Imagine some kids in the park. One is playing on the swings, other is playing football alone and there are a couple more playing in the slide. Then, the mother of the child who is playing football appears and kicks the kid out of the swings so the only thing he can do is go home or play football with her precious son. That’s more or less what some people are asking devs to do. I can’t belive it’s not obvious for everyone that this is totally wrong. And the worst thing of all is that developers are taking that thing into consideration as a fair request.
I can’t speak for other players but I promise I won’t play any game in a map I don’t want to. You can take my ELO, you can put me a time penalty or you can make me resign minute one, I don’t care. But as the wise man said: They may take our ranked ELO games, but they’ll never take our freedom
I will post my story about how i see the lobby vs ranked. It has a simular context.
If you want to play football, then you have two options:
Just go to the park and play with your own rules. You dont like offside rule? Just delete the rule set.
Go to a club and play by the official rules. You might not like offside rule, but there is not way to get rid of it.
Point 1 is like playing the lobby in AoE2. Point 2 is like playing in ranked. Point 2 doesnt mean nothing can change. Sometimes there are small rules changes as well. So feel free to suggest these rule changes.
The lobby is to play the game under the rules you want. Do what you like. You desides about the rules. You pick whatever map you want. Ranked is the more competitive setting where you have to play according the official rules, like playing football at a club against other clubs.
So what you describes in your example it about playing at the lobby. But your draw a conclusion about the ranked map ban system. This is obvious a wrong conclusion based on your story.
I perfectly agree the system is very bad.
You should not being forced to play maps which you dont want to play, there is no reason to have limited bans especially when you want to play 4v4 in soloqueue.
There is at very least 2 maps which i dont want to play in each map pool : arena bf(which i dont understand why still permanent…) so if i want to play solo on maps which i like or even OK maps i just cannot ban all other maps because only 1 bans…
That is one of the numerous reason for which i dont play a lot the ladder. But if you decide to play ladder, pls dont dodge thats toxic and you ruin other peoples’s experience the very same way as you playing map which you dont like.
A smartest people said, your freedom stop when impacting other people’s freedom which is your case so stop playing ladder or stop dodging.
If there were an alternative ranked arabia system I would leave the global rank for you with 60% of players (numbers from aoestats). Why don’t you move to unranked if it’s so good, then? Your ideal vision about the system is to annoy 6 out of 10 players just to make you happier. Seems legit.
I can agree in some points but the system should be what players enjoy the most. Most players just want to play arabia. aoestats.com shows 60% of games are played in arabia. Yes, the real percentage of only arabia players should be a little bit lower it’s still half of player base.
I just want a system where I can enjoy the advantages of the ranked queue and play my favorite map, arabia, as majorty of players. Unranked has a lot of issues in long term as you should know. If there were an alternative arabia ranked system I would leave the global ranking ASAP, problem solved for everyone. But I think the incoming solution from devs will be in form of bans and penalties. This will annoy at least half of players, just to make the other half a little bit happier.
When I do alt+f4 I’m lossing like 6-7 minutes of my time. My oponent is lossing like 3 minutes at most. The biggest issue is for me, not for my oponent. The non arabia players just think we will start to enjoy arena and islands magically. That’s pretty much a stupid way of thinking. Arabia is the most popular map since the very beggining of the game and I don’t see why would it change. If most players want to play arabia, let them play.
Ladder system is a must and I think the only reason they don’t make a separate arabia ladder is because the main ladder would be empty in two weeks. Solution? Forcing 60% of players into a ladder they don’t enjoy. Fantastic.
arabia has the worst civilization balance in the entire game. even water maps have fairer civs than arabia does now. you can play some teamgames to see how awful the balance of arabia is with the DE balance and DE settings and DE mapgen.
if you want a separate ladder for a map that lets players ignore 95% of the tech tree, maybe that would work. but RM ladder should be for people who want to play Random Maps and the full game, not just arabia. we want to play age of empires 2, not age of franks+crossbows
3 minutes ? You are completly wrong about it, when i ban arabia because want to play other maps in the game thats is not only 1 casual dodge that can be like 6 in a row (probably the same guy which alt f4 then relaunch queue), my record is 14 dodge (fav crater) and that’s is for 1v1, for tg it is worse, so no that’s is not “only 3 minutes” that’s is because it’s rare to play on other map than arabia without many dodges and very long waiting
I have given my opinion about this attitude in more detail in the Alt-f4 thread, so I won’t repeat much here. But let me describe you my experience as someone who sometimes wants to play megarandom, a historically divisive map.
