v3 game where one of the players was afk, and then resigned 2 minutes into the game. So all 3 people on his team have to get penalized because one person whom we dont even know was afk? How does that make sense.
true and i think everything i wrote applies to those games too
Initial feedback so far, I would say the change is working as intended: people sandbag games, resign early, non-alt F4’ers get punished, smurfs dodge the penalty etc.
Those consequences were easy to anticipate, so, I can only guess that the true goal of this patch was to demonstrate to everyone why a timeout is really a terrible solution…
I mean if there were 51 maps available then each player in a 1v1 could ban 25 and they’d still have at least 1 map both could tolerate. I’m not sure if this solves much, but I don’t think it makes sense that two players have to pick from 7 maps they neither may like just because the majority if forum voters chose those options.
Personally, I find about 2-5 of the maps enjoyable any given week. When its 4-5 there are plenty of bans, but when its 2-3 I have to leave some in the running I’d rather not play. Not saying the game has to accommodate me personally, but I do think I’m fine with more than half the maps available, just sometimes disagree with the weekly 7.
Hello:
TBF I am a guy that has tons of fun (and rage) playing with aztecs only, but my micro is bad… so at one point in time I just got rage by all the scout rushes on maps like serengeti that are hard to wall…
So at one point I found that I did enjoy arena, and I could go to a lobby only 1v1 but there is no way to see what is the level of the other player so the only way is to go to the 1v1 queue and alt+f4 if I don’t get Arena.
I was willing to try just going random civ and sticking with the map pool, but I have to tank my elo as I know I am no where close in opens maps, but guess what the freaking timeout would make this painful, so know I am just thinking on just quitting AoE 2 altogether…
If you guys gave us either specific ladders for specefic maps or n-1 bans… we would be talking about actually caring about the player base.
i have to believe this is just a temperary mistake. i will definitly be quiting ranked until this is fixed. the old sytem wasent perfect but it was a hell of alot better then what we have now. i realy hope we can play ranked within the month again
Games should be fair, that’s literally why basically all games have rules. (Adult) life can be unfair /hard/something you want a break from in the first place, so I really struggle to follow your line of reasoning here.
Or how fun is playing catch against a dude that has his feet tied together? Not really all that fun, but as long as it is not “work” it must be fun by default, right?
Your ranked elo should show how good of a Player you are, and if you are a one Trick Pony then you should be punished for this by losing on other Maps.
After all Ranked is the competetive Game mode that is designed to show the skill of each Player, which is why any Competetive RTS Game has a Map Pool. The Map Pool forces the Player to be adaptable and be skilled over all, not just at one specific thing. I also could have a higher Elo if i only play Hideout and islands, but this would be fake elo then.
In the same way I knew people who only played one map, dodged all others and pushed their elo this way, despite being worse then their shown elo.
That is exactly the reason why Hera will not become Number One unless he improves his skill on maps other than Arena/Arabia.
For those who appeal to “playing it for 20 years”: the game is evolving and the tactics evolve with it if you cant keep up and adapt to the changes then you cant call yourself a pro anymore, youre an ex-pro, an ex-ranked player. Go to unranked lobby if youre only good at arabia. I remember when players wolrdwide competed in a game called “Age of Huns on Arabia” for several years. And i’m glad we`re back to competing in “Age of Empires II” , with good rebalancing after each update.
To the devs: there will always be people who like the updated stuff and those who don`t, but those who do - rarely bother to post a “thank you” comment. That does not mean they are a minority. Thank you devs, keep doing great job and keeping the game alive and competitive.
Ranked is a matchmaking system that allows players of all skill levels to find a relatively equal opponent for a fun and fair game. Thinking it is exclusively for competitive play is a mistake. I would bet that most players do not care about their Elo rating beyond the fact that it finds them better matches than any lobby game.