Why should Treaty and Deathmatch specifically have ranked custom games?
Quicksearch relies on a larger playerbase which has already dwindled down since launch. Statistically for every active sup team player there were about 4 to sometimes even 5 active 1v1 players in any given 2 week period according to stats aggregated from agecommunity.com by now defunct fanmade elo site aoe3.jpcommunity.com/rating2/ these stats were inverse in treaty with 1v1 players almost always also playing team games and deathmatch only had a small 1v1 playerbase with there not being enough players for a team game unless people from other game modes decided to have a deathmatch game amongst themselves. Treaty players and deathmatch players are also more strict about what maps theyâre going to play than sup players.
Deathmatch, queue times and maps
In deathmatch you can easily go 1 hour without finding an opponent in quicksearch just for 1v1 and nobody will stick with it without the added flexibility of custom games letting you communicate with players, asking in whispers for a game, observing what other hosted games look interesting that you may want to join and the deathmatch playerbase also has a pretty narrow set of maps that they want to play on like the players of the original without expansions comprising about half of the playerbase with the deathmatch players being a small subset of them would only really want to play on Great Plains where you would run as soon as the game starts to take the closest Cheyenne native post allowing you to train cavalry instantly after getting all the training upgrades. On the expansions itâs also largely the players from the game without the expansions that play deathmatch leading to Great Plains being pretty much the most popular map in deathmatch all across the board although the players who just played on the expansions were less picky about maps in deathmatch.
Treaty queue times and general sentiment
Treaty is much the same way with queues for 1v1 and team already being slower most of the time than when people hosted custom games before the remake with the quicksearch queue now it can easily go past 1 hour if itâs team and even in 1v1 it happens too. Everyone Iâve known from before the remake that I played some treaty games with on the remake have either decided to just go play unranked games/quit/returned to playing on the original and thatâs just the players who got the game, Iâve had conversations with a lot of people where they didnât want to try it because of the lack of ranked custom games leading to not only these issues but also a map pool that people donât want to play.
I can agree with the general sentiment, havenât really been able to get what I could call was a particularly good game that was ranked but when I played unranked even though I only played a couple games by chance some decent players ended up gravitated towards the 3v3 40 minute treaty deccan game after me and my friend hosted which lead to a pretty good unranked game in about five minutes after we gave up trying to find a 2v2 ranked treaty game after waiting I donât even know how long. When considering itâs the most popular map itâs not surprising people would rather play it when given the choice rather than the random quicksearch map pool.
20 minute treaty
Treaty players much like Deathmatch players have a narrow set of maps that they play on with the 20 minute treaty players mainly playing Deccan, Painted Desert, Himalayas upper, Siberia, Andes land version. Deccan and Painted Desert specifically comprised about 80% of 20 minute treaty games played. In 1v1 games specifically Great Plains is probably the third most played map in 20 minute treaty historically and out of all water maps none can rival Saguenay in terms of how much it was played in 20 minute treaty although only a small minority of games were played on water maps although these canât be played as before due to the inability to make docks past treaty build limit.
40 minute treaty
When it comes to 40 minute treaty players they mainly played on the land version of Andes which would now be Andes Upper and Deccan with a smaller subset of lower ranked players playing on large maps and a wide array of water maps which canât be enjoyed as before with the inability to build docks past treaty build limit, much like in 20 minute treaty were there were 2 maps being played the most Andes Upper and Deccan were by far the most popular in 40 minute treaty with Deccan being the most popular overall and Andes Upper mainly played among the higher ranked 40 minute treaty players.
Docks in treaty
The minority of higher ranked 40 minute treaty players that were mainly playing on Andes Upper went away from the official patch to play on a balance patch they created for 40 minute treaty games on Andes Upper in which they removed the ability to make docks past the treaty build limit in case they wanted to play on a modified version of Orinoco with the natives present on Andes. This change was widely abhorred by the more abundant lower ranked player and anyone who wanted to play a water map occasionally. These people who while malleable in regards to what map theyâre going to play would never accept not being able to make a dock to water boom during the treaty because of where first town center spawned if they were to choose to play on a water map.
55/60 minute treaty
The current system leaves 55/60 minute treaty players alienated with no good resolution. There was a lot of players merely selecting 40 minute treaty in the game while they actually played 55 or 60 minute treaty where they could then build a forward base at the river which separated the two halves of the map, the 55/60 minute treaty games were always played on Orinoco in the expansions and in the rare case it was played without the expansions they were always played on Great Plains. The players active in this played other game modes more actively than 20 minute treaty players played other game modes, although behind 20 minute treaty players in attachment to their game mode itâs clear to say that they were more attached to their game modes than players of other game modes besides the 20 minute treaty players. There were also a pretty large amount of the 40 minute treaty players who chose to play 55/60 minute treaty too almost interchangeably. Even if the option of Orinoco only quicksearch with 55 or 60 minute treaty was available they canât build a forward base at the river like before when it was 40 minute treaty but played as 55 or 60 minute treaty making it all pointless.
The case against trade monopoly in treaty
Itâs probably a bug as it was not present in the previous game and wanted by any faction regardless itâs important to address. In the previous game and this game as well sometimes a map wonât always spawn with all its trade posts. For example in a Patagonia this would cause some problems where itâs supposed to be 6 trade posts with 2 trade routes going behind each teams town centers but in the case where only 5 trade posts spawn one team will have 3 and one will have 2 this would lead to cases where a player can forcefully win before the treaty ends.