Tiered ranking system is more transparent and engaging. It will truly show who is good player and who isnt.
This means bronze, silver, gold, platinum, challenger tiers and so on.
AoE4 uses something similar already.
For those who fear the negativity: Calling someone or being called bronze noob will be great. RTS games are already too stoic.
Oh yeah, and add map bans which allows to diversify the map pool. Some of us love teamgames on maps like Arena.
You do realise that ELO is still used in those tiered systems as well, right?
Map bans are a STRONG yes for me.
Tiered ranking system could be fun. Especially if it comes with cosmetic rewards like AoE4’s system does. But IMO it’s not a super important deal.
For those who fear the negativity: Calling someone or being called bronze noob will be great
Eww, absolutely not. The best thing about the Age community is that, by and large, it’s much more mature than most games. We don’t need to encourage making it worse.
This is worth noting. AoE4 has an Elo system under the hood which it uses to decide who you will match against.
Side note, to Moonshadow: it’s Elo, not ELO. It’s named after a person, Arpad Elo. It’s not an acronym.
Yes, of course I do. It seems you missed my point that it is nicer to play ranked in games like AoE4, Overwatch and Teamfight tactics where you progress through ranks rapidly. Gaining 50 elo is nothing, going from Gold 3 to Gold 2 is.
Graphics and feel of weight are important. Also if you tell people who dont play AoM that you are Diamond/Challenger rank, they know you are good from their experience
For what? So that premade teams have more reasons to ruin matches and annoy everyone else? No thanks, disable premade teams first!
I would love there to be ranked leagues in AoM but claiming that it would be more “transparent” is way off. If anything, it’s the opposite in most cases, unless your rank is 100% tied to your ELO without any “points” system on top of it.
Since you’ve mentioned AoE4, it’s a perfect example of how ranking system and points which “cover” the underlying ELO is the opposite of transparent. In that game, your rank points can be way off from ELO (like, 200+ difference). Very often it happens at the beginning of the season (placement matches affect your rank a lot but not your ELO), but not limited to that, simply going on a huge winstreak or losestreak will make points differ from your ELO in either direction. The reason why this happens is because points increase at a higher pace than ELO, so if you only win a lot (or only lose a lot), they’ll start diverging until you play with 50% winrate again. As the result, you can have a person who is in “platinum” but it’s actually Conqueror-ELO player who had bad placements. It’s also possible to abuse the system by going down to a very low points/ELO (basically 0 points so there’s no way for it to go further down), and then do a huge winstreak from there, you can get Conqueror with a diamond ELO. People have done it in the past.
With that said - it’s still better than not having any ranking system at all IMO. And it does make ladder way more engaging to play, that I can agree with completely. Getting a shiny a rank badge definitely feels better than just getting a higher number. And calling yourself “diamond”, “conqueror” etc. feels way more prestigious than just “1400 ELO” or whatever.
And map bans - yeah for sure.
The cynic in me doesn’t expect any of this though because they’re too busy cranking out DLCs and seemingly don’t give a shit about multiplayer.
The users wouldn’t be asking for a map ban if the developers did a good job creating them. This is simply evidence of the poor work they’re doing with map design. Players hate water maps and desert maps because they lack resources. Some maps even have bugs in the gold mine distribution.
Wouldn’t it be better if every map started with two gold mines near the Town Center? And Wouldn’t it be better if huntable animals didn’t just go extinct, but instead repopulated over time?
Tiered ranked systems are almost universally disapproved for being less transparent and manipulative. SC2 for example has had a long history of controversies about ranks, win rates, rank points etc to the point they just default to showing the elo instead.
I think the ranked system in this game could benefit more from bug fixes and map bans than eye candy.
Actually issue with lack of map bans is that we will never see maps like Arena or Nomad in ranked rotation. AoE2 ranked caters not only “open map” audiences but also Arena/Nomad audiences. I was also hoping for Jotunheim type of maps but ways to grow additional forest would be troublesome there.
Since there is no Arena in ranked, all AoM tournaments will be same ghost lake spam
You can show both, duh.
Then it becomes even worse.
I like how Dead by Daylight approaches this.
They have no casual mode. Every mode is ranked (they don’t say this directly). There are rank divisions but they are not respresentitive of your skill rather they show how much you play. It will increase as you play no matter if you lose or win just the amount is varied. And your Elo (Which is used for skill based matchmaking is hidden from you).
Currently I think the fact that elo in AoM is super arbitrary is not bad. Id some one is 600 elo he won’t know how he is actually doing. The only to know what 600 elo means is to go to aomstats and check the graph so you know how you are doing compared to others.
The issue with nomad and jotun types of maps is due to the way aom works they get abusables pretty fast.
Some maps are very fun to play until you realize the Best strategy/abuse and then it becomes meh. The water/land is an example of this. It was fun early on while people figured it out then its pretty Black and White as to what wins or doesnt (assuming similar skill).
Nomad benefits some civs way more than others. This was partially adressed but you still are simply behind because of what pantheon you picked in that Mode.
Not really. People like different playstyles and this different maps. People Who like booming and defensive play are more keen on playing closed maps you can wall off and be safe and play for a later stage game. People that like raiding civs would rather have open maps to fully benefit from what they want to do.
Besides the whole water and land aspect thats also divisive between players. Some like them, some dont