Hello,
Alright so firstly I truly want TG ranked, but how the game is and how developers have acted in past, I don’t feel like its good idea at all and my prediction is it will fail miserably and takes game to worse direction. So here is my arguments why it shouldn’t happen.
- First and most important is balance. Game cannot be balanced around 4 different modes and all different civ combinations. With introduction of ranked TG, many players will start feeling that the mode they play should be priority for balance or game should get X balance change, because its too op in XvX and this is bad thing. In the past developers have nerffed certain units specifically because of TG’s. For example Firelancers which were never used sameway in 1v1 as they were in TG’s. This left unit to be completely useless. There is also many other tactics that are not viable or very hard to execute in 1v1.
For example: English + Abba council hall to face + dark age ram rush. This tactic is insanely hard to defend because english pulls 4-8 villagers which can kill anything you can throw at them at dark age and builds council hall to your face while denying gold if possible. This follows up abba proxying barracks and building rams to your base followed by english building stone wall and positioning longbows there. I have not seen any other civ able to defend against this other than french or english. Its possible to defend with other civs or win the game as long as the player who isn’t getting rushed goes to fast castle and attacks abba and gives up on their ally. There is other variations of this but they’re not as strong as English + abba.
Another strategy is HRE fast imperial. Another player helps and supports HRE which can reach imperial 8-9min mark which leads to ultimate snowball and really hard to stop.
These are just few small examples. There is many more that are completely broken in TG’s.
Potential solution: Doesn’t exist.
- Next one is premade groups vs individuals or smaller groups. As of now its close to impossible to reach top rankings in AOE4 world without playing with premade (2v2 perspective). At some point along the line player faces multiple times in row premade of 2 players which got massive advantage over 2 solo players which often results loss even if premades are bit lower elo than the solo player(s)
Potential solution(s): Premade groups are matched against each other (because smaller playerbase this is not good idea), premade groups gain less elo and lose more, because its easier to play in premade than its in solo so this is to balance things out.
- Another is the matchmaking. Currently TG matchmaking is wild west. Players may get teamed up or against with 500-2k elo difference which is too massive. I have played with and against with 300-500 elo while being 1700-1800. This shouldn’t ever happen.
Potential solution: Fix it. No one should be playing with or against vastly higher or lower players.
- Then the specific rules of games. Its easier to deny sacred site victory condition in 1v1 vs TG’s especially on maps that got 1 sacred site.
Potential solution: Increase sacred site victory timer by x amount of minutes based on how many players are in match.
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Trading in TG’s and meta. Currently TG’s its too easy and too profitable to trade which has brought up the best unit comp in game which is spamming heavy cavalry which is by far strongest unit in game and its “too” easy to achieve infinite gold and food in TG’s. Meta would be same in 1v1 if the trading was as easy to do as its in TG’s.
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Leavers. Now this is something which is one of the most annoying aspects of TG’s when playing with random allies. Players leave the match even when its not over and now Im not talking about situation where anothers base is destroyed but something very minor goes wrong and they leave. I play anwhere from 10-20 games per day and around 20% of my games are lost because of this and this results me losing most of time 50-100 elo and usually match gives me 5-10 elo. There is no simple solution for this, because vote surrender etc do not really work in RTS or games where votes can go 50-50 easily like 2v2. Also it won’t remove fact that ppl afk or because they didn’t find enough sheep or other stupid reasons. I had abbasid in last game leaving because he took berries at middle of map at start of game and HRE pushed it with MAA when he hit castle and abba had nothing to deal with it even tho I was coming to help. Game wasn’t over and we actually had upper hand, but because it become 2v1, I had no choice to leave too after both enemies came to my base.
These are my arguments why TG ranked is bad for the game and how it will be failure. Without devs solving these issues, I cant see any reason to make TG ranked yet alone fact that it would work well.