Why we need "Unranked" Elo

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
21

I’d like unranked ELO scoring or some other measuring stick to make all the individual games I play vs AI or teamed up vs. AI mean something over the aggregate of games… whether I go online, or not.

All the AI games played are just islands of statistics, never to be seen again; never to count for me or against me in any manner, living alone, never to be combined to give some overall sense of how I’m doing or what I’ve accomplished.

Vs. one Easy AI, not many points earned. Versus 2 Easy AI, a bit more. Versus Hard, more points, etc.

There’s more than one way to dish scores out or rewarding gameplay, too. It doesn’t have to be just numerical. For example in Sid Meier’s Pirates! video game, you were given a ranking/profession based on how well you did (fame). AoE could do something similar, or be inspired by this.

Here’s Pirates! (2004) rankings/professions. Each rank has a portrait image for what you look like in the game given your profession. (I can’t show those on this table below, taken from a fandom wiki website):

Rank Profession Fame Points Required Your Portrait
1 Governor 103 - 126 2004 Retire 1 Governor
2 Bishop 92 - 102 2004 Retire 2 Bishop
3 Mayor 80 - 91 2004 Retire 3 Mayor
4 Surgeon 70 - 79 2004 Retire 4 Surgeon
5 Magistrate 62 - 69 2004 Retire 5 Magistrate
6 Fencing Master 53 - 61 2004 Retire 6 FencingMaster
7 Shipwright 45 - 52 2004 Retire 7 Shipwright
8 Innkeeper 38 - 44 2004 Retire 8 Innkeeper
9 Merchant 31 - 37 2004 Retire 9 Merchant
10 Parson 25 - 30 2004 Retire 10 Parson
11 Farmer 20 - 24 2004 Retire 11 Farmer
12 Butler 15 - 19 2004 Retire 12 Butler
13 Constable 11 - 14 2004 Retire 13 Constable
14 Bartender 8 - 10 2004 Retire 14 Bartender
15 Mortician 5 - 7 2004 Retire 15 Mortician
16 Fisherman 3 - 4 2004 Retire 16 Fisherman
17 Clerk 2 2004 Retire 17 Clerk
18 Pauper 1 2004 Retire 18 Pauper
19 Pickpocket 0 2004 Retire 19 Pickpocket

Some type of statistic that carries with you while playing unranked games and offline vs. AI games would be nice. It plays into my thought that I wish individual maps had more weight and staying power than just that one single game (e.g., ‘Build an Empire’ mode); as it becomes just a blip in time. (I know campaigns (and some Steam achievements) go along these lines of continuity, but it’s not the same.)

22

i haven’t read all the replies, so i might be just repeating stuff, but i have 2 thnings to add.

  • unranked elo exists, it’s just not visible in the AOE interface. you can see it on sites like aoe2.net
  • you can see someone’s ranked elo in unranked matches. most people who dont have a ranked elo wont be too good in unranked matches
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23

When HD just came out I ended up teaming up with a friend and practicing a pretty dumb Michi 2vs2 strat. Over a few months our ELO went up towards 2,000 as we beat other players in a single game type, with us practicing the same thing over and over again. I stopped playing the game for a couple of years, but when I came back my ELO was pretty high - despite the fact I was out of practice and basically rubbish at anything other than a single meme strat. I kept getting booted out of games for being too high ELO - and I didn’t want to go play with other high ranked players who would be furious in team games as I let them down. So basically I had to start Smurfing my kids Steam accounts to get games at the level I was at.

Anyway the moral of the story is that an ELO which accumulates for everything from CBA to Forest Nothing is not a useful indicator of skill and in fact can distort things (when the master CBA player gets kicked out a 3v3 Arabia game for being too high ELO…)

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@CelticFC That is pretty much the problem summed up, for the people that want unranked elo, if it isn’t implemented in a sensible way, then the numbers don’t mean anything and it can still stop people having even games and kill the fun.

You’d basically need to implement a system where for the game/lobby to be counted as ranked it would need to be standard in some way - that is standard rules (maybe speed, res, map type, mode eg regicide, empire wars etc ) and balanced teams (equal numbers - roughly equal skill?) if it’s a team game. Only then would it affect peoples “unranked” rating.

Even if this gets implemented, there’ll probably be more games that don’t get counted than do, and in principle it could be tough to get games that count without a matchmaking system.

Which is where the ranked ladders for 1v1 and team games are useful. There’s a matchmaking system in place, and rankings for both team and 1v1 games. Sure it’s not a choice of map, but there are some map bans, and the fact that it’s not all one map surely is a better reflection of lets say “average/all-round skill”. (You could be amazing at just one map and not have a strategy for any other maps).

This debate could really just be solved instead by questioning “how to get more people playing ranked games to get a rating?”

