This makes no sense. Empire Wars is just like RM but skips the dark age. DM starts with thousands of resources, all upgrades and explored map…
Glad devs dont listen to one or two comments online or games would be a mess. So much incorrect information being thrown around.
Yes, in the end there’re so many variation of game modes, so I don’t think fitting all game modes into one ranked elo is doable, worse when lots of players prefer to play on certain maps only.
In order to make Elo work best, the player pool has to be sufficient, which is the reason why more players are encouraged to go into ranked than lobby, but first, we have to study the reason why many players refuse to go ranked. Maybe some of my information above were inaccurate such as RM is same as DM. Please take it with a grain of salt, my intention is to hope to provide insights, and discussions are always welcomed. 
Disclaimer: I’m not a pro player but a loyal one where I played AoK and TC during my school years, I didn’t know and played HD until recent years and continued playing DE with my father. So some of the HD features I might missed.
Insights:
For SC2 they did revamped a couple of times their matchmaking system throughout the past 10 years, and I feel it’s pretty good today. As an overview, SC2 has 3 servers, which they separate world players based on different regions for better matchmaking and latency, namely US / SEA server(including Oceania AU), Asia server (KR/TW), and Europe server. Each of them further categorise their players into different leagues based on ranked from the lowest to the highest, the Leagues are: Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, Master and Grandmaster. I find this categorisation fit into modern RTS and MMO games today where many are familiar with it. It can be seen as an in-game achievement. There are numerous divisions within each League, with each division being composed of up to 100 players (for further easier categorisation making the list less crowded). The process of matchmaking is based solely on MMR and not on a player’s division or league.
Players are ranked within their division based on their Points. The function of points is to determine a player’s rank within their division. After having completed their placement matches, players start out with 0 points. The number of ladder points is only weakly correlated to skill. Especially if players have unspent bonus pool, ladder points tend to measure activity level much more strongly than performance. The Bonus Pool is the sum of all “bonus points” a player can get in a particular division, mainly to encourage players to play games so their points are always trending upward, to me this is optional.
You earn or lose points by winning or losing matches, respectively. To simplify how it works in practice.
y = (+/-)12 + x + z
where
=> “x” is a value in the interval of [-12,12], positive numbers are when your opponent is favored
(of course, if you are the slightly/favored player, then “x” is negative, which means you will lose more or win less than 12 points)
“z” will be greater than zero when your bonus pool is > 0. In which case z = 12 + x, permitted you have enough points in your bonus pool.
You may refer to this link Battle.net Leagues - Liquipedia - The StarCraft II Encyclopedia for more detailed information on Starcraft 2 matchmaking system.
Again, I do not intend we take everything from there, just sharing it as I feel they’ve done a great job and we can learn something, and some parts AOE2 DE are different, for instance:
Sorry for the long post. I hope I’m making the posts on track to the title. You guys may quote me for discussion to make the game great again! Again, please take a grain of salt on them, hope we have a great discussion ahead!
First: I will have a look at your insight about SC II at a later moment. So dont worry, i will respond to that, since i like suh insight.
I dont think there needs to be one ranked elo. I can see we have the following:
RM 1v1
RM team
DM 1v1
DM team
EW 1v1
EW team
regicide FFA (?)
KOTH FFA (?)
Something like this. This seems pretty much doable. Question in the end will be: Is the number of players of each mode sufficient? Probably only for RM, but DM already has a ladder and i dont really think EW or KOTH has less players. There are always some lobbies with this game mode.
Like i said i will respons to this part of your post. I try to understand how it works at SC II.
To me SC II has two different kind of systems:
I feel like SC2 had much more players. On Steam you can see the number of players. This will pick around 30.000. Then we have Xbox live, but i dont know if you can see the numbers of active users. Note that some of the users are playing the game in single player or as unranked. Those are not part of matchmaking.
For RM 1v1 there are currently 33,342 players on the ranking (at least 10 games).
For RM team games this number is 48,187. To me a surprise: More players at the team game ladder than on the 1v1 ladder. I dont know anything about the number of games for each players. I always thought getting a 1v1 is much easier than a team game. So a new surprise to me.
You can compare this numbers to SC II. I think SC II will win without doubt. If you have more players, you can also have more different kind of rankings to me. So i can understand
Us a surprise to me, your right. But dont have a look at the lobby. I have see the ongoing games at the lobby. I think half of the games is against AI. I dont think games against AI needs to be part of Ranked games. But again, also in Unranked games most games are team games, i feel.
There are even 193,564 players with at least 10 unranked games! Based on the ongoing games this is also a surprise to me. I thougth it would be a bit largers, but not with this factor. It would be great of we can make them move to Ranked games as well. More games in ranked is better ratings to me. This means we need to know why they play unranked games and maybe make changes for them.
I feel like most attention go to 1v1. Even most big tournaments focus on 1v1, but by the looks the team game community is much bigger than i was expecting!
Does SC II just have 1 game mode? Or do i see this wrong? I also dont know how maps where generated in SC II, so i dont know how the variaty is between the maps played at SC2. For civs (or races) they have only 3. For 3 civs it is much more easy to balance the civs, since all match ups are pretty common, even on high level. If you had a larger player base, it is much more easy to analyse winrate and such things.
