The matchmaking works for most people without constant complaining too. Back in lobbies you had unpredictable wait time, point traders, players would get alienated if they played an annoying strategy… If you had 0 games played no one wanted to play you afraid of you being a smurf, which really sucked for new players.
Also considering the extend that people go to win some points, I bet there would be stuff like checking players profiles and gaming history on aoeinsights/aoenexus to see strategies and units used before joining a lobby, favorite maps, favorite civs… Can you imagine joining a lobby and after 2 minutes you get kicked because the host doesnt like to play against Krepost Rush or Spanish Conqs?
I will give you that lobby system allows for some flexibility on the settings… But then should the ratings be shared between “Arabia”, “FFA Nomad” and “Regicide Fortress” anyway? There doenst seem to be that amount of players wanting to play the gimmicky settings on ranked to justify the effort. They can already play it on unranked (which also has a rating! Just not connected to the main one).
It would be nice to have the data on how many play solely arabia. I bet it’s less then what most think. I know it has a 60% pickrate right now but how many actually pick it as a favorite and it wasnt just the 1 of 2 maps to play left in the pool.
Yeah! Even though I don’t quite agree with the concept of skipping other maps on ranked (because again, ranked is supposed to show your overall skill in AoE2 and not just on Arabia), let’s just take that solution and be done with it! I just want this Alt F4 nonsense gone! If people only want to play Arabia, let them have it. Let them be the Hoangs of map picking. Or the Fatslobs
Then again, I would prefer it, if there were a better way. Give those people that only want to play on one map their own queue and let the grown-ups, that know and accept the rules of ranked play (meaning agreeing that you don’t always get what you prefer) play on ranked, without those Alt F4 annoyances.
I still prefer it that you are sometimes forced to play on other maps. It’s like in real tournaments, where you have home maps, but you also need to play on the enemies home maps. So you need to learn to adapt to “enemy terrain”, which I think is a very big part of Age of Empires and therefore needs to be part of the ranked system!
But most importantly, we need to get rid of the Alt F4 situation, it’s really getting annoying. I have the impression it’s getting worse by the day.
The solution @BillWayneWood presented could be something for “Quick Play”.
They could set up two separate ques in quick play along with a hidden elo. Arabia and arena. The hidden elo would work similarly to ranked except you couldn’t see it. Since it is quick play the server would look out 50 elo every set time till a player was found. This would allow them to have games and be placed by skill. It would keep the self centered out of ranked and still let them play games. This would also allow those maps to rotate out of ranked every so often.
For ranked team games the ladder should be running a lobby system, same like other small maps or game modes that only a quite small minority enjoys such as nomad or megarandom or that 0.0003% of all players who likes migration.
But the lobby has never been working properly, it doesn’t display all the game rooms, you can’t even find the games, despite you have the number of it, it is impressive that the unranked lobby from DE is even worse than the old lobbies in the HD, so even if i know that the lobby system is superior in order to find fair matches and more competitive with the current spaghetti code they have as lobby it would be an epic fail.
The silence of the devs just shows up how this small issues has not a simple fix, they will keep avoiding it until they are about to announce the 47 civs maybe lol, meanwhile lets just all pretend the game is growing and in a perfect state.
define minority…
less than half of all players prefer to play arabia, are arabia players a minority?? 11
i think it’s a mistake to underestimate the amount of people who like to play arena/bf/nomad/mega random/islands
there are players like me, who enjoy every map, but still suffer with the current system of map seletion, because other people alt-f4.
and yes, also i have my map preferences.
For TEAM GAME ONLY
We all are aware of how much time is wasted in the joining, re-grouping party due to Alt+F4 issue. Many solutions suggest inf bans or penalizing the small player base that we have. My solution is different and may help the devs. Please do not comment if your suggestion is aggressive or makes the community suffer… Only positive recommendations!
Split the 6 major categories into their own que system
These 4 maps are pretty much 62% of our game. The 5th category can be MegaRandom Que that contains various megarandom map generations or the “fun” maps like Socotra or what ever.
Then lastly, the 6th category can be what the community votes or the devs vote. These can be the new maps or any maps that community wants from voting.
Yes this is 6 different que options but this will result is FAR LESS Waste of time. Those people who wish to play TG Arabia all day long, let them play! Those who are arena clowns or BF Amigos, let them play their map all day long. Sure the que times may be longer since we are splitting the player base but its far better than playing lobby simulator for 30 mins of Alt F4.
This is how voobly was, players were allowed to play what map they wanted all day/year long. Please dont force the community to play maps they hate or dont enjoy. Aoe2 has always been about fun, let it be the way it was.
P.S Time to rest the entire ladder elo. We know what has happened lately.
There are not enough players to support all of that. Especially if you also branch out the TG ladder.
