Wait, what?!
A month ago we announced we’d be moving to bi-weekly updates. We’ll still be holding true to this, but we have so much information to tell everyone about that we will be increasing the frequency for the upcoming weeks.
The first thing we’d like to address is why we’ve been so quiet. Based on player feedback, we’re going to be changing Age of Empires Online quite a bit, and we’re now at a point where we feel comfortable talking about some of those changes. We always knew what we wanted to do, but we had to figure out when we could do it. We understand that it was frustrating for some players, and we appreciate everyone’s patience.
The next few updates will feature a lot of information. This update will discuss changes to matchmaking. Next we’ll unveil the plan for Season Pass holders, and subsequent updates will include Skirmish changes, core gameplay changes, patching changes, and more detailed and specific discussions of the contents of the “bugchilada” update.
The next update for Age of Empires Online includes continued tweaking of the matchmaking experience and party systems. The end result should be an improved multiplayer experience for both PvPers and PvEers.
First up, the update will finally allow Party matchmaking in Sparta PvP. You will now be able to start matches with another player in your party for both Standard and Champion modes of PvP. You’ll be matched with other fellow 2v2ers or random 2 player parties. Each player will also post to the leaderboards in Champion mode; currently there is no “team” entry. The Party 2v2 feature also allows Free players to experience Champion PvP and post to the leaderboards providing they’ve been invited to a party by a Premium player.
Work has also been done on the matchmaking algorithms used for Standard and Champion PvP to improve the quality of matches. This mostly involves increasing or decreasing the times for “expanding” searches outside of levels and TrueSkill ranks when searching for Standard PvP matches, and what happens when the LIVE system switches players from being a host or when joining.
We’ll be rolling out a new and improved Matchmaking UI with our next update.
You can view a screenshot of the new UI here. The differences that you’ll notice are there’s now a description shown for what type of match you’re looking for, a timer to let you know how long you’ve been searching, and has icons to indicate when you’ve been matched with players. These icons are the red and green dots at the bottom of the screenshot. When a dot flips from red to green, that means you’ve been matched with someone. Once all the dots are green, that means your match is a go and about to start. If someone drops out of the queue, the dot flips back to red. Hopefully these changes help users searching for matches get a better idea of how long it’ll take you to match and where they’re at in the matching process.
Another new feature will be our new “Find Party” feature. This feature lets you do a simple search for other players who are also looking for a Party in your level range. The current implementation uses player level for matching up party members, starting with the same level and extending outwards up to five levels. Users will be able to access this feature via the “Party Invite” button in the Capital City UI. There’s a new button, “Find”, that starts a search for other players in your level range who are also interested in forming a Party. Once it finds another player also looking for a Party, it automatically sends an invite and, if accepted, you’re in a Party! You can exit the Friends List UI, and the search will continue running in the background while you’re doing other things in your city or in a region; it will also continue searching even when you switch regions.
If this feature is found to be useful, we will look to extend the functionality in future updates to allow specific searches such as “Find PvP Party,” “Find Arena Party,” “Find Co-op Party,” “Find Skirmish Party,” etc.
Again, I want to thank everyone for sticking with us for the past 6 months. We’re very excited to show off all the hard work that we’ve been doing behind the scenes to Age of Empires Online.