Ranked games are 90% made of 1v1s. Time for a change?

Ranked team-games are dying … It’s so hard to find a game and when you get one, you are put to play against pre-made teams, meanwhile your teammate is a newbie or 200 elo under the opponent team.
Because of that, most of the team games moved to Browse Lobbies section, meanwhile Ranked matches are mostly made of 1v1s.

Something needs to be changed. This is so annoying.

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The team game seems to be in the middle of the treaty with 1vs1. But what is certain is that team games rarely benefit from balance, but I don’t think it’s wrong. The default mode of all RTSs is 1vs1 supremacy, and even when AOE3 was a WCG event in the past, only 1vs1 supremacy was in progress.

We should be able to discuss the balance between the team game and the treaty after adjusting the balance of 1vs1.

No, nothing needs to be changed. 1v1 is literally the mode most people have time for, and the majority does not want to play in a Team with unknown players.

1v1 just dominates RTS. It is THE game mode par excellence, of the genre.

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Team game balance is a mess, but dev considered treaty balance prior to team game.

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Lol, I mean lol.

Never in the history of AOE3 has the number of 1v1 crossed even 1/3 of the teamgames at the same moment.
Let’s not even talk about the fact than in a teamgame there’s obviously 2x to 4x the number of players of a 1v1 game.

Right now, with lobbies and rec games, there’s like 40 players in 1v1 and like 100 in teamgames.

  • we can’t see games being played in lobbies, which are 99% teams.

1V1 is the competitiv mode of RTS, that’s right.

Age of Empire 3 community is mostly teamgames players, that’s a simple fact. I don’t know why some try to deny it still after 15 years. If you abandon teamgames, the game just fall appart.

I mean, on legacy there was moments when there were even more players doing scenario than 1v1 in the lobbies…

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3DE must have team game system of 2DE, which allows selecting civ after allies and map are decided.

That is verifiably false. The number of 1v1 matches was always higher than team matches, although you are right that it should be taken into consideration how team matches feature more players at once.


Source: https://eso-community.net/population-statistics

Adjusting for the actual number of players involved per-match, we can still infer that the number of team players does seem higher overall, although not to such an extreme extent.

Anyway, onto the topic of improving current situation. I think a big problem in the current system is that it pairs players of very uneven skill levels, which usually results in frustrating games for everyone involved. There should be a way to limit the Elo range you are searching in, just like there was a selectable PR range in the original game.

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First of all, your stats don’t includ vanilla, and on vanilla there was literally no 1v1 community, but the playerbase overall wasn’t that far away from TAD.

According to your own stats. There is =

  • 2 800 000 player taken into 1v1.
  • 2 320 000 players taken into 2v2.
  • 3 900 000 players into 3v3.

Other is scenario/FFA etc… I’d take 5 players.

Others = 500 000

So, according to your own stats :

1 400 000 1v1 were made involving 2 800 000 players.

1 330 000 teamgames were made involving 6 720 000 players

2 800 000 1v1 players vs 6 720 000 teamplayers. Idk how is my statement false.

  • of course, it’s not each time a different person. But there’s 6 players in a 3v3, 8 in a 4v4. Only 2 in 1v1. So even according to the fact it’s the same players again and again, the community is still playing WAY more teamgames…

What you are saying, is that :

10 players plays one 1v1 each : = 5 games

1000 players do once a 500 vs 500 = 1 game

The community rather 1v1 ! 5 match vs 1 ! But this is biased point of view… :confused:

This game never had 3-4 million players on MP.

Dude, of course. The average peak was for years between 1000 and 2000.

But how else in my limited english can I formulate this ? I never said one player make one game.

But it is impossible to know how many players are doing how many 1v1, teams etc… so I’m just explaining that wayyyyy more teamgames were played than 1v1 if you count the number of players, which is a fact.

Depends on your interpretation of ‘balance’. True in terms of power levels yeah, 1vs1 is significantly more balanced, but in terms of content redundancy… well… 1vs1 leaves a LOT to be desired. I would argue between cards, units, revolts, politicians, wonders, council members, the whole lot around 70-80% of the game gets ignored in 1vs1. In team games that number is significantly lower. 1vs1 also focuses much more on mastery through repetition rather than actual understanding of the game.

Sure, that’s exactly how some people like it… (much to my frustration) and goodness knows there’s enough bots out there who throw a hissy fit at the slightest thing that threatens the meta.

I hear you though. I don’t play the game at all except vs. the AI anymore because of this issue and I came here to make a thread on that basically asking them to make the AI worth playing because well it isn’t when they run their units into cannons/towers constantly but that’s another thread.

Lobby games aren’t ideal either because they are usually quite one sided, and ranked games, even with a bunch of friends, you either stomp the opponent or know your opponents are going to stomp you because you know them and their skill level far surpasses yours.

To be blunt though, none of this surprises me. The whole way AoE3 DE has been handled, the issues that exist, the bugs that get through the net with patches, everything… its not at all surprising people are losing interest in this game. It was always the red headed step child and thus was never going to get the quality control it needed and honestly its ‘failure’ is more or less a self fulfilling prophecy.

“Distribution of 1v1 matches versus team matches on ESO, as recorded by ESOC Elo Ladder (its recording started in 2017-06). Only rated matches lasting longer than 2 minutes are counted.” So I assume the other category is 4v4 anyway we can infer that there’s a lot more team players either way and this is doubly true for treaty which according to the statistics you provided has more 3v3 games than 1v1 games with 2v2 games barely below the amount of 1v1 games.

I don’t really see why you’d argue for merely tweaking quicksearch especially when the current way of calculating “elo” which can’t really be called elo at this point for team games when it’s only based on your rating vs the highest rated player on the opposite team. There’s also the issue of your highest rating across all game modes affecting rating in the other when you play those first 10 games in the other game mode leading to absurd levels of inflation.

If you really wanted to improve the current situation perhaps it’d be better to look at making treaty lobby games ranked, probably dm games as well and perhaps even sup team games instead of letting the game especially team games which always comprised most of the actual playtime of the playerbase to continue slowly dying off. You could even compile the playtime stats to make a comparison between how much time players are spending on team games and 1v1 in different game modes to argue for such a change since you have such data available.

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Team games is a lot more popular mode especially at the low/ mid tier players.

Considering team games lasts longer, involve more players per match and usually took a lot longer to start (ppl coming in and leaving the lobby to fill a 3v3). I would say I could probably get 2 games in 1v1 at the same duration from hosting a 3v3 to completing a match.

And if u could put a time line of games played for the different modes…U would probably see a drop in 1v1 compared to team (especially 3v3) in the last recent years.

What im saying is…team games is very integral part of aoe3 and was probably the mode that kept legacy alive for so many years…

Wish the devs recognised this and actually put a bit more effort and creative solutions on how to improve the current team environment

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As a spanish main in teamgames that has being playing mainly teamgames for years I couldnt agree more

I thought this was an issue. But the reality is that it is not. This is a cooperative game. Play against players, make friends and then tackle the ranked team ladder.
With the new friend system it is even easier.

True there are clans, but people get invited to clans all the time while playing non ranked.

I think that is part of the community aspect of the game. If you dont want that part, you have the 1vs1. :slight_smile:

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