Hello fellow Age of Empires III players!

With Voobly's dedication to all the "Age of" games Ensemble Studios have ever produced, it was just a question of time before Age of Empires III takes its rightful place as a featured game as well and kicks off to brighter tomorrows! Recently we've been working hard to make playing AoEIII/TWC/TAD on Voobly even more fun than it already is, with _NiceKING_, a community persona you sure know from ESOC, helping us out as the new Mod, and today we take the next major step in helping the competitive part of the community feel at home here through improved ladders.

In the past weeks, we have introduced a couple of important features leading to today - two popular community patches widely used in tournament play - ESO-Community Patch and Treaty Fan Patch - are now available as mods in our Mod Centre for comfortable use in your games, and we have added the ability of your played ladder games to be automatically uploaded together with the game statistics - now you can check out your opponent's point of view as well, or you can simply follow your favourite player and enjoy his played games whenever you wish (provided he has the rec option enabled)

The next step is then naturally taking a look at the ladders themselves - just seeing the tops in them gave a clear sign a refresh is needed, as having inactive accounts sit in there forever achieves nothing but discourage rated play, because what's the point when those players certainly won't be ready to face your skill and give you your deserved points, while at the same time they undeservedly enjoy the spotlight for far too long without any effort backing the achievement up

The best way to resolve that and to also support all the steps taken for Age of Empires III - The Asian Dynasties on Voobly so far, the ladders are getting a proper facelift with a completely fresh start to let everyone find their true place on them, including the new heroes for the first page whose skill outshines all others - and to sweeten things up, we have prepared a little competition to reward you along the way!

New Era Ladder Competition

The competition will be rather simple, which is what makes it so fun - all you have to do is play rated games and be the first to reach certain milestone - all ladders will be involved, so if somebody proves better in e.g. 1v1 Supremacy, you can still triumph in Team Games The rewards will be fancy banners to your profile signaling your achievement, and also a Premium Voobly Account making your playing at Voobly that much better

Rules:
- Only genuine, fair play effort counts - no point trading, no noob bashing, no cheating! Make sure you play your peers as you rise on the ladders, this is supposed to be an achievement, not a cheese Staff reserves the right to judge the fairness of the efforts.
- The first to reach 1800 on a ladder through fair means will receive an Award Banner and Silver Premium Account for 3 months.
- The first to reach 1900 on a ladder through fair means will receive an Award Banner and Gold Premium Account for 6 months.
- The prizes will be awarded to the account that has reached the milestone. (This means you would do well to use your main account )

Sounds good? Then get to climbing!

New Era Ladders - What's Changing and How

And how will the new ladders work? Due to varied activity amongst the standing ladders and the number of dead souls on them making any partial changes unfeasible, we are going to be archiving all of them and introducing brand new ones - the old ladders will still show in your profiles, so you're not losing anything, but now you have a chance to assert your rightful place on the spot that belongs to you.

1v1 and Team Games for both Supremacy and Treaty will be reinstated the same, for Deathmatch, we will be introducing one common ladder to make it more attractive and fun to play on - having two barely active ladders doesn't make much sense, it's better to have a common one to make you, DM players, feel better about your rated games - they will now be more important for the standings than before. Further, we will not be reinstating the Overall ladder, because it serves no real purpose in a proper competitive environment - it is just a passive way to rise some rating to infinity, a rating that has no real meaning as far as your actual level goes - we want to put more focus on the dynamic 1v1 and Team Game, DM ladders to motivate the competitive community. Lastly, we'll be introducing a new type of ladder - Match Stats Only - which serves as an "unrated" ladder, as it only records game statistics/recorded games, but does not actually tally any rating - it's also a good ladder for tournament games.

As a novelty, we will be introducing a feature you are all familiar with from ESO - Rating Decay. Rating Decay serves as a check against point-sitting and autocorrects rating of inactive players - after weeks of inactivity, you can hardly say you haven't lost your edge This way it supports healthy competitive environment on the ladders, making them more meaningful and also fun. We have listened to the community input on this matter, and have chosen a starting period of two weeks of inactivity before a player will be a subject to it - mind you, Rating Decay does not affect all players - it affects only higher-rated ones, those that should be active in the first place to deserve their spot on the ladder, as there is a threshold below which it does not take effect - the threshold will be 1700 points. If you're 1699 and less, you don't need to worry about it at all.

New Era Ladder Features:
- TAD Ladders: 1v1 Supremacy, TG Supremacy, 1v1 Treaty, TG Treaty, Deathmatch, Match Stats Only
- Rating Decay: applies to 1v1 Supremacy, TG Supremacy, 1v1 Treaty, TG Treaty (not DM); decay period is 14 days, decay step is 20 points, decay threshold 1700

Since the ladders haven't been properly tended to for some time, leaving some things a bit of a mystery, we'll be closely monitoring how the new ones fare to see if we need to tweak a thing here or there

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Well, that's about it for the new ladders and assorted novelties then, so we hope you'll have fun on the new grounds and Age of Empires III will have only nice things ahead of itself on Voobly - we'll try to make sure that's exactly the case through our continued efforts

If you face any issues playing at Voobly, be it technical problems or game troubles, including unfair players cheating, being obnoxious or otherwise making your stay here uncomfortable, don't forget we a have forum where you can post your questions or complaints - we'll help you have more fun with AoEIII on Voobly in (almost) no time

Well come the new competion.. but reset all the ladder is a bull****.. many players who had very high scores are still active and have lost a lot of time to reach that position.. Records are made to be overcome.. But as far as I understand the moderators do what they want without hearing or listening to what other people think .. congratulations .. beautiful community ..

Oh , what a great step for the community ...Now the competition is gonna be tough , I hope I could also stand in somewhere Thanks for taking such steps to take the crap out and Re-Boot the Ladders (If I may call it that way) Hope to see , some more attention from you guys towards the community
Peace

this is really good and i like how you guys are paying attention to improve voobly and special thanks to niceking - since the real changes started to happen when he became a moderator

Wow! , a good news for everyone!