Lobby games give unlimited variety.
Matchmaking gives a higher rate of games and limited amount of maps/settings a player can focus on.
Either is justified in a good implementation.
Hello,
i am one of those âqueue dodgersâ. I donât understand why we canât have everybody play the map they want to play against people who want to play the map as well.
I have been playing AoE2 since the late voobly days (so ca. 3 years) and i love the game. And when i say i love AoE2 i mean watching tournements and youtube videos and playing Arabia. I tried the other maps, when de came out, when we were âforcedâ to play on all maps, but it wasnât for me. Back then i stop playing ranked and just played against friends, which also got boring after a while. Then the option came to âfavorâ a map and suddently i was able to play arabia again all day. That was awesome!
By introducing the new alt-f4-punishment you are reducing the fun i have playing the game.
Best regards
Whizzle_bee
6 Likes
You donât love the game.
Kappa.
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You canât believe how much you screwed over other people by forcing arabia.
This and smurfing/rank boosting killed the teamgame ladder.
But I agree with you on the point, that you should be able to queue up for ranked arabia only.
So does everyone else for every other map in the pool, imho.
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By alt-f4âing you are majorly decreasing other peopleâs fun in the game as well as wasting other peopleâs time. I donât think you will find many people here in who are in favour of supporting / allowing it.
The main question people are divided on is wether to allow infinite map bans / separate Arabia arena only queues and wether these will be worth the exponentially increased queue times.
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I am not proud of it and i wish there would be another way to get competitive arabia games, but there isnât so dodging is the only way for me.
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Hello AOE team and fellow AOE players,
I enjoy playing arabia and been playing it for many years on voobly and now on the de version of the game.
I dont see why the devs need to force me into playing maps i dont enjoy.
I hope that one day we see the possibility to ban as many maps as we want because as I am not one of the top players of the game, there are a lot of players on my elo level (1300) so I can hardly imagine that my queue would be taking to long if I ban all the maps other than arabia.
Atleast I think this would be a better solution, than the way it now is (being forced to resign early or respectively waiting 3 mins into the game to resign so you wont get punished by the game wasting even more time for you and your opponent)
Sincerely Ruby
7 Likes
Not sure about that. But as we mostly get arabia anyways, these people donât fall into weight as much.
A modern phenomenon. People like to restrict themselves to set perceptions. I think itâs cause it makes live in a untransparent world easier. You are permanently put in a flood of (false) information - so you restrict them with a shalloe perception set and only let them reach you which pass that first shield of perception.
But I donât think AOE can change that continouus shift towards more and more closed minded people, itâs not the task of a video game.
What I want to say with this, that I think a lot of these Alt+F4 players donât even want to try the other maps. Itâs not that they donât like them because they canât appreciate their gameplay or design. They are just biased towards Arabia. And you canât break this kind of biase by force. If you want to convince them to at least try the other maps, you have to make them play and then maybe change their perception. Force is the totally wrong approach, it will only lead to even more bias against other maps.
You could make events like âwin 5 x golden pit rankedâ and set a prize for it. This could work, but ofc a bit more creativity would be nice. But this way you might get some alt+f4ler at least trying it - and maybe appreciate that map then.
Thatâs a way it could possibly work, but punishment for sure wonât, it only leads to bad blood.
thatâs a terrible âworking as intendedâ in that case. THe system ruined games for three users.
We want more players, not less.
Iâd be really interested to know stats on how many Alt-F4 vs how many people are now getting punished by the system.
People are not biased towards Arabia, they just donât like Nomad, Megarandom, or whatever the random dice throwing matchmaker will put you in. No need to invoke selfishness or âshallow perception of the worldâ (what the heck man?).
When was the last time we saw BF, Nomad, Megarandom in a Tier-1 tournament? All these maps are in the ranked TG pool right now. Nobody plays these maps seriously but you think youâre the smart one calling others ânarrow-mindedâ for not playing them?
