Urgently needed treaty improvements

Hi devs

The better treaty players are currently all facing a similar issue. It’s really hard to tell the skill level of a player in the lobby if they haven’t played a lot of ranked games.

Why is this a problem?

We all want even and fair games that lead to great battles. There is no point in hosting a 3v3 nr60, booming for a full hour only to crush a player that joined with a supremacy deck or didn’t know how to max our vills. It’s time wasted for that one player and it’s in particular time wasted for the other five players that would have been on a similar level. Beginners can learn the game by playing with other beginners and experienced players get the games they want. You can check your opponent’s/mate’s deck in the game Yes of course but first of all you don’t want to get six players into a game only to rehost after five minutes and secondly, deck screenshots from good players are easy to find (eg. on Discord). A good deck itself doesn’t yet mean that a player knows that game well.

So what do you suggest?

I suggest two possible ways to address this.

  1. Back in the days the game had a great feature that would allow you to check your mate’s/opponent’s decks while in the lobby. We are desperately missing this feature as it allowed experienced players to figure out whether the other players in the lobby had a similar skill level. As indicated above, it doesn’t always hold true but it’s at least a solid indication.
  2. My other and acutally preferred suggestion would be to have every game count as a ranked one (as was the case in the old days). That would quickly lead to the elo score being a fair representation of a player’s skill level and you could host for example “1400+ elo” or “Max 1200 elo” games.

Don’t we have the badges/ribbons for that?

Indeed but they are not very telling. Most players don’t understand what they mean and whether or not someone has won their 100 games against only beginners or only pros isn’t reflected although that’s arguably the most important information.

Wouldn’t that discriminate beginners?

I don’t think so. Most beginners don’t find it fun to play good players and getting wiped out in a matter of minutes. Most experienced players don’t find it fun to boom for 40 or 60 minutes only to crush their opponent in a matter of minutes. It’s a win win and it doesn’t mean that beginners can’t play pros but both would transparently know what they are up to and be able to decide whether they want to play this game or not.

Lastly, most online RTS games work that way. You usually know what you’re up to for a good reason.

Thanks for a feedback

8 Likes

Just being able to see deck in lobby is all you need to know about a player in treaty tbh. I think its been suggested from very earlier on but never implemented.

4 Likes

Not necessarily, I remember a game me and my brother played on ESO a little while back where we crushed a second lieutenant and a I think master sergeant but the don’t remember exactly, we were both sergeants I think and the second lieutenant was shocked he lost because he said our decks were bad

Doesn’t particularly solve the issue though, if I wanted to bash some noobs I’d just make a noob style deck. Also anyone can watch a youtube video or go on discord and copy a deck.

2 Likes

I totally agree with what @domi7914815 says. The best solution would be for all treaty games to count as ranked games. So many games are just a waste of time due to too different skill levels which you only notice after a while ingame and even if you can look at the decks in the lobby, that doesn’t really help much. Since the Treaty ranked-queue is gone, the ranked games are almost extinct anyway, so it would be much better if all games count as ranked. At the moment it is also the case that the Elo doesn’t say much, since just a few ranked games are played. That would change very quickly if all games counted for the ELO. The Elo ratings would be more realistic again and the games would be fairer and more fun for all players. The stars and stripe rank means nothing, it says even less than the ELO and it’s not even a little bit helpful.

2 Likes

Agreed all treaty games should be ranked now that they moved all treaty games into the regular lobby search

This has already been suggested a lot in late 2021 and early 2022. I’m not sure what the devs think about this, but I’m pretty sure they think they’ve already made progress with this by putting in a casual rank and making ranked treaty games searchable in the casual lobbies. I believe their end goal is to get people to use the ELO system and get people into the proper ELO that way.

But if that’s their line of thinking, then we have problems:

  1. Treaty games last very long, so it’s going to be slower to accrue wins or losses to get fitted into the proper rank.
  2. Some people host some really unfair matchups, like NR20 with a good early boom civ. Cheating the system by playing by their rules, right?
  3. Lots of people team with friends, so it’s very possible to get carried by really good, competent friends who will help you inflate your rank. Also, I just came out of a ranked 4v4 where someone was a noob on my team and then became a 3v4 that didn’t end well. Really unfair for the randoms.
  4. There’s no way to accurately tell a person’s skill level while in the lobby. Checking out decks is a REALLY important utility to winnow out most people who don’t know what they’re doing (but why haven’t they implemented this?). And even if someone has a high win rate, were they grinding against noobs or winning against competent, skilled players? People on the Treaty Universe discord chat all know about the high win % guys who just grind against noobs, but are just average compared to other good people. It’s just not consistent.

I believe a solution has already been proposed above - if they want us to use the ELO system to determine skill, then make all treaty games ranked. It’s already a slow system to get games completed due the long nature of treaty games.

