This clownery has chased me away from playing the game on the regular and steamcharts prove I am not the only one.
Stop putting nonsense maps in the rotation. Black Forest was funny once, it’s time to stop.
Stop letting people who don’t play comp vote on comp maps.
3/4 open maps one of which is arabia, megarandom, arena and maybe a second closed map/islands. Anything other than this template is stupid and actively killing the scene.
December was the first time AOE2 DE has dipped below 20k players online and it’s becoming more and more common. Devs need to address the issues affecting the games health.
No more meme maps in ranked (Black Forest, Fortress)
No more non-ranked players voting for ranked maps. (Ideally just move it back to a forum/age insider vote entirely, the bar of entry for simply making an account on the forum was enough to generally keep the quality of votes high)
Ban Xbox rewards idle lobbies
What do the devs do instead of address these issues? Add MTX.
Imagine going through someones post history in because you’re upset.
Anyway if you actually read that post, you’d realize that it does outline stuff that had already CONCRETELY taken place.
Microsoft did cut funding to AOE2
Several pros took microsoft money and decried AOE2 for a time (Nilli committed to such an extent it lead him to leaving the AOE2 pro scene entirely.)
Microsoft absolutely made an attempt to stomp out AOE2 for 4’s success. AOE2 just luckily had things like T90 not giving up on the game and upping the amount of youtube uploads he made, Jordan stepping up to run a tournament series in the wake of microsofts cut funding, Spirit of the Law openly abandoning AOE4 coverage due to the lack of game quality, and of course the fact that AOE4 released in a terrible state. Had any of those things not happened, microsofts schemes would have come to fruition and Wololo 2023 would have been an AOE4 event, or did you not realize how last minute the change to AOE2/1 being there was? Or how rushed and stilted the rome DLCs announcement was? These were changes made mere months before the Wololo as a direct result of AOE2 refusing to die.
Back to the topic at hand however, there is a concrete demonstrable shift in AOE2’s playerbase. 20k has been the baseline amount of players since the games launch pre-pandemic. Peaks will come and go, but if that baseline number of players starts to freefall there will be no more peaks. Hours of the day where the game is dead will lead to more and more hours being dead until the playerbase moves on. The 8th DLC expansion and microtransactions aren’t going to save the game like proper housekeeping will. Fix the ranked maps, fix the xbox rewards spammers in the lobby. Those 2 things alone would do wonders for the games longterm health.
I’m not at all upset - my point is, you somehow see this game failing whereas in reality it’s bigger than before.
And no, they didn’t cut funding. In fact, the last couple of years were the biggest in terms of funding Age 2 ever received.
I agree about the reward lobbies, those are annoying. In general, the lobby system has to be reworked. But overall, when taking everything into account, AoE 2 is doing great.
I’m not as crazy mad as the OP but he does have a point. Black Forest, Fortress and Islands are pure cancer maps. And i also agree that map votes should be limited to active ranked players only. No fewer than 10 ranked games per month unlocks the voting.
Islands is not a closed map, its an open map. City of Lakes would be a closed water map (which I would prefer).
The problem is that MegaRandom is in every rotation, what is not justified by the amount of games on the map.
I personally didn’t play AoE2 since December, but this rotation I played a ranked game just because Black Forest is in the rotation, what is not often the case and I didn’t want to miss it. There need to be unique maps in the rotation to make it interessting. And MegaRandom is not unique enough.
@SurfaceTen38@NastyHigh Islands is not the same category with the other three (Arena, Black Forest, Hideout), it’s a water map instead of closed/semi-closed map, and it’s your personal preference to not like it as well.
So no, this particular composition you chose to criticize can’t be subject to that criticism; you can begin by reducing your mentioned closed maps to three, if you want to be taken more seriously, because the actual count is:
The problem is that a lot of guys here see the water glass almost full instead of half empty.
This game has had a lot of big cash events, red bulls, big tournaments every 3 months or so, a lot of trash civs i mean DLC and balance changes and promotion non stop and the numbers haven’t increased,the xbox crossplay which was supposed to be the biggest thing was a massive failure, with all the investments done to this game the numbers should be higher way higher.
The devs as the one who has posted here is defending an awful job, cause with all the invested in the last years the real numbers are barely higher than the previous year which was a bad one cause of the aoe4 release.
The game is so dead to me and not because of broken path finding or bugs but because the devs were unable to find a middle ground for players above the average but below the top 32 players in t he world, that is the only player base they care the very top and the very rookies, i do not enjoy playing this game as a team gamer anymore, such a waste of potential cause bad management, this game could have been like chess and become greater with time.
I am not a developer - the Dev Agent tag dates back to an injoke.
Edit: Actual developers have the Forgotten Empires or AoE Logo beside their profile icon.
As for your other points…
Apart from the two DLCs last year (I’m excluding the animated icons packs), the DLC civs actually seem to be quite popular with players debating whether Dawn of the Dukes or Dynasties of India is the best DE DLC.
Non stop promotion? The management usually goes full radio silence unless we’re very close to a DLC release like it was the case last year with Return of Rome or back in 2022 with Dynasties of India where we only knew the codename for a while.
I can’t remember crossplay with console being promoted as the biggest thing. Coverage on the console version rather focused on the controls and eco automation and those two aspects received praise.
Imo AoE 2 was and is like chess. And it became greater with DE.
If it’s very typical to fast castle on that map, it’s effectively a closed map. Sure, you can do a landing in Feudal but unless you do good damage, you’re dead, especially since it’s not hard to wall and opponent will have vision from docks etc. near his TC.
Also, naval battle is trash. So slow and one-dimensional. Needs a huge overhaul to make it playable. Water maps are always super long and dragged out, just like the land prison maps.
I try to avoid them for obvious reasons. The main one being that they’re utter shiiiit. The rush will always be way too slow on Islands. You need a dock + transport ship, so that’s extra resources. Then you have to decide whether you want to build your military on your own island and transport them or send villagers to build them on the enemy island. Either way the ‘rush’ is slow AF.
If it’s very typical to fast castle on that map, it’s effectively a closed map. Sure, you can do a landing in Feudal but unless you do good damage, you’re dead, especially since it’s not hard to wall and opponent will have vision from docks etc. near his TC.
Why would someone land near docks in vision?
There are at least 4 strategies:
fish boom
feudal naval aggression
early landing/raiding
castle drop
If ressources are spend for eco or military on water, there will be less ressources for land defense and something like Scout or Knight raid or a castle drop is extremly dangerous. But if you build land defense, the opponent can just fish boom. There is basically too much to defend on Islands, what makes aggresion very strong. Also compare fishing ships to villagers, fishing ships have much less defense. They can’t hide and they can’t fight.
Sorry I wasn’t talking about landing near docks. I meant you can wall one side fairly easily, then your docks give you vision on the other. So if he lands on the blind side, you’re somewhat protected with walls and you also have vision on the other side with docks.
