Upcoming ranked system suggestions (Please learn a lesson from AOE2)

Age of Empires IV IV - Discussion
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If anyone wants this game to last longer and agree we should make the upcoming ranked games more fair and competitive, please up vote this so the developers might have chances to take a look. Before it’s too late after it’s launched.

AOE2 is dead now, due to the smurf abuse, before that, it’s also very well unknown that TG is not competitive mostly due to its unfair ranking system.

1…Ban family share before it’s too late, it’s VERY IMPORTANT. (If there’s any alternative to prevent smurf abuse, it can be considered as well.) In AOE2 right now, smurfs abuses totally destroyed the game as everyone using 1 to 2 smurfs in TG to elo push the other accounts. Also, the existing of smurf is definitely destroying others (especially to beginner) playing experience.
To me this is almost equal to cheating because it’s breaking the initial game matching system which suppose to have 2 sides with similar elo playing a competitive game, Smurf is totally breaking this.

2…In ranked TG, separate premade and solo queue, this is also IMPORTANT(and probably separate elo of solo and premade as well: elo of solo in TG, elo of premade team in TG)
The advantages using discord in RTS games are too huge. Specific strategy, unit movements, map awareness, resources exchange etc. I believe whoever has RTS experience before should agree the premade team advantages.

3…Better elo matching system. In AOE2, the elo matching is terribly bad. It always happened a 8 solo players game with huge elo different between 2 sides (I saw a game with 2000 elo difference in total, average 500 difference). They simply just pick 8 players in a game and randomly separate the teams without an elo distribution.

4…Becareful of the map assignment, there were always debating about forcing people to play the map they don’t like, and it creates other debates about punishment of ALT F4, map choices etc.

5…Improve the reporting system so that some real bad attitude players could be punished in ranked games.

6…This is optional, maybe giving out 4v4 an only option in TG to make the ranked queue more concentrate and standard. (this is optional because the player base is quite huge now, the queue shouldnt be a problem at this stage)

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It’s two years old. If they tried they could actually probably save it, ideally by implementing at least some of your suggestions. Maybe don’t ban family share overall, but certainly ban it from ranked games.

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yup, that post was one year ago and I have already warned that the TG will be dead due to smurf and solo vs premade.
I have even raised out the smurf issue more earlier but seems people really dont care.

I am really afraid once smurfing becomes a trend here there will be no turning back just like AOE2.
I still remember smurf got a lots of support at the beginning because everyone somehow has a smurf account either do have their own causal games or doing the elo push which I think it’s pretty toxic culture over there.

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sigh, this is very similar when I first posted in the AOE2 forum.

No one cares.

People will only realize how harmful can be done by smurf until they started to suffer, probably 1 or 2 years later this forum will start having the voices about "stop the smurf, but as I have said, damage will be done and it’s probably too late to change anything.

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Devs should understand that it’s mainly a MP game. And the bigger and healthier the community the more people remain in the game and the more new people appear, which means more money for them either, not only the bigger and more interesting AoE IV community for the players.
Hope for right solutions from devs as this game has high potential. It’s a new game, which gives a chance to learn a lesson from the past.

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What? AoE 2 is not dead. They should address smurfing though.

The game grew in that year.

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I posted it around here, but whatever the trend is up or not, I think most of the AOE2 players agree the dead of TG is because of smurf abuse, and before the smurf abuse, TG also well known (lots of pro streamer said so) that it is not competitive at all due to it’s bad ranking system, especially for solo queue player.

Since AOE4 and AOE2 are different developers, it’s really important for Relic to know how’s AOE2 going downward. (though the release of AOE4 is also a reason), before AOE4 released, there’s a chaos about the smurf abuse already, it’s very valid for us to say that Smurfing ruining the game.

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Central Asia is my bet

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if this is your guess of mine, the answer is close but wrong

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It’s nearly impossible for solo players to defend premade team fedual all in like this:
In this game, they dont even use the France knight plus archer Ram combination, which I faced many times in a 4v4 and this is totally no way to defend when solo players has no communication and civ pick counter.

