TREATY quick search (Play a Ranked Game) is in a TERRIBLE state! Devs please intervene!

Age of Empires III: DE III - Report a Bug
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The problem:

Unlike in rush, not all the maps in the Standard Maps pool work for treaty.

This is forcing a lot of treaty players to resort exclusively to the lobby for games (and that has its own host of issues). Just look at the high-skilled treaty streamers on Twitch. In Oct and Nov, they were still bothering with quick search, but these days, you will rarely see treaty players streaming quick search.

In comparison, the top rush streamers almost always still play via quick search. Just scan through their streams over the past three months on Twitch.

Alternative that is worse:

On the other hand, if you choose to go to the lobby, you almost always end up with very imbalanced skill levels in the game, unless you choose to play with and against only players you already know.

Essentially, there is no way for treaty players to reliably get a decent game (both quick search and the lobby screws them).

Also, I feel like a good number of those still asking for a ranked lobby are treaty players (this is my guess based on three posts I’ve seen in the past week), but they are asking for a solution that’s too far from the original vision of AOE 3 DE multiplayer.

Conclusion:

Treaty games in quick search shouldn’t be spawning into maps like Artic Territories or Great Lakes (that is, Standard Maps). This has killed quick search (as can be seen his the trend from treaty streamers). This is clearly a very terrible oversight from the developers. This is tantamount to a design bug. I hope this reaches them.

There is already a Treaty Maps pool and all the maps are at least decent for treaty. Why is this not the map pool for Treaty QS?

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I concur. I like playing Treaty more than Supremacy and was a 1stLt in TAD in Treaty. It feels impossible nowadays to find an even game with people around the same level.

Many times, I’ll find myself pushing into someone’s base, only to pull back because my weaker teammate has fallen through, not knowing that culverins exist while he drains his eco away, spamming musks into the enemy cannons. I scratch my head and think “That just wouldn’t happen back in the old days where the lobbies were balanced.”

You could have a general guarantee that people would be able to hold their own if the skill levels were roughly the same.

Or, after 40 minutes of booming hard, it could end up being a 10-minute, unsatisfying game because the enemy didn’t know basic, proper unit counters and didn’t make any artillery to push armies back. It’s just not satisfying. 40 minutes of booming well for this??

There’s just no way to consistently get a balanced game in the casual lobbies.
You can try to put “NR40 NO NOOBS” as the lobby name, but do people even really know what that even means? Being the only NR40 game there is, people will hop on there anyways.

Back in the old days, people didn’t mind having a noob on their team if there was a noob of the same level on the other team. “If it was balanced, then let’s just play” was all they cared about.

So at the very least, I try to ask in-game if they have treaty decks. Some people are quiet (because they don’t know), and some say “yes”… only to find out in-game that at 7 min they have rush decks and screw their economy (and teammates) over at 40 minutes. What a waste of time.

Being able to look at decks before the game would’ve prevented that. And I would’ve gladly helped them build a worthy treaty deck if they were honest or really needed help. I love the game and would love to see them get better. This simple feature taken away has caused a lot of frustration among people.

And there was a consistent, faithful group of around 1100 people who played TAD throughout all these years and kept the game alive. They are the ones who retained a lot of the treaty experience and knowledgeable opinions that gets shared in these forums today.
A lot of small talk in-game reveals that these veterans feel frustrated too about the difficulty in getting balanced games.

My theory is that AOE3 is trying to look like AOE2 too much. People from AOE 2 DE bought the new AOE 3 DE (hence the spike in numbers) and want the same quality of life improvements too.

Some of them make sense, yeah. But overhauling the unique multiplayer that AOE3 had was one of those mistakes. Newer players probably don’t notice it, but the old rank system, the ability to check decks before games started, and the ability to whisper had their place in shaping the good ol’ AOE3 multiplayer the way it was.

Nowdays, I just hop into a lobby and pray for balance to magically happen. Lol

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Well written post. Wish the devs just took the legacy (EP version), modernised the UI, upgraded the graphics, added the 2 new civs, added the spectate mode and art of war and move to xbox server and that’s it

Everything else is the same as legacy.

That would have been an even better DE game tbh and probably a lot less effort.

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Well, if they don’t want to remove all their hard work on the new ELO system and there’s people complaining about the old system being better,

Why not just use the old legacy system for casual games and keep the ELO system for ranked games?

We already have a “casual rank” that is different from the ELO ranking system. And they are already tracking game statistics in order to calculate the casual rank.

Converting it back to legacy and letting the system resolve people into proper ranks would be a great thing.

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That makes too much sense to implement:)

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Hello @PrimaryN00b, thanks for this report! We are now tracking the issue of Ranked-Treaty matchmaking selecting maps from outside of the Treaty Maps pool.

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I agree with a lot of what you said, but I don’t think changing the old rank system or the lobby was necessarily bad. Change is not bad so longer as it introduces much more improvement than degradation. In this case, multiplayer treaty was severely degraded by the changes made. But if they can tweak the changes to improve the current system while still staying on course with their current vision for multiplayer, then it’s a net positive.

Making ranked multiplayer restricted to quick search actually makes the ranking system more competitive. Controlled randomization is unreasonably effective, pretty much in every field.

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@Breadalus we are asking for more than that. Even enabling to view players decks in the lobby will go a long way in making the experience better.