It has been days since the patch was released, yet team games remain in an unplayable state. As soon as you get close to imperial, the game starts lagging for everyone (and it is extreme lag). This has been witnessed on streams, and anyone playing team games can confirm that it is happening 100% of the time.
I have two concerns:
Why has this not been added to the list of known issues? Just like the disconnect issue, for some reason this issue is not getting the attention it deserves even after so many complaints. Why have a list if you are not going to add the number one on-going issue to it?
Do patches never get play-tested? A problem as a big as this would surely get caught if even one team game was tested out before the patch was released.
If a fix is not coming any time soon, the patch needs to be rolled back. So that people can start playing again.
The anniversary patch was supposed to be a celebration for one year of this awesome game. Instead, it has reminded us of the struggles this game has gone through with bugs and late-fixes and lack of acknowledgement of issues.
The devs have acknowledged the issue, stated that they are investigating it with the highest priority and will release a fix as soon as they can safely do so.
I agree with your concern that patches often introduce new bugs, performance problems or other issues, so that’s the same reason why they shouldn’t release a fix for this particular issue without proper testing and QA.
I think the OP made valid point here. Team games, especially 4v4s are currently unplayable. Looking at the ratings on AoE2.net, it’s safe to assume that the biggest mass of the playerbase plays team games… which are utterly broken ATM.
Why do the devs don’t consider to do a roll-back in these cases? Is it better to lose your playerbase because people cannot play?
I wouldn’t leave AOE2 ever, because I love it, but this behaviour really confuses me when MS and co. want to reach out to new players.
they also need to remove those unnecessary animated menu, or at least give us an option to turn it off. also allow lobby hosts to set benchmark restriction for anyone trying to entier their lobby, this will prevent us playing with laggers and laggers can go play with other laggers if they dont mind the lag.
I didn’t say he didn’t have a valid point. I just mentioned what the devs already posted here about the issue. I’m not sure if it’s useful to bring up the same topic again in a new thread, speculating about a rollback or hotfix. It’s just like this one: Anniversary Hotfix?
I don’t see a rollback happening, because it would mean they remove all new functionality they just introduced and promoted.
More realistic is a hotfix, but even then I think they shouldn’t rush out a new release until it has been tested properly.
I appreciate you letting u know about it, but that is part of the problem. The community has to dig through replies from devs to find out that “oh looks like they know about the issue” rather than them clearly communicating to us that they have seen the issue and it will be resolved.
They have so many avenues to communicate with us. A simple tweet would suffice. They have their own list of known issues which they rarely update. It literally takes 10 seconds to make an official post about it, yet players are left in the dark.
The problem is that this lack of communication will cause players to start leaving the game because most of them will be unaware of what is going on and just give up.
Yes, that could be communicated more clearly and the known bug list seems to be not very well maintained, but it’s also because numerous new threads are created about the same issue.
As a complete outsider, I would assume the same will happen as you described
I simply just bantered about the lack of professionalism from MS again in cases like this. How could they ever believe new players will join AND remain if they cannot handle serious issues like this?
Again, that’s the issue. What percent of players do you think come to the official forums, let alone dig around in threads for a dev response? If they want to keep the player-base intact, mega issues such as this need to be communicated on with the community. Other games do this successfully, and AOE has a large enough player base to warrant it as well.
I’m not defending their process of testing, releasing and communication. There is certainly room for improvement. So I understand your frustration.
I occasionally report bugs myself and most often I don’t see any acknowledgement, which can be frustrating (but in this case they responded quickly).
Then again, I try to be a little forgiving, especially since we get all these updates and new content for free, one year after release. Sometimes I wonder if creating new topics speculating what the next step will be (a hotfix? a rollback? when?) are useful. I’m sure they are working on it. And this wasn’t a perfect example of “lack of acknowledgement”.
True, but honestly, even though we can consider the updates as free, they always introduce something game breaking. 5 minute disconnect issue, Malay bug…all these things that get fixed only after a month or so (the disconnect issue is still unfixed by the way and I made a gazillion threads on it).
If they started with a working game, and didnt introduce all these problems progressively, I would praise them as well. Right now I just think there is too much carelessness.
Yes, testing could definitely be better. With every change, there is a chance it breaks something else. They apparently thought they improved the performance, it’s even in the patch notes. Maybe that change had a side-effect they did not anticipate. There are also bugs in other new features they added (quick play map selection, dequeuing from global queue).
A mod on this forum suggested they should release a beta version first:
Why do i see once every week a new thread from another person here about the TG ratings? Ofc it is not as broken as with the lag, but it is also something the devs need to fix to make TG really playable again.
Team games previously had issues, now 3v3 and 4v4 sounds like they’re almost unplayable. I think the issue is things got worse not better. Of course some of the issues are caused by local machines, but not everything. I believe that this is actually a high priority for the devs. They are obviously concerned with creating a quality product. But perhaps the reality is fixing it is actually harder then writing a post about it? Haha