I don’t know how easy this is to fix, because people can always just lose a bunch of games to lower their elo, or create an alternate account. You’d either need to show a rating history or a rating maximum instead of current rating, for the first problem, or just start banning people for having alt accounts for the second.

I’d have to check what the report options are again, there’s ones for being offensive, and probably for being kind of unfair/trolling by dropping when losing/hiding your last vil in the corner of a map for an hour. I don’t know if you could report people for not having the right rating.

25

@CelticFC
Yes, high elo might be a problem sometimes for someone. That’s why I suggested a display counter cap for 1800 /example/. Anyway by my guess lobby won’t ever get such thing, it is still intersting to see different opinions.

@basmentjax
For elo smurfing that is also a problem. Solution could be simple one. Elo changes after 10 minutes in game. Because normal games do not end before this time-line.

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26

Michi is a meme map for a reason… No way you can become 2k on any of the maps in the current map pool with that method.

You even admit that you played a niche strat over and over, so you are the problem.

And what compells you do limit others from playing their preferred settings, when you aren’t even interested in partaking in that system?

I get very frustrated when people come to bash others ideas, many of us are left out in the MM system and we just want a place where we can play how we always used to play. Unlike your niche strats we do play seriously and varied, and find fair matches with likeminded players in lobbies all the time.

@basmentjax Stop acting like the last 20 years of lobbies were the end of the world.

27

I’d prefer if you didn’t @ me and try drag things across threads. If you’d like to have a useful discussion please, highlight something I’ve said in the thread you’re commenting in.

I can barely follow what you’re saying because you’ve read about three of my posts and split the responses across them.

I’m not even bashing other peoples ideas - I’m attempting to be constructive and realistic

Stop pretending the last 20 years of matchmaking were perfect.

28

That was directed towards the member CelticFC, not you.

However you also don’t have a reason to shutdown the request for a fully featured ranked lobby when you aren’t even interested in using it. While on Voobly and HD people have played maybe millions of games which is the whole reason why DE even came to be. Now DE comes along and all of a sudden we need to throw away all our preferences, you can’t give a reasonable argument for why a ranked lobby shouldn’t be allowed if a standardised MM system exists. A game does not get to decide how I enjoy it, very simple.

Stop pretending the last 20 years of matchmaking were perfect.

I never said that it was perfect. However it does allow freedom and when players don’t abuse the system, it works more than well enough.

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I actually agree with you, I don’t have a reason to shut it down completely. It probably should get implemented, and it would probably make people happier

But I just think if it’s going to be implemented and be useful to people it has to be done ‘right’ (whatever that should mean). It shouldn’t be that any match counts with any settings otherwise what does the rating really mean? What could you conclude from it when trying to balance teams?

I apologise for my last post as well, I shouldn’t be getting annoyed.

I think this just got to me a bit for some reason.

What do you gain/lose unofficial elo for at the moment on aoe2 dot net for instance?

30

You have some weird passive aggression against someone having an opinion that they didn’t like the previous implementation of unranked ELO. I didn’t come to bash your ideas, I said why I didn’t like something that existed and gave an anecdotal tale of why.

(and there are plenty of people who are currently 2k+ unranked ELO who do nothing but meme maps - the CANNONEER clan is full of 2k players who play only Forest Nothing.)

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31

I would love to see such ranking for ranked games.

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32

Me, too :slight_smile: Gives another level of fun and depth to the rank than just a number.

33

Actually there’s this site: https://aoe2.net/ (sadly compared to in game browser, this one works well and shows even other servers which game can’t handle)

you can see unranked elos and that can help to balance the games. This might just be enough as it updates lobby in real-time.

Interesting ideas you had above, guys, the complex fame system looks like a lot of work and literally, that won’t happen. :kissing:

34

The game could show unofficial (unranked) elo directly in the lobby.

You’re by far not the first one to request this. There have been dozens of threads with this request, basically starting last year, right after the game was released.

Unfortunately instead of starting to show the “unranked” ELO in the lobbies, they recently started to show the “ranked ELO” in the lobbies, which is of course is quite useless, since most of the players in the lobbies never played ranked and therfore have no ranked ELO.

This said, I’m strongly in favour of this request (as I already pointed out in some other threads that requested the same).
We’ve been playing with ELO in lobbies for many years in HD and it worked reasonably well when it came to “creating” balanced games.
Now “DE” is the new thing and HD isn’t maintained anymore (which includes that they never completely fixed the ELO system in HD that broke more than two years ago), so we should at least get the same thing in DE that we had in HD, if the devs aren’t willing to fix HD anymore.

