Hi all,
Currently top players and streamers such as Beastyqt and DeMuslim often have to wait a very long time in queue. Its pretty common for the queue times for these players to be 6m+, other 8m many times as well. Often at the end of this long wait they end up playing a much weaker opponent. This results in a poorer experience for people watching the streams as there is considerable downtime and many mismatched games. I would like to offer some potential solutions to this to improve the aoe4 viewing experience on streaming platforms.
I am working under the assumption that the system implemented in patch-12973 are still in effect.
https://www.ageofempires.com/news/age-of-empires-iv-server-side-patch-12973/
I believe that when looking at the ladder rankings and the system described in the patch, the source of the problem is easy to identify.
At the top of the ladder we have our 2000+ elo players. This is mostly the top 20. Once you hit rank 100, we already have a difference of 300 elo (even more for Beastyqt at 2200+). Using the system shown in the patch notes, it would take 5 minutes of queuing before a top 20 and top 100 player could match with each other. However, with 1.5 more minutes in queue we now have an uncapped search. This results in a system in which the top players have to queue 5m to get a good top 100 match but then only have around 1.5 minutes once they get there before they start finding plat level players.
My proposal is to treat the top level players differently when queuing. A rule could be implemented that for players above 1600 or so (this can be played around with) have a different queue system that gives them more time to match with top 100 players before moving out too wide.
See patch notes above for current times
For example:
For a 2000 elo player
Max elo delta 1-1.5m in queue - 100
Max delta 1.5m-3m - 300
Max delta 3m-5m-500
With this, a 2000+ elo player could queue with a top 100 player at 1.5m. Then the they around 1.5 minutes to match with a top 100 before moving to all conq players. This gives 5m of queue in which the search is wider then current parameters but also doesn’t match them with diamond/plat players.
Of course, all of these parameters and elo cutoff can be tuned. Since the initial change was a server side patch I hope that this one could also be a easy win after new year holidays. I think this would greatly increase the aoe4 streaming viewing experience, which is a win for everyone! Thanks.