I have been playing AoE2 in team games for ages, on HD first and then DE. I am a 2k1 player team game and recently I experienced over and over two things that are really discouraging me from playing, but I thought I would give it a shot in this forum before giving the game up.
PROBLEM 1: people leaving the queue after the game has been created. Probably they don’t like the map or the teammates, but I spent 5 or 6 minutes just to start again. And this can easily happen multiple times in a row. SOLUTION: take 14 points from the person who dropped and give 2 point to every other player, should be enough to discourage people from doing that. Why are we not doing this??
PROBLEM 2: people creating new accounts to have lower ELO and easier games (aka smurfs). Just lost a game to a guy who had 1k8 team ELO with 50 wins and 3 losses. To make it worse this is compensated by 3 real 2k4, making the game totally unfair. But even worse (!!!) on average they are as strong as my team (2k1/2k2) so I lost 13 points. I lost 200 elo to smurfs in 2 weeks. And now if I don’t play smurfs I easily win, as my elo is not realistic. SOLUTION: going back to the old elo system, at least I would be losing 1 point when playing smurfs and could still enjoy the other games. Also the game could consider the ratio wins/losses on top the elo to create teams. Why are we not doing this??
Developers - Please do something about this, in the last few weeks this has become unbearable. And if you experienced the same please help sharing. Thank you.
glad you are here and welcome to our forum.
But unfortunately this is the forum for Age1.
Please move your post or wait until your the moderator has done.
These issues are know and discussed in my main thread already. Also confirmed that the devs are looking into both issues. Look for example in the pinned Alt F4 thread, which is about your problem 1.
If it is me, i would choice for different solutions, since both arent real solutions. But i dont really feel the need to again explain the best solution in my opinion again.
We can discuss the solution, although I think the only way to promote a behaviour in people is the carrot and stick approach. But what concerns me is that as you say the Alt F4 issue is known at least since December 2019 and nothing has been done. As a result the problem is bigger now than ever, as people think that they can get away with this.
Again you don’t like my solution I don’t mind (can you please link the page where you explain yours? I am interested), but let’s do something about this!
By the way, if I alt+f4 2 seconds into the game it is ok to lose points for me and my team, but if I do 2 seconds before the game than I shouldn’t lose points? Sorry but I don’t follow you on this.
Both issues are mentioned in the latest patch notes. That is why can be sure about the devs looking in to this issue. So i expect some changes in the near future to deal with both problems. Just read the patch notes. Problem 1 is mentioned under ongoing investigations. Problem 2 is mentioned under the new EW ladder and the issues with TG rating (this is not a clear reference to smurfing, but i am pretty sure they meant the issues with smurfing).
For Problem 1:
I explained my view multiple times in that thread.
For Problem 2:
The old calculation were terrible. I made this thread about the old calculation and i am glad it changed. Previous TG elo was meaningless. Now it is exploitable by smurfs. I prefer the second, but they devs have to deal with the smurfs. Not sure if that is also discussed in this thread as well, so i link for some other threads about the smurfing issue as well:
See for example post 3 which is posted by me.
This is another thread in which is probably share my ideas.
Just do a quick search and you probably will fine more threads about this subject in which i shared my opinion.
Ok thank you I will take the time to go though all of this.
Just one thing. Although the elo system in place used to drift up (I guess that’s why you call it meaningless), at least I could play for 1.5 years and enjoy my time. Something that I am struggling to do now.
I think that a mix of the previous ranking and the current one would be better tbh. They could do that taking into account additional statistics as Basil mentioned…
If you do not crash 290 out of 300 games, the likelihood to not crash in a game of 8 players is (290/300)^8 = 0.76.
So you will crash in 1 out of 4 games of 8 players.
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edit: Assuming that the crash is inpedendend for each player, not like a out of sync, which can be caused for all players.
He’s not talking about crashes (which do happen, more frequently than I’d like, but are worked one). He’s talking about deliberately exiting because you don’t like the map. That cannot be addressed by fixing anything in the game, but only through two options: sanctions, or giving AlT-F4’ers what they want and having an option to restrict it to one map. Not sure which is best… (which they say is also being worked on, though not as soon as I’d like)
I would like to see them perma-ban all the smurfs and take away the losses from the people they fought against. The smurfing in ranked is so bad I’ve gone from 50% to 48%. Everyones winrate suffers so these jackoffs can have 90% winrate. Why does it take so long to address this stuff?