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Hello! If you still have any technical issues that players mentioned earlier in this thread, please contact support.
Have a nice day everyone 
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I love megarandom! It gives me an opportunity to crush someone who only knows build orders and has no skill at adapting.
The point is the ranked lobby should give players the option to play specific maps if thatâs what they are after. Even if someone wants to sit for 10 minutes in an âArena only 4v4â queue.
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Not sure what your point is. Most S-Tier tournaments these days play a wide variety of maps; usually much more variety than the ranked queue right now. Yeah, you donât see BF, nomad or Megarandom much, but itâs also definitely not Arena/Arabia only.
The thing is, the more options we give, the longer queue times will be for everyone, not just the diehards who only play specific settings.
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And btw:
https://gowerc.github.io/aoecps/outputs/report_rm_solo_any.html
These arenât played less than other maps if they are in the map pool. Ofc currently there are only 3 maps that are played frequently, but the mentioned megarandom and nomad are played actually more often than maps like golden pit or four lakesâŠ
It wasnât intended like this. I just wanted to explain to the devs, that punishment of this kind of mindset canât work. If you take this as an insult⊠ok. But Iâm actually on your side. Yes I think of myself of being kind of open minded, but I respect the people with more closed perceptions of the world and argue for not punishing them for their closed perception. If this is an insult to you, Iâm sorry. But I didnât made theis narrative and I donât have a different wording for this.
Just because I call the things by their names doesnât mean I want to insult anybody.
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If the developers are reading, and if you do decide to go for split queues for each map, please can you pre-initalise Elo based on players relative performance in the 1v1 and team RM modes. Like at the moment I really want to play EW but finding a fair balanced game is a nightmare whilst the Elos are all in so much flux. This feels like it could have been easily avoided 
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I donât agree that the queue times will be longer for everyone. If people are interested in joining a mixed map queue and an arabia-only queue then it would be as fast as it is today. It would be up to the player for how many queues they join which would determine their wait time. This is how it works now, the issue is the queues we have donât represent the preferences of the player base.
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I have not said that.
And I havenât said that eitherâŠ
Then donât quote my post, especially in reply to someone else⊠I did not say the queue should be Arabia-only, just that if half the maps in the pool are not competitive, it is a legitimate request to give players ways to not play them.
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Then shouldnât the push be for better and more competitive maps in the map pool? I think most people can get behind this, whereas unlimited bans comes with a whole host of issues that are often unaddressed by those advocating for it.
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My biggest issue - is I get band for 5 minutes because my game crashed during load. thatâs not cool - fix that bug.
The debate should not be about whatâs competitive and whatâs not.
The debate should be, why are we not ending this insanity, where a game studio is making half the community fight the other half, over what should be personal preferences, and due to a technical limitation. Maps and game modes should be personal preference, they have been personal preference for 20 years, and then suddenly DE comes out with its bugged ban algorithm, and now people like you speak about how itâs good to enforce variety and how itâs good that DE developers have designed it this way, when it clearly just is a pure algorithmic limitation showing that they werenât able to implement proper map bans in the matchmaking system.
I donât care if you like random map, and I donât care if a guy wants to play Arabia-only, what I care about though, is that we should not engage in actively killing the ranked community for stupid reasons, and right now we are doing exactly that. There are various polls showing that at least 25% Alt-F4 just because of maps they donât like, so what is the goal, to have 25% of the playerbase banned, because the other 75% do not play the game the same way?
Nobody plays TGs already at high Elo, the game is full of smurfs, do you think the issue right now is that the TG map pool would not be competitive with unlimited bans? While there are maps like Nomad and BF in the pool? While the TG Elo is still broken even after devs multiple attempts to fix it? Tell me, what is so bad about unlimited bans that is worth losing 25% of the ranked players while also making everyone engage in hostile debates and causing 10x more issues while trying to fix the Alt-f4?
EDIT: single-handedly â âjust becauseâ, so that WoeIsToWhoâs joke becomes obsolete.
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