I queue up for a team game, ban Arabia (most frequently picked map) from 4v4 or 3v3. At my elo (22–), it takes about 3 to 6 minutes to get a game. I get matched, see it’s megarandom, but my excitement soon makes way for a worrying thought: who will alt-f4? Will I even get to play? And about halfway through the countdown, a team mate’s name disappears, and disconnected all 7 players are.
I que up again. Having banned arabia, queuing takes longer, it’s 7 minutes now. Hurray, megarandom again (that’s lucky, btw). But again, suddenly we all get disconnected. I queue up again, but because of course, I get matched in an Arena game, which I hardly enjoy - but will still play, because I don’t dodge.
So no, it doesn’t just impact you. If you’d play other maps than arabia you would know how unlikely it is you even get matched for your map. And how frustrating it is when, if you are that lucky, some idiot decides to selfishly dodge with alt-f4.
i honestly think as is stands the ranked System got an variety map selection as it should be intended. and to be fair thats how ranked should be played with various maps and options and not just one or two maps because they are popular. the inbalance that was created can be fixed how? i dont know yet but alt f4 shouldt be tolerated. with the new system people could actually appeal against a ban since a Crash creates a file that can be shown to proof a crash. i honestly dont know if we maybe should increase the map range and amount and punish people who grief the game with alt f4 but many people(including me)allready get really annoyed of alt f4 shennanigans
I think the system is unfair for everyone, the ones who want to play only Arabia, the ones who don’t want to play Arabia, and those who want to play any map, and that is basically because the system doesn’t work.
Someone here said:
RM ladder should be for people who want to play Random Maps and the full game, not just arabia. we want to play age of empires 2, not age of franks+crossbows
Which is not true with this system, we don’t play Random Map, we are forced to play the maps available in the pool, which are voted only by 1% of the players.
I’m a programmer, and the solution is very very very simple, just make all maps available and let me ban every map I don’t want to play, and it is my problem if I’m 1hr in the queue because I only want to play Baltic.
I think the ban system exists because there are people who only play one map. Remember back in voobly when there were mostly 3 played maps: Arabia, Arena and Black Forest. There are people who fully especialize in one single map and its very annoying to play against them.
In Arena we had tower rushes with vills inside your base (thankfully fixed by devs), in BF we had all kinds of sneaky villagers and sudden rushes, and you know the drill for arabia. I’m not saying these are valid strategies, but if a player is a full specialist in only one tactic, he will beat others every single time they encounter on that map.
Thats why I think the map ban is quite fair, and its like the Champion ban in League of Legends and DotA. When a champion is OP or you know a lot of people specialize in exploiting that champion to the max, it becomes annoying to play against it, thats why they have bans on their ranked queue. If anyone here played League a while ago they will remember that Katarina used to be SO ANNOYING it was first ban in ALL ranked matches and even tournments. This is just an example, but I think you get it.
This game is not a moba, those games you are trying to compare aren’t really time consuming or strategical, those are short game modes with only one strategy keep ur hero and units, aoe has 4 times more things happening at the same time, aoe is more demanding, that why its a RTS.
The ban system was introduced by an idea of one big youtuber, the system before the current one was even worse, but his suggestion wasn’t the best, i knew it would be abused in no time and it happened, it seems you are relative new to the game, otherwise you would know it has always been bad regarding team games, there is a big reason why the pro teams aren’t in the top of the ladder or well not even playing together.
The idea of being matched vs anyone in certain time is only exciting for low elo legends, good players have always waited longer to get fun or fair games, but the system only cares about quantity and not quality, so the top players decided not to waste their time in the MM tg, cause they don’t really care about the maps as many of you think is the issue, the issue for them and me are the unfair matches, that gets worse in awful maps.
We were playing team games for 20 years without a single issue, the devs just ruined that experience for us, there is little to not attention from big streamers or youtubers cause they focus on single player content or exclusively 1x1, otherwise the image of the game would be really bad.
I’m a programmar is the worst argument for this change i have ever read, i think. Being able to program something is something different then it being a good thing.
I mean he is not wrong tho eventho i think something that gratually stacks up would be better
and i think if i would get banned in leauge or csgo or wherever i would play something else too because when i am unbanned i can clear my mind and not grief people