Because to follow up on that, how can you ever fix a broken winrate? You can’t really, not until you are in the top 100 anyway. This is going to create more problems because people are going to “reroll” their account so they can have a positive winrate again. So the cycle continues.
The real problem is inflation caused by previous elo system. If there wasn’t such terrible inflation, dude would be at his right elo long before playing 53 games.
I know the current system encourages smurfing (or better said, allow abusing smurfs to boost elo), and it IS problem that should be solved ASAP, but this guy could easily just started playing tgs after playing only 1v1s for long time. I have 13-1 score in tgs and I know I will win few next matches too, because so far my opponents have been plebs.
Well your problems are not the same real problems others have to deal with, the first one is clearly the performance and stability.
The other issues are non game related but devs choice, so current MM design, voting system, elo distribution and algorithm are merely human decisions and not related to the ancient game code, meaning that they could be fixed in like a day or two, but somehow they aren’t willing to give what the players need, so if they pretend to continue with their position the upcoming fix will be just the beginning of newer issues, sadly for you and us your problems wont be solved soon.
Im answering this post not only to give my opinion but to keep this kind of threads active. Excuse me for my bad english.
I started a thread like this not long ago, and the situation its exactly the same as you described here.
Regarding your Problem 1:
As someone who owns an old PC, this kind of crashes tend to happend, but i do agree that this “rage quitting” thing its annoying. I think that after a rage quit (Alt F4) happens, in the
“60 seconds to start”, people should get a time ban, like 10 min or so, but not involve ELO points, because it wouldn’t be fair for those who accidentaly disconnect and also, it has nothing to do with skill so no points should be awarded, but in the same time, it would make less tempting for those who exploit it because of the waiting periods. Even more, if the quitting hapens on consecutive times, the ban should last longer each time. Things like this already exist in other online games.
Regarding Problem 2:
I absolutly agree.
I don’t think its possible to have a system that rewards (and discounts) ELO points in the same amount and not having an smurfing problem. Because you see, in other games, like Chess.com (or the older AoE 2DE system), when you win a 20 games streak (or even less), your clasification skyrockets in order to place you as fast as possible with your same lvl competition… I don’t mind that the whole comunnity isnt equally balanced/distributed and according to the gaussian bell distribution, i want a game that can offer a good matchmaking service.
Last, but not least, this kind of problems make the game annoying for those who stand in the 1.000 ELO bracket in 1v1 and also in the whole 1000-2000 TG RM (just where the new players start the game) and this its particualiry serious because in order to a gaming comunity to grow, the experience of the new players must be pleasant, and with the current situation, this is not happening at all.
A year ago I agree, the main issue was stability. But today my feeling playing the game is that it is acceptable and the bottleneck has moved to queues and smurfs. I represent an average honest player who only wants to enjoy the game and based on the threads I found around I am definitely not the only one.
We are all on the same side, if the devs choose not to do anything about this it is just poor customer service. We pay for the game, we are the customers. And unhappy customers will stop paying and spread a negative word. What is the interest of not solving these problems soon? They should be at the top of list, surely well above things like " Fixed an issue where Sans Serif Fonts could appear smudgy on specific UI screens."
The old system isn’t the solution. It needs to give equal rating gain and loss to avoid inflation. The only thing that needs to change is how team strength is calculated, to reflect the fact that higher rated players disproportionately increase the strength of the team. This could be achieved by making the team rating the rating of the highest rated player, or if that is felt to excessively prevent people from playing with lower rated friends, a formula that is at least very strongly weighted towards the higher rated players. I don’t know to what extent the same thing would be true in AoE, but in Rocket League casual mode, it allows parties to match against players up to around 150 mmr lower, so you might get a party of 1750, 1700 and 1000 against 3 solo queue players who are all around 1600, and my experience is even that amount of difference makes things unbalanced, and the 1700 and 1750 players will typically dominate the game. It doesn’t allow that imbalance in competitive ranked mode, so obviously it’s a concession for casual mode to increase the ability of people to play with lower rated friends.
