In late 2025, the developers shortened queue times, resulting in most people finding matches in one minute or less.
Although this lead to some matches of greater elo disparity, the community seemed to generally welcome the convenience of short queue times.
I live in Australia, which is far (in physical distance) from many of the large player bases of aoe2. Under the original Definite Edition match making, us Aussies would frequently get matched with Chinese, Vietnamese and Indian players. We have decent enough connection to the servers in those regions and the lag was totally playable for some fun, casual ranked games. (Ping up to 150ms)
However, since the late 2025 change, the short queue times have us matching very frequently against Europeans, North Americans and South Americans. This is fine when the connection is in tact (Ping up to 300ms), but it causes the “lost connection” lag spikes which mean none of your inputs register for approximately 10-30 seconds, while the connection is re-established.
I’d estimate approximately 75% of my matches now end prematurely due to huge lag for either myself or my opponent.
The lag spikes make the game unplayable. It’s a waste of time and a complete killjoy. It genuinely makes me want to give up the game and I know a lot of other Australians feel the same way. I fear that this single change has effectively exiled the passionate Australian AOE2 community from ranked play. I fear it will be really difficult to win those players back in the future.
Devs - Please revert to the longer queue times!