If RTS will always be limited to appealing people that liked the genre 20-30 years ago it will eventually die out.
AoMR is probably the best suited title in the series to attract new players.
The original AoM just happened to be released right after Warcraft 3 so it never had the chance to become as popular as it deserves.
btw.
I didn’t even know AoM had autoqueue until I read about it in this forum, apparently I never noticed what the button does back when I originally played it.
I very much agree with this part.
And it was added in The Titans.
So if that is the decisive feature that makes AoM not espooooorts enough, then the vanilla AoM must have been a huge espooooorts game before the expansion.
Actually according to accounts, this is closer to home than your sarcasm intended:
They say there was a decently thriving multiplayer community for AoM, and they quickly dissipated after The Titans came out.
This is my recollection as well.
I said this because I know there is a lot of polarization on this automatic queue issue and I was heavily criticized for it, especially by the hardcore side of AoE players because they tend to detest this.
You have to try to reach a consensus and not close yourselves in lines of thinking. You have to try to find a way to favor the new player and not harm the old school player who likes the more competitive side.
Just disable auto-queue in ranked play, here’s your compromise ¯_(ツ)_/¯
It is one more idea like mine, I invite the rest to reach consensus in this polarization and not to remain in some closed ideas.
I only ever played the Titans because I bought the Game of the Year edition or something like that years later, after I played AoE3 already.
Anyway I want autoqueue not because I’m a noob that needs assistance but because I like levelling the playing field.
I want to be able to play with my friends without them being stuck behind because they keep forgetting to queue villagers.
You’ve got a couple of too many o’s in the word “esports”.
It’s okay to be a noob Skadidesu it won’t hurt you. But we all understand your “friends” need a more reliable and comfortable way to get used to mechanics. And don’t worry! You are not alone. I myself never really used auto queue till I played on EE. Never even realised too it was there. But now it’s very comfortable and a good way to be able to hold against very hard AI. (yeah I am one of those too who never had friends who play my games and only every played vs AI silly me I know but from what I heard regarding EE’s multiplayer and how many issues it had I am glad I missed multiplayer - TILL NOW. Prepare to lose against me when AoMRetold arrives!
Playing with friends isn’t ranked play, so the auto-queue should still be there.
I personally don’t play ranked, so I wouldn’t care if the feature was disabled in ranked.
But I think it would still be good to have mechanics that level the playing field a little.
It is easier to find an similarly skilled opponent, which creates the most fun matches, if the average difference in skill is not as big.
That’s what elo is for.
Tell that to Norse players who get almost no economic benefit due to having to juggle between ox carts, dwarves and gatherers. All other civs will be like “0 TC idle time”.
Overall, I would learn towards not having autoqueue or making it worse than manually queueing as it does make great economy way too easy to maintain and agression pay off much less since enemy won’t have TC or Dock idle time even when their camera is elsewhere. Now I do understand lot of you guys don’t like fights happening before deep into Heroic Age, but little bit of early Classical age aggression that isn’t all-in should also be viable strategy to get economic advantage.
Look, it doesn’t matter who gets more or less benefit, yes civ that has to produce resource drops off has it worst as they can’t be done and ignore TC, but that same civ has lot of other advantages to compensate, no need to rebuild drop-offs or spent villager time on building…
Military units building buildings is one of the strongest advantages you could ask for. (forward bases anywhere, without loosing gathering time)
Balance has no solution, there is no such thing as perfectly balanced game, even chess is unbalanced game. For video games balance is just how fair the game feels, mathematically you are more likely to prove that it’s completely unbalanced then even remotely close be being balanced and fair.
I would say that, most of us agree that the best compromise is to make ranked & tournament mode with AQ disabled so everyone, who care about it, can be satisfied. If someone still keeps hating it, then that person is problem and his opinion should be politely ignored. Gatekeeping is not going to help making RTS games more popular, we need more players, not less.
Just leave AQ in all other gamemodes, casuals are mostly uninterested in playing highly competitive PvP.
Casual playerbase that is major and dominant part of sales enjoys slower games with large armies that is not demanding 100% attention, after they come home. And majority spents most of the time just in games against AI whatever it’s skirmish, coop or campaign. One of the reason, why it’s so hard to maintain higher population is that you need constantly new content for these players, but in return they will buy it.
What competitive people are worried about is that the RTS won’t be hard enough to supplement diverse meta with competitive playerbase and tournaments.
AQ extending to all unranked games also has its issues because unranked lobbies are also popular amongst people who take game seriously. After all best matchmaking happens when top players do it themselves.
All AoE franchise is without autoqueue and I am not sure if the ranked players of AoM want to be the ones to be home to noobs that can’t press shift + V to queue multiple vills or keep track of their favor, at expense of their own game.
Yes, no autoqueue will lead to everyone having worse results. But if you’re strugging with campaign or bots then just tune the difficulty down. After all, you’re casuals. What does it matter if you take 40 minutes to build an army instead of 35 minutes?
No.
ELO sorts players by skill.
If there are not enough players with exactly your skill level it matches you against better or worse players.
But if the skill curve is flatter the players you will be matched against are more likely closer to your actual skill even if the ELO gap is the same.
This would generate more interesting matches and less one sided ones.
Better players will still outmicro you even if there was no macro in the game at all, so that’s hardly an argument.
But if it barely makes a difference why do you want to ban it?