I know this is an odd topic, but I can’t help but notice occasional fury in these forums about the game and its state and devs.
Frankly, I find this absurd.
DE has taken an original well conceived and built game and handled it with respect and care while massively upgrading the graphics (minus the sad lack of skeletons) and actually improving gameplay significantly overall. Of course we can quibble over balance and such, at times with merit, but for the devs to manage what they have is both excellent and rare.
Honestly, compare the Age devs to most other games updated recently from the same era: the debacle of Warcraft 3 is obvious and glaring in contrast, but not alone.
This is coming from a guy who’s predisposed to dislike modern Microsoft over their pandering and empowering of literal genocide in China.
Kudos to the Age team(s) and the people they work closely with in the community. I think that the bulk of us feel the same.
There will always be people who like the updated stuff and those who don`t, but those who do - rarely bother to post a “thank you” comment. That does not mean they are a minority. Thank you devs, keep doing great job and keeping the game alive and competitive.
The game is more successful than it ever was since it s evolving and attracting more and more players. New strats are born old strats get tweaked. If some players can’t adapt to ever-changing environment the problem is with the player not with the game.
I could go deep and write lots of solid arguments, but its too late here so i will crush your claims with just one basic thing, the biggest playerbase plays team games but current state of team games are the worst from any other previous platform(this including punishments, broken tg rank ladder, etc) you can find hundreds of complains since the release of the game, in fact you can see it reflected since not a single pro player team actually plays in the ladder together cause of the bad experience, high level on team games are gone in this game version and the game has been losing players since several months ago, game is not growing anymore, not even stuck cause it has been losing players steadily, fortunate not as fast as aoe4 but there is a clear tendency and so far i haven’t seen a single decision aimed to fix or address that in fact their latest decisions seems to be pushing players away.
It is so easy to challenge others to prove you wrong if you are only seeing things from your perspective ignoring the big spectrum and the larger playerbase and before someone comes here and say “single players or campaign players are the majority” global campaign progress/achievements proves wrong such argument, while there are 60608 active players on the TG ladder and only 37313 active players on the 1x1 ladder from last 30 days, there are more players interested on TG and yes there are way more team games being played than 1x1 matches all day long, that has always been historical in this game, so now i hope you can see things different and to think in the rest of the playerbase, aoe2 is not only twitch viewers and events.
Here are a bunch of reasons why AoE2 is not a good game:-
Introduction of 6th civilization into East European and South European Architecture while Indian and African set which should have far larger diversity have only 1 or 2 civs.
Inconsistent castles introduced with DE.
No regional monks even with so much demand.
Indian Civ picking UI shows heavy camel instead of Imperial Camel. Graphics of Imperial Camel flickers with changing saddle cloth cover while standing idle facing east. No ship sails and no UI for Indian Architecture set. Using Arabian sails and Khmer UI.
Units like Flaming Camels that never see any use and remain a meme unit.
One user is running rampant in the forum with multiple accounts for pushing his agenda DarthPyro /Alexandrikov /TsarSilver /DustyDeadly/don’t know how many others.
Mod browser flooded with Krakenmeister civs but no separate filters made.
You have to reupload the entire mod size and redownload for every small file change.
No support for adding new civs to the game even though it was initially promised.
South East Asian ships lose their player color when facing in certain directions.
Funky event mods and UI changes that were never needed.
Unnecessary chat filters.
Downgraded decay skeleton graphics in DE.
Allows mods like small trees/range indicator to be crossplayed with non-modded players even in ranked multiplayer making it unfair.
Event mods forcefully automatically subscribed and downloaded wasting internet data as well as pc space.
Time limited events making new joining players cringe at what they are missing or look for some third party mod.
Cannot play data mod with achievements in singleplayer offline but can play the same in singleplayer online.
Mayans Chinese Koreans Persian Turks Japanese Magyars Slavs Vikings get no dedicated Campaign.
Frequent path finding issues of Villagers in clumsy areas.
No way to move all military units spread across the map.
No way to reconnect to a game after disconnecting shortly.
No easy way to roll back to a previous patch to play a specific mod that’s not updated to latest version. (pre-LotW, pre-DotD) (Check EU4 to know what kind of roll back support am talking about).
Battle Royale Mode is dead. Nobody plays it anymore.
Hindi font is broken and unusable but never fixed.