I think some of you guys take the elo too seriuosly. I feel it doesn’t really matter if you are 1600 player but you still lose to 1400 in water maps, it doesn’t matter. It’s your problem that you don’t want to learn new maps, It’s only your problem.
I think the most important part was that you still had freedom to never play those maps you don’t like.
It is clear you only care about playing Arabia only and you dont really care about anything else.
I’m gonna ask a question.
If they don’t add the other game mods to MM, will it be bad to have a Ranked Lobby for at least those?
I mean, not that I care, but if someone just wants to play ranked Arabia, if they ever get to MM they will have a hard time in less standard maps. So, that will be their disadvantage
I’ll try to answer these three statements here. Basically, eventually it goes back to the dev and the community to determine the main focus game type as the standard, most likely it will be RM 1v1, and my next bet will be RM 2v2 and 3v3. 4v4 will be slightly complicated to balance, but I think it’s not far of a difference compared to 3v3. I do hope that tournaments will include RM team games in the future, it certainly would be fun to watch.
For other modes such as DM, EW, and Regicide can be added into ranked, on a rotational basis. I believe this is gonna be fun to play too. FFA and KotH are consider fun modes to me, interesting to watch and play, can be in brawl modes. So the main ranked can be at random modes in 1v1 and team games consist of RM conquest, DM, EW, and Regicide, plus rotational map pools, These are more than enough variation I believe, so the unranked players (lobby) can see if the map pool, and game mode that they like has come to ranked, and join ranked for the season.
In order to encourage unranked players to join ranked, perhaps favourite maps like Arabia and BF can be set as default maps in every map pool for the time being, and reduce number of maps selection to 4 maps a season so higher chances in getting their favourite maps, then allow 2 soft ban maps in the pool. Soft ban means less favoured maps, but as queuing time goes longer, it can be played in a match since no closer range players around. We have to take into account that we can’t allow a too high level player to play against a low rated player just because they chose the same map. The number of maps in map pool can slowly increase thereafter based on future community and balance feedback. I believe this is doable, both balancing ranked players environment and encouraging more unranked players to go ranked, it’s less discouraging this way.
For AI games, it can’t be mixed with ranked for sure, but we can have another pool for them to have their own rating, perhaps a simpler rating calculation (+/- 25 each AI game or something), just to determine their skill against AI, can have team vs AI and another rating for it based on different players. For example, Jerry is having 1450 AI rating, Oliver has 1850 AI rating, teaming together vs AI, then their total average rating will be 1650 AI rating, playing against 2 Hard AI, for example. The difficulty breakdown can be discussed later if wanted.
This is correct, not much influence on MMR, the Leagues and Divisions are just segregating the players of different ranges into different rooms, easier to look around to similar rated players, add friends, check history, etc. But mainly, Leagues indicate your MMR range too since MMR is used to determine which league are you in, hence your skill level at a particular point. Same like our Elo, but shown in Bronze, Silver, Gold, Plat, Diamond, Master, and Grandmaster, to show if you’re a Gold player (hence, people will know your skill level roughly). Easier to categorise this way, more familiar to today’s players around, better than to say 1400 is better than 1200, as it’s meaningless if you tell people your rating, and rating inflates or changes from time to time, but Platinum players mostly will lose to Diamond and above generally. I feel our Elo range is a bit too narrow (1000 to today’s top rated player 2314), maybe it’s still new or we need more players to join ranked. Widening the range will be easier to determine skill level, as else too little difference in rating but huge skill difference.
I believe you’re saying about bonus pool. It’s an additional feature in their MMR to encourage players to go ranked to earn more rating points as an active bonus besides to use it to widen player ratings among themselves. I can’t say much about how accurate will this be affecting rating, just a plus to me for earning more rating points, that’s it.
I feel the same too, SC2 having more players, and generally shorter game time, around 10 mins per game on average, compared to AOE2’s 20 mins (real time) a game at least, for 1v1, much longer for 2v2 and more, so this explains long waiting time for team games. Unranked players to join team ranked games will definitely reduce this by a large margin.
For team games rating, each time having a different players in the same team will have different rating (in SC2), unless you’re queuing alone to play ranked team games then you’ll have your own team game rating.
The idea of multiple ladders for better MM experience was also discussed in this thread. The discussions are pretty much related, since it will fix both issues.
I do support the idea of having some different ladderes. We can even have some global ladder:
RM 1v1 → Just like now, this is the global ladder. This reflects your overal skill level and needs to be the most important ladder. I would say that the number 1 of this ladder is the true best 1v1 player.
RM 1v1 Open maps → Only for open maps, will be used in MM if you are playing a open map
RM 1v1 Closed maps → Only for open maps, will be used in MM if you are playing a closed map
RM 1v1 Hybrid maps → This will be used for other maps, like pure hybrid maps, but also thinks like water maps, Nomad, MegaRandom, MM will use this rating for this kind of matches.
After the match you get an update to RM 1v1 rating and to RM 1v1 rating. With this we can easily expand the curret MM system to even other kind of maps / game modes. In the end, most games are played on MM system, so we dont need any ranked lobby any more. If you go to lobby, most players will have accurate Elo from MM which can be used for teams in Lobby.
To me such system would look like the system of SC II which have proved itself if i much believe you. Just one note: This only works if the player base is big enough.
I am not a fan of ranked games against AI. But that is just me. It can be part of a completely different rating with no connection to the other ladders.