However, the “unkranked ELO” as shown on aoe2.net (and even more the nonsense that shows up on your profile page here an ageofempires.com) unfortunately is bugged too. For example I played five games during the last seven days. All five show up in the list of played games, but only three of them generated ELO (and were added to ‘won games’ and ‘win streak’), while two just didn’t count…

So before showing unranked ELO, it should be fixed. It really can’t be that we again have a broken ELO system in the “new” game, after having to suffer the unfixed ELO system in the old game for years -.-

I never played ranked matchs. I tried, but i dont want wait 3~4 min to find a lobby.

3-4 minutes? I tried to find a ranked match two or three times and always gave up after none was found in 10 minutes. When I’d get one in 3 minutes I might even consider ranked :wink:

35

I always seen it funny when ranked people cry about their queue lengths. Played so much custom games that I know what it is like to wait an hour or two for a game.

But now unranked people are crying about ranked queue lengths? Wth? Unranked games always take minimum 5 minutes to start and that’s if you’re lucky. More like 15 minutes is the usual, if not 30 for an actual game start. After all, in ranked when you find the game, it’s about to start. When you join a lobby, the game is not most likely going to start right away since there ain’t enough people in 11.

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36

Unranked games always take minimum 5 minutes to start and that’s if you’re lucky. More like 15 minutes is the usual, if not 30 for an actual game start

Not really… Nowadays, the biggest problem in unranked is to get into the lobby before it’s full… because often they fill up within seconds and 20 players try to join at the same time. After that the game usually starts in less than a minute. (Except if you have somebody who doesn’t ready up and the host is reluctant to kick him. But in such cases I’d just leave after a minute.)

Anyway, that’s a bit of Off Topic. Important is:

  1. Fix unranked ELO
  2. Show unranked ELO in lobbies

This game can’t be a step backward in this regard compared to HD any longer… (other issues like the non-existant pathfinding of villager are enough regression already.)

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I never played ranked matchs. I tried, but i dont want wait 3~4 min to find a lobby.

You seem pretty unlucky. I have waiting times around 1-2 minutes. I think i once had more than 3 minutes. Maybe twice.

I once tried lobby, but it was bad. Very bad. You got randomly kicked out of lobby, lobbies dont really start quickly. In the end i go back to ranked games.

If you want a quick game with equally balanced team, go ranked. It is much easier to get a good ranked game than a good lobby game.

I really dont understand peoples complaints about the lobby:

  • the lobby isnt meant for ranked games. So why would you have someone ranks?
  • the settings for each game are completely different. ELO dont transfer from one map to one other. If you got ELO in lobby, it is pretty much meaningless. So why would we add some meaningless rating?
  • For me the lobby is to play against and with friend. You know each other, so you can make your own teams. This dont require a rating. Also for clans who wanna play together. Again, you know each other, no rating required. Also tournaments will use the lobby. Again, you dont need a rating to talk about the teams.

The ranked system is a great step forwards. Getting into the right game on HD and Voobly was terrible. With match making it is great. I would advice everyone to join the ranked games.

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38

I really dont understand peoples complaints about the lobby

And I’m a bit tired of explaining it the 100st time. But here we go:

  1. Since “ranked” heavily limits you in maps and settings, it’s not suitable for anybody who wants to play with maps/settings of his choice. Ranked is like a ice cram shop that only sells vanilla. Vanilla ice is delicious but often I want another taste.

  2. People who play unranked (for the reason given in 1) still have the desire to play balanced games. So they need a “tool” that let’s them balance the game. Therefore they need “unranked ELO” shown in the lobby. And the system that generates the unranked ELO shouldn’t be broken.

  3. The system that we want is simply the one we had in HD: There we had “unranked ELO” in the lobbies, it was used to balance games and it worked quite well.

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39

There was no unranked elo, there was only ranked elo. Ranked games have been completely moved to matchmaking and they are not going to do anything to let you have “ranked games” on the unranked side, because that’s defeating the purpose of the MM. Unranked side is the casual side where you can play relaxed games. If you want to be competitive yourself you can, but it wont get turned into a ranked mode.

You can want a change for this, but from the devs perspective they would be advertising you to use the MM less when you felt like playing a ranked game.

40

You completely miss the point.

It doesn’t matter if you call it ranked or unranked or whatever you want to call it.

The thing is that lobbies in HD allowed you to play with the settings you desired - and if you played those settings in numerically balanced teams (1v1 / 2v2 / 3v3 / 4v4) you’d be awarded ELO. This lead to a score that was quite accurante in relating one players skill to another players skill. So you could use this score to achieve balanced games.

In DE the very same thing doesn’t work for two reasons:

  1. The ELO is not visible ingame, so you can’t use it to balance
  2. Even if it were visible, it’s still extremely inaccurate (12xx stomping 18xx) which tells us that obviously the calculation must be heavily broken.

(And just repeating “use MM instead” when it has been clearly explained why MM isn’t an option really doesn’t make much sense…)