3 minute queue will turn into 15 especially for the uncommon maps. Bear in mind the game also has to find someone within your Elo range and then place you on a decent server. By this point its easier to have lobbies.
1v1 doesnt need any changes currently, 3 bans are enough.
Solo TG is the problem. To fix it I think they should add the “ACCEPT” button and whoever doenst accept a map should be put at the end of queue, whilst other players go to the front.
This way if someone really wants to be picky about their maps, they can stay in queue longer without affecting other players.
I see no other solution that wont create bigger problems.
Is it that difficult to understand why this isn’t a technically viable solution?
If the number of total bans is higher than the number of available maps, than there is a possible scenario, where every map is banned. This would lead to possibly endless queues for certain individual without a clear indication of why. The proposal is not a real solution, it just leads to other problems.
So the only reliable way to give you more bans is to increase the number of maps in the pool. Would that be better? You end up in a similar situation with more variety.
If you split the ladder Team A that likes maps 1, 2 and 3 can only queue for one of them, so he may be stuck in Queue 1, whilst Team B that likes maps 2, 3 and 4, is stuck in Queue 2, whilst they could both be playing. Thats 4-8 people in queue unnecessarily (bad matchmaking).
Its also 4 times more games to be played until a person/team reaches his Elo on each of these queues and starts finding good games, so 4 times more bad games (bad matchmaking).
And as I said, there are not enough players currently to properly support the TG as is.
It also is not the same because if someone does not accept, the game finds someone else to join the players that did accept. So the queue moves forward and shortens, except for the player that declined.
You are such a newb you don’t understand the problem.
There a people who quit, if they don’t get their desired map, no matter what.
If you queue for all maps, then you don’t have extra waiting time.
If there is only a single queue for all maps, then people will still quit, and by doing so everybody has to requeue (with the current implementation).
Multiple queues/infinite map bans give neither a disadvantage for the people who play all maps, nor for the people who quit.
Is that so hard to get?
I get it, a 4v4 has 8 players. If they all ban different maps, all the maps are banned. But the queue doesn’t consist of 8 players. There are hundreds or thousands of players in the queue and even if everybody bans two maps, you can still find matches. That’s because hundreds of players cannot ban the maps in a way so that no matches can be created, because there simply have to be overlappings. It’s simple math.
If the system first creates a match from 8 players and then checks for the map bans, then that’s not a good system. It should first check for the map bans of each player and then match them accordingly into a match. That way it’s no problem to have more bans than maps altogether, it might just take a little bit longer to enter a match. And at a certain size of player base, that actually gets mitigated.
I always thought that’s how it works, first check map bans and then form a TG of 8 players, but judging from your explanation you might think differently?
if it doesn’t, here is how it could work for a 4v4, if there are 9 maps and each player is allowed to ban 2:
First the system finds two players and matches them. It could consider their preferred maps, but lets keep it simple. Then it tries to find the next player. Ideally one that has the highest overlapping in map bans with the already created group of two players (best match would be exact same map bans, if that could not be found, next best would be only one map ban matches and so on). Then it matches the next player into the group and again tries to find the highest match in map bans. Then comes the next and the next and so on, until you have 8 players with at least on unbanned map.
However, I’m not convinced that adding another ban will solve the problem, it might only extenuate it a little bit.
Then lets see some. We can assume random map bans, 2 per player, normal distribution of Elo around 1000. I’d like to know what are the probabilities of seeing longer re-queue chains - when a party of players was formed but the bans prevented any map to be selected, so the players needed to be rematch with a different party. So I’d like to know what is the probability that a player it re-queued n-times. I’m sure additional simplification will be necessary.
The problem isn’t that an event is very rare. The problem is that when a problem is rare but possible, with a large number of events it can become certain. Honestly, I’m not sure how to analytically determine the probability of these events. Maybe a simulation would be simpler.
AFAIK, we believe the matching system matches players based on Elo exclusively. This reduced the matching problem to a 1D problem. Adding map bans as a restriction will likely change this to a 2D problem? This greatly diminishes the possibility of matches . For what everyone is saying, we don’t have the player base to support this and maintain reasonable queue times.
The problem with over committed map bans is that it’s also a hard restriction. When matching on Elo alone, if no players with a similar Elo are available, then a player with a much lower or higher Elo can still be matches (which happens at high Elos). With over-commited map bans this isn’t possible without ignoring bans.
Have you considered the time complexity of your proposed algorithm? From a quick glance it seems a straightforward solution is O(n)=n^8. You are also completely ignoring Elo of selected players.
This is making the game unplayable for me. I only have 40 minutes at the end of the day to play a game and it takes me 20-30 minutes in the queue for 3v3 or 4v4, with 3-6 drops in between. It’s not feasible unless you have your own team to play these.
