Ranked multiplayer experience is (still) trash

I’ll quickly sum up the last few games I played:

  • 3v3: player in my team immediately surrenders when 4 camels attack his villagers (even though he has barracks up and could build spear men… as I told him)
  • 3v3: player has yellow clock since the beginning and makes the game run @<20 FPS for everyone else. I quit the game as I don’t wanna keep playing like this for 45+ min. Is there a way to bypass the benchmark test or is the score requirement just ridiculously low?
  • 3v3: after 1-2 min player in my team pauses the game without giving a reason and ALT+F4 out of the game. However, we are only able to see that he quit AFTER unpausing the game (which we did after having waited for 5 mins). Basically we waited like fcking morons while he has already quit the game. Why do such people exist? Yea he got a report. Are they even reviewed?
  • 3v3: player in my team is obviously the biggest noob and far behind in player score. Matched with a player who’s at the completely wrong rating.

The AoE 2 dev can be glad that there are not many popular RTS alternatives on the market right now because this is NOT how you keep your playerbase alive. And latter is already shrinking fast…

I know that there are some obvious limitations with the old AoE2 engine but the multiplayer is completely new and there are many things the devs could implement to improve the player experience:

  • Increase the necessary benchmark score for ranked. Players with bad PCs can still play unranked
  • At the same time, show the benchmark score also in unranked lobbies if players don’t wanna deal with this. It’s their right!
  • Players who are far below the average player score in every match, should lose rating faster.
  • Actually give us some feedback when measures were taken against a player who we reported
  • Make surrendering early a report reason. This ruins the game for everyone and players who do this simply do not care about their rating and hence should be banned from ranked mode. Make it temporary if you want to.

There are so many things which need to be fixed asap because the product was released unfinished but Microsoft is taking way too much time to do so. Most of the team is probably not working anymore on AoE2. Releasing an unfinished product and drip feeding urgent fixes… that’s terrible support.

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Benchmark test issue isn’t that it sets a low bar, but that it can be bypassed by some simple tricks like not looking at the battlefield and some others (that’s what I’ve heard). Imbalance in team games is caused by many factors, some of which are:
-premade teams are matched up against randoms, which means that a very weak player can achieve reasonable rating thanks to communication with friends and then play with randoms.
-winning a game on average gives significantly more points than losing a game subtracts. At 2100+ about 20-30% of the playerbase has 40-45% winrate with 500-1000 games, which should (in theory) result in roughly 0-100 rating, but somehow they have 2k. Also, there are 2.2k players with 40 wins and 20 loses without any significant number of games in other modes, which is absolutely ridiculous, how do you even get this many points per victory? As the result, rating at 1900-2300 means nothing, which causes imbalance.

Imposing a penalty on those with low score doesn’t solve the issue when you apparently get +20 for each victory and -10 for each loss.

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imo the report feature is just a placebo, there have been a number of guys here reporting blatant cheating with screenshots which went on something like 2 weeks? if that stuff isnt solved, some suspect debatle issue sure as heck wont be

this is completely and utterly irrational and likely based on you feeling bad atm. you dont punish the gimp for being put into a high ranked team. wtf logic is that? imagine you are the gimp, aoe has decided you must go into a team with elo +200 players, of course you will get rekt, you might not be the person that drops, but tons of people would rather drop then be put through that hell, who’s fault is it?

drives me nuts, but its not only score dodgers, its also this latest patch causing intermittent performance issues, as wll as the usual server garbage.

just lol. the game is still hugely popular despite everything mentioned here, unfortunately for you, the community doesnt automatically share your extreme feelings just because you want them to… go look at steam reviews… nvm ill share them here brb

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image

cough cough… yes they need to fix the issues but what you said is 115% untrue…

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Seriously? The game (supposedely) removes mouse control during the test, if there is a way to bypass that that’s a huge exploit.

I thought about this too. Why not tweak the score so that premade team gain less ELO/lose more, so that their overall better winrate doesn’t make them ladder climb instantly?

