Dead because actual game breaking bugs and issues occurred and the beta testers didn’t do their job. Now I bet devs just focus more on other games anyway.
Still in the process of having the ranking system fixed where it works one time, then doesn’t work another time, and then might crash and lose randomly, so the ELO has been broken even if it’s a bit better now.
I enjoyd learning to play it but that’s about it, and AoE3 still basically had online/multiplayer as far as I kno so, the issues are just too unforgivable. But I never would have even tried the original probably anyway.
If those baseline issues weren’t there I’d definitely be playing a few more games but rating is just inaccurate, the game is the simplest out of the 3 or 4 ensemble games. Sometimes, you could just find a good match, but usually not. It’s simple and the balance is for 1v1. Sometimes I found bad random matches where slightly worse players do 3v1 tactics which is too much for a lot of random players to react to (like the guy above mentions, he is bad but he ‘trolls doing 2v1’ and so you can be in a game but teammates are not so competent, and then causes inbalances even if you do well). It’s very simple to just spam out units and do that because aoe3 is just a simplified RTS, so less room for like bad players being worse off and good players able to do 2v1s and other things you could sometimes do in like AoE and AoM to survive (if you just knew what to do and had the skill ceiling). But mostly inaccurate rating is what killed it for me, so even queuing for games is useless (does not count for me, or randomly win/loss, if crashing it’s just a loss). The fact I had to come here 3 week later after release… and no one had posted about it, then it broke for everyone shortly afterward, it’s sad. The rating being broken meant even people with high win rates might be slightly worse, and I beat them, but it was custom or didn’t count anyway, then no need to stay playing the game to accomplish anything.