Recently I had discussion about aoe4’s issues which aren’t being looked at enough, and in the process remembered that current ladder system, while it works more or less decently, has several issues, some of which are quite severe. So in an effort to hopefully bring attention to them (again), I’ll compile my thoughts here. Maybe someone notices it, maybe noone does, maybe it’s irrelevant, but here goes:-
- Teamgame ladder currently allows to queue with people of much lower ELO than your own account, and your team’s ELO will be calculated as the average of ELOs of everyone in the party. Certain players abuse this by intentionally creating smurf accounts, tanking their teamgame ELO and queueing with account of someone they wanna boost. For an example, look no further than current top1 of teamgame ladder - God O – AoE4 World - a supposed 3k+ ELO account queuing with 3 accounts of around 1k ELO (and they’re 1k after all the boosting) and getting matched with at most Conq1 TG opponents. He’s not actually playing against anyone who is legit top 100 of teamgame’s ladder, except other boosted accounts like him. This undermines teamgame’s ladder competitive integrity, this indirectly promotes creating these low rated smurfs (guess how they are created? by ruining games for other people in TGs so they can get losses), and is just terrible overall.
- “Points” being significantly different from ELO, especially after losing in placement matches. This is something that has been this way from the start, and I always thought it’s absolute bs. If this is supposed to encourage ladder activity, there are way better ways to do so (more on that below). What this does best is make the ladder extremely confusing for anyone that’s not familiar with how this ranked system works. In just the last few weeks, I’ve seen at least 3 or 4 threads on reddit alone with people either wondering why they’re fighting diamonds while in gold, or ranting about it, or just asking how the ranked system works. And these are just people that bothered to ask; I imagine there’re a lot more who are equally as confused but don’t ask about it. I for one would welcome if points just reflected player’s current ELO without any weird shifts in either direction.
- Ladder decay. Or rather, lack thereof. Right now if you’re Conq+, your points start aggressively decaying after 2 weeks of inactivity (and it’s bugged or something near the end of season because it starts decaying even after a day of inactivity). But the keyword here is “points”. Your ELO remains absolutely the same. ELO decay, even if present, is barely noticeable. I personally had an account which was inactive for over a year at one point, and when I came back - I played against the same level of ppl I was playing before. So… what is the point of decaying points but not ELO? Prevent people from pointsitting on high ranks is the only reason I can see, but, like, this comes at the cost of creating another scenario where points can significantly differ from your ELO. And I have definitely seen requests for an actual, proper, ELO decay, so if you’re inactive for a long time, you don’t have to resort to smurfing or getting repeatedly destroyed to re-learn the game.
So, what are potential solutions to those issues? My proposed changes:
- Simplest changes I can think of - forbid queueing ranked with pre-made team if ELO diff is too extreme, or make it so ELO is calculated according to the highest ranked player in pre-made team. Random teams unaffected;
- Just tie “points” to ELO so there’s no difference between the two and the system is transparent. To encourage ladder activity during the season, you could instead enforce playing specific amount of games (lets say 30) during a season to be eligible for end-season rewards. Alternative twist on this (for long seasons) - each month offer a single reward from the reward pool, but you need to play 10 games this month to grab it - this way the ladder activity would be more evenly spread instead of spiking at the beginning or end of the season;
- Introduce a proper ELO decay after prolonged period of inactivity. Probably shouldn’t be as aggressive as point decay is, but something like -5 ELO/week after a month of inactivity should be fine? (or maybe that’s too conservative). For Conq+ I guess it can be as aggressive as their point decay so the two are tied. Also, point decay in the end of the season should be fixed IMO, why does it decay points for even a day of inactivity??