Honestly I don’t think losing more ELO will make people feel punished. And even then, since it means they will get faster with players of their skill level, they should quickly forget about it.

I haven’t found a way to move the view, but the zoom level makes a huge difference to the score. This PC scores 955 fully zoomed out, and 1159 fully zoomed in. I regard it as not good enough for 4v4, but if the benchmark is done zoomed in, it very comfortably exceeds the required score.

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I thought the new server-based system made it so one player’s game running slow didn’t affect the other players tho?

Sorry this is also very counter intuitive. An arranged team will perform better than a random random team.

If this was implemented it would mean i would need to be repeatedly rekt by the same imbalanced OP team before they win their way out of my bracket.

These issues would be reduced if the devs weren’t so lazy and just implemented seperate elo for each team composition like literally almost every RTS today.

A random team elo and a matched team elo should never be interlinked since they can have such extremely varying results depending on team composition.

Each arranged team should have its own elo. We should technically go so far that 2v2, 3v3, 4v4 random TG has its own elo.

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But they already have a low elo. The issue is the server matching them on those occasions with high teams due to faulty calculations.

Hypothetical example i have 1000 elo. Im matched with 1200 on 3 back to back games for irrational server reasons. I lose more elo than i should so drop down to 900. The next time I play the server puts me in the right bracket for my elo (900) and im now way more skilled than my elo reflects(should be closer to 1000)and the TGs are a cake walk.

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Who’s talking about punishment? This is a fast adjustment system. The faster the “gimp” lands at his true rating, the sooner he can actually have fun without always being stomped by higher-skilled players. Games will be less frustrating for him as well as for his team mates.

How in the world do steam reviews mirror the current active player base? Let me show you maybe a graph of the actual player base in the recent months.

Taken from steamcharts.com which tracks the player number given us by Steam. I see a small but steady decline in the player base.

Nevertheless, I think we can agree on that not fixing long term issues which have been there since release hurts the player base. Of course there are some issues people can live with but other issues are more like “WTF?! they still haven’t fixed this?!?!”

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Although there are very few games that don’t fit this bill within a year of release. Even more so for strategy games.

I forgot about the graphs, but i would bet aoe2de still has better numbers than any other rts on steam.

Definitely agree though. It feels like they are putting all their time into the next cash cow. Especially with this “quarterly balance patch release”.

(which might make more financial sense?)

Greater elo loss is a punishment. Also i explained the fault with team match ups and how this doesn’t resolve it and could lead to bad match ups in the wrong direction afterwards.

Also the steam reviews convey a sense of the general feeling of the game. We know people will complain much sooner than they will compliment so of course the forums will have complaints. But if the majority of people had such big issues they would take it to the reviews. You sure as Heck wouldn’t have 1000’s of reviews with “overwhelmingly positive 94%” if remotely half the people playing weren’t happy…

Ive seen it from all the other strats i played that didn’t pan out or simply had bad starts. Rome 2 had terrible reviews until it was stabilised and swung around. DOW3 has terrible reviews.

But peak 30k down to peak 20k imo isn’t such a bad drop for an rts within a year

its not a quarterly patch. its quarterly BALANCE patch.
they still did fixes in the last patch to the game, which was just a few weeks ago.

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My mistake. Sorry. 20cha

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i’m not mad at you or anything, i just don’t want misinformation out there confusing people.

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Its too late daddy. I took myself to the naughty corner. And im flaying my body into submission :joy:

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As much as I like reading on creative bedroom talk, this is not the best forums for it.
:wink:

We will judge it once it’s out. Maybe they decided to do that since people were kind of disappointed when the balance notes are short, even when they contain huge changes like the Aztec general nerf.

people are always disappointed when a patch comes out because the change they had in mind was implemented, and ofc it’s always the most important, even if it involves some bullshit like buffing an op civ, nerfing a bad one or destroying a (meme) strats they don’t know how to counter

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Funny, that rise and decline in players also coincides with a certain global event that had everyone stuck at home for months :thinking::thinking::thinking:

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