Legionary Shield becomes upside down when it starts moving.
Xolotl Warrior gets no upgrade for imperial age viability.
Elite Steppe Lancer Upgrade and Elite Battle Elephant Upgrade buttons overlap in All Tech Mode.
Scenario editor bridge cannot be crossed directly by units.
Unnecessary wall corners keep popping up when saving and reloading scenarios in editor.
No option to change architecture set of a civ in skirmish games directly, you need to go to map editor again and again or data mod it.
Italians, Huns, Goths sharing voice set with Byzantine, Mongols, Teutons. They should get unique voice sets.
Voice acting of Malay and Indian female villagers sounds very strange as if the Malay voice was acted by a man who is lowering pitch and Indian voice was acted by someone of english accent.
Civs like Slavs should be renamed to Rus, Italians should be renamed to Lombards after introduction of their subcivs.
Three winged hussars in one game is excessive. Atleast remove the wings from the generic hussar via event mod.
All heroes don’t have unique look. Only some got the special treatment.
Saracen monks don’t return gold if they die on a transport ship.
East European Stable oversized above 2x2 grid.
Population space remains occupied if transport ship containing units gets converted by enemy.
Siege towers over expensive. Doesn’t see any action in most games.
AI wastes all its resources building navy even in small water bodies.
AI has a very predictable behaviour when it comes to making or breaking alliance.
You cannot make graphics mods for independent units and buildings without data modding. It is implementable shown by the yurt event mod but was never revealed how.
Water maps are severely unbalanced to favour only certain civs and no step ever taken to make it fun.
Burgundian AI keeps resigning after Flemish Revolution suicide attack.
Volume cannot be adjusted for wem sound files added with mod.
Walls don’t have destruction animation while gates do.
Ship sails are stagnant, it moved back and forth in HD but not anymore in DE.
Introduction of quick play splitted the player base with ranked.
Cannot play LAN offline over hotspot like the older versions.
Your entire argument has a handful of fatal flaws:
The most common player is certainly playing against the AI. That combined with your entire argument being based around this kinda adds a level of irony to your lecturing about seeing things from only one view.
Team games are absurdly complicated, being reliant on the various players not only working together but also having adequate PCs. It’s never been a sure thing to get a functional team game if you don’t know the players and computers playing beforehand. Moreover, the function HAS improved.
Of course fewer people are playing. People can go to work now, unless they live in Australia.
Ive only been on twitch once or twice and really don’t care about event. Like, I suspect, the majority of players, my play is generally either with a couple brothers of mine in non ranked play OR against the AI.
The game itself, yes it’s absolutely amazing. Unbelievable how far it’s come since the early days of the game. The online matchmaking for 1v1 is the main problem which needs fixing. All the other issues i can tolerate.
Honestly i would be happy with just fixing 1v1 ladder. Team Games will always seem lopsided and unfair because snowball victories are amplified when there are more players, no matter how much they try to balance civs or fix the game to deter smurfing
Yeah, 1-6 are very biased especially when mentioning a person who got banned a long time ago…He wasn’t pushing his agendas all the time as others do with their obnoxious threads, begging for devs to add their civs just because they said so while constantly arguing disrespectfully with other ones they don’t like.
And on the subject I think AoE2DE could have QoL additions such as custom color picker like AoE3DE has and bringing back event scenarios (Barbarossa Brawl and Mongol Raiders) as I’m fine with the current state if it.
I have my own list of things to improve, but lets have a look at the bigger picture. HD was a disaster, Voobly didnt really have a growing player base. DE came, the pro player base moved over to DE (while they didnt for HD for obvious reasons). Microsoft sponsored many tournaments. Red Bull stepped in and hosted some tournaments. We get active balance changes to keep the game fresh. We see much more different maps played competitvely. All great things mainly due to DE.
Does this mean DE is perfect? It is far from perfect. But many players seems to hate everything at this forum. I dont really think that is fair. So i see why @FronsterMog wants to make this thread. And i will not kidnap this thread to put all my complaints about the game in this thread like some others are doing.
Kudos everyone, so cute.
Let’s spread love and support, who cares about the poor state of the game, let’s focus on empowering each other and appreciate the efforts of the mighty developers. (please Santa, I hope the Devs are reading this)
I mean, if this approach works for you, that’s great.