But before that happens, it’s a ****show with so many varying skill levels. At least give us the option to see decks in the lobby to help ensure better teammates, thus, better games and the ELO system should adjust according the average ELO of the other team or something.

3 Likes

host dont even let know that the match is no rush 40 , only on lobby list appear nr 40

Yeh true, im down for all treaty games to be ranked tbh. The player base is too small for treaty to have a separate system.

4 Likes

I agree that that it should default to ranked. Maybe provide a checkbox to make it unranked incase some ppl just want casual. Also being able to check players deck is crucial.

Next up would be to move supremecy teams into this ranked lobby.

1 Like

would totally agree on this with all treaty games being ranked treaty. Right now the rank one on the ladder is feeding himself with his second account. There is no way we can tell if a player is decent or not if we do not know him/her or he/she is not in the treaty discord channels. So please make this happen, it would make the treaty games more competitive and more fun as well.

8 Likes

Thanks, appreciate the support for everyone. Let’s make sure this thread reaches the devs. Cheers, Domingo

1 Like

This isn’t a treaty problem. Every fair (not FFA, cheats, comp stomp, etc) game should be ranked with ELO. Right now so few people play ranked that it’s hard to even do a quick search. Maybe custom lobbies could be weighted a little lower so their results don’t change your ELO as dramatically to compensate for more variables.

2 Likes

For any competition to be fair, both parties must be on equal terms.

Your request that novice players not play with any pros is perfectly reasonable.

  1. I don’t like the idea of opponents being able to see my deck before or during the game.
  2. I think that’s a good way to go to ensure players play each other on equal terms.

Continuing off that thought, that was why the old system in ESO worked. Every game you played was automatically taken into account to determine your skill level/rank. The fact that we can play casual games that don’t get recorded keeps players ambiguous. And the casual rank now is too general to differentiate if a person is actually good at the game mode.

I mean, there is a lot of overlap with eco management and knowing the counter system with all the game modes. But there may be some niche things pertaining to treaty (like choosing cards that have long-term value) that can cost other people the entire game if someone don’t fully know what they’re doing.

I get it, the decks can show what kind of strat you have in mind. But in my opinion there’s a ton of benefits that outweigh that:

1.) It builds trust in the lobby. Hosts can winnow out or balance teams so players can go in-game knowing that their teammates have a general sense of what their teammates are doing.

2.) Continuing off of #1, it helps prevent people from quitting 2 minutes into the game when they see a bad deck from their teammate. Wastes less of people’s time.

3.) It can help newer/less-skilled players get advice from more experienced ones. A good deck makes hell of a difference in-game. No resources crates or villager cards.

4.) By looking at the cards, you can get a better glimpse of your teammates’ or opponents’ skill level by seeing they have cards to cow boom, fur trade, fort hop, merc spam, etc. We will already see decks in-game later, so why not see them beforehand? And would you like to have a teammate in treaty who plays France but does not know about fur trade?

5.) And also, it was already done in the past since AOE Vanilla, Warchiefs, and TAD. I believe in my experience, it think it led to more fair and satisfying games. Back in the day, I had as much fun as a lvl 15 Sergeant playing with other lvl 14-16 Sergeants as I did as a lvl 22 2nd Lieutenant playing with lvl 19 Master Sergeants up to lvl 24 1st Lieutenants. It’s an amazing feeling to know you can trust your other teammates to hold their own. I haven’t had this kind of trust in awhile playing with randoms on DE.

2 Likes

In competitive I think what you say applies but I think that outside of competitive the decision to show the deck should be up to each player.

There are strategies that only work with the surprise factor and there are people who put cards that they do not use just to try to prevent you from knowing what they want to do.

Sorry, but that’s nonsense. If I have 40 minutes in-game to study your deck, where’s the surprise factor? It makes no difference whether you already see the deck in the lobby or ingame. The benefit of seeing the deck in the lobby is that you can sort out the bad players or help them make a proper deck without wasting time ingame.

2 Likes

I meant all game modes not just treaty

In the lobby it doesn’t matter too much because we normally have many decks but during the game it seems to me that it limits the strategies that can be made making it easier for the opponent to see what we have planned

If your concern is the long-term treaty, I’m not so concerned about them seeing the opponent’s deck.

Treaty start should be reworked, change the treaty to 15 minutes, let everyone start with dm resources, 2 mils, 2 Plantage and 40 Villa on them,but still start in dark age, but the agte up time are changed to 100% faster.

This will severely reduce the wasted time of booming and preparing against an bad opponent.

It isn’t desmrchamrch yet with the super unforgiving start which we want to avoid with trety.

Won’t work because of the amount of cards you get. Booming skill is very important so doing this basically makes no sense at all.

3 Likes