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Problem of 4v4 is also untill your random allies come to save you (in best case) you are already dead because of push of 2-3 players … there is no way that premades and randoms should be against each other in rankeds otherwise TG rankeds are dead already …

Just imagine what everything can premades do from sending res. to rush wonder to picking intetionally civs. for early rush … its just completely broken and nobody is gonna enjoy MP TG in this case …

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AoE2 is definitly not “dead”. Also you won’t really encounter that much smurfs in 1v1 if you played a fair amount of games. Smurfing will always exist in multiplayer games for multiple reasons and you probably wont be able to do much against it. Banning family sharing wont really solve the core issue, as you can just make another account and buy the game again or use gamepass,…

TG are a joke when it comes to balancing. Not only the players skill but also the civ matchups makes it really difficult to balance things right. TG Elo doesn’t tell a full story of a players skill either. Lets say i start playing only TGs and then switch to 1v1 and get much better. Jumping back into TGs I probably make games more unbalanced to my favour. For smurfs: How do you detect if a person is simply just good or a smurf? Quite difficult to detect that. Then TGs are probably less popular so they reduce queue times by allowing a wider range of elo in a game.

I dont expect that people want different balance for their civs for civs for 1vs1, 2vs2, 3vs3 and 4vs4 so ofc they will balance everything for 1v1. Making 4v4 just a complete clown fiesta most of the time. And it should be rather obvious that a coordinated team will always destroy randoms. I like the idea of having seperated ladders but how do you prevent that one team of randoms use discord while the others dont?

Thats why teamgames should not be taken seriously anyway.
It will always be unbalanced either in terms of skill or due to civ advantages/disadvantages.

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AoE2 is definitly not “dead”. Also you won’t really encounter that much smurfs in 1v1 if you played a fair amount of games. Smurfing will always exist in multiplayer games for multiple reasons and you probably wont be able to do much against it. Banning family sharing wont really solve the core issue, as you can just make another account and buy the game again or use gamepass,…

To me it is, I used to play TG pretty much until I found the smurfs with premade team are extremely toxic started from 2000 elo, the upper elo the more serious the situation is. so I get to 1v1 and recently I saw the cheater keep playing 100 games for few days until he get banned while the reporting system is totally non-sense, I stopped playing this game anymore.

TG are a joke when it comes to balancing. Not only the players skill but also the civ matchups makes it really difficult to balance things right. TG Elo doesn’t tell a full story of a players skill either. Lets say i start playing only TGs and then switch to 1v1 and get much better. Jumping back into TGs I probably make games more unbalanced to my favour. For smurfs: How do you detect if a person is simply just good or a smurf? Quite difficult to detect that. Then TGs are probably less popular so they reduce queue times by allowing a wider range of elo in a game.
I dont expect that people want different balance for their civs for civs for 1vs1, 2vs2, 3vs3 and 4vs4 so ofc they will balance everything for 1v1. Making 4v4 just a complete clown fiesta most of the time. And it should be rather obvious that a coordinated team will always destroy randoms. I like the idea of having seperated ladders but how do you prevent that one team of randoms use discord while the others dont?
Thats why teamgames should not be taken seriously anyway.
It will always be unbalanced either in terms of skill or due to civ advantages/disadvantages.

  1. Yes, TG is a joke in both AOE2 and AOE4, but that’s why we are trying to suggest to make it more fair.
  2. in AOE2, those there are some civs are T0 in some specific maps, I found most of the games are fun when solo vs solo or premade vs premade, at least not 90% one sided unbalanced games.
  3. It’s not about smurf happens seriously like 1v1 or not, it’s about shall we try to stop this toxic culture.
    my elo in AOE2 is between 16+ to 18+, around every 15 to 20 games I saw a smurf, and a smurf usually take 30 to 50 games to get back his own elo range, if you check in AOE2.net with those super high win rate account, you can notice how many games are ruined over there.
  4. how to identify a smurf, that’s very simple, check their record, new account, 80% win rate up with no other games, in TG it’s more easy to identify, they always with the same premade party.
  5. Family share supposed to be shared for those offline games only, when it goes to competitive game it’s totally ruining it, AOE2 is definitely an excellent example.
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None of this has been addressed and pre-ordering the game to playtest yielded absolutely nothing from the feedback given from players. It was a scam.