AoE2 devs: Please stop trying to experiment and just listen to the community

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
23

I think they dislike them for a variety of reasons:
-Many of the new civs are gimmicky: Sicilians, Cumans, Burgundians, Georgians and to a lesser extent Bohemians each force a very particular game with very little variation (similar to Spanish on Nomad). This isn’t interesting to play as, play against or watch
-It makes getting into the game harder. Less competition means fewer interesting tournaments, less prize money etc

I don’t think the top pros mind learning new civs, they have the time for it and get paid for it after all

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24

I understand and like both philosophies. There are civs who only do 1 thing but 1 thing good. And civs who are very flexible and you don’t know what to expect. I like both playing with these civs and against them. I think there’s nothing wrong with picking a civ that has 1 particular gimmick and mastering the heck out of it.

Most of the pros are already old school players, is there any pro that picked up AoE2 in 2019? I think what makes the competitive zone of AoE2 very “gatekeeping” is the fact that there’s only 1vs1 tournaments and no prizes for different tournament elo levels.

Some 2vs2 or 3vs3 tournaments would be amazing. Seeing pros team up against each other.

Instead of ranked elo which could be abused, there can be a tournament elo for tournament players (doesn’t even have to be in the game, just in a database), each time a tournament with money is made those games will count towards your tournament elo. Doing this will allow making torunaments that will reward players who are good but not top 20 good.

Hera talked about this in a video, that it’s only the top 20 players who get to earn money from AoE2. Making it very bad for anyone who is not top 20, meaning the vast majority of players.

I agree with your point that more civs means harder for someone to become a pro, but I don’t think that’s the main factor.

You are correct. Sorry, I meant, you are ##########.

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25

I understand ur point of view, and think this is a dilemma between being able to say: “hey, respect us as consumers” and "I Hope age of empurre doesnt fall into darkness like others RTS.

26

I agree with most of your points. Or let’s say the core point.
If 3 campaigns and 2 civs cost 15$ now then how can a bunch or scenarios cost 13$. Are the civs only worth 2$?
But then people payed 15$ just to be able to play Romans, since there is still no way to buy Romans without getting all of AoE1 on top.

I asked for it and many others too.
They didn’t end up executing it the way people wanted it, but that’s partially because people had very different ideas about what they want an AoE1 port to look like.

You gotta adjust for inflation.
They can’t keep charging 10$ for DLC and only 20$ for the full game forever.
AoMR will probably cost 30$, that’s my guess.

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27

I disagree. How a game plays out should be determined by the civ match-up, not just one of the civs. eg if you play against cumans, it’s always
-confirm they are doing double TC
-go fast castle yourself (fuck the fucking censorship system)

I don’t think any one civ should be able to dictate the game

I don’t think you can get good enough in only 5 years
There are lots of tournaments for lower elos, Hera organizes his colosseum. The German discord has tournaments super frequently etc

What are you talking about>
nations cup (4v4), battle of africa (3v3), two pools (2v2), Empire Wars Duo (2v2), were S-tier team game tournaments in the last 3 years.
Additionally there are lots of A-Tier team game tournaments

that already exist and is used for seeding in many tournaments. from this and the stuff about “no teamgame tournaments”, I get the impression that you make assumptions about the competitive scene without informing yourself first

It’s literally what Breezy (was that his name) said is one of the biggest things he struggled with, and it’s the first thing that Nili mentioned that he would change about the game (“remove 10 civs”)

29

Theres no justification to go from 10$ in 2017 with 4 cics and campaigns to 15$ in 2023 with 2 civs and three campaigns

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30

2017 was still AoE2HD and not AoE2DE yet I don’t think that’s the best comparison.

You could argue that Dynasties of India was a better deal with 3 civs and 3 campaigns for 10$ vs. 2 civs and 3 campaigns for 15$.
That is true.
But they likely want to keep round numbers for the price.
So if 12$ would have been fair then and 13$ are fair now, they round it to 10$ in the first case and 15$ in the second case.
Just as an example.

But in the end it’s simply up to everyone to decide it they think it’s worth it.
You can just not buy it or wait for a sale.

In many places you would pay more for a meal then this DLC costs.

Unless we start the regional pricing debate again but then we start getting into more price differences between DLC and it gets a lot more complicated.
But I think that is a different debate.

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31

I also don’t buy the “inflation” argument. If you work professionally you build up tools, tests and libraries that let you create new content cheaper than before

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32

90% of the work on AoE2DE is not the content creation.
What is content in this game?
A few skins and campaigns.
Everything else requires a lot more work.
Coding in new features doesn’t get easier over time, maybe even harder because they already got the low hanging fruits.
Balancing also gets harder because every new civilisation has to be balanced against more civilisations then any civilisations before it.

Not sure how much they can improve their tools anymore at this point.

But in the end it’s their decision to choose the price, and our decision to decide if it’s worth it.

33

as someone who has done game development myself that isn’t the case. You build a framework, that is the bulk of the work. Adding new mechanics or content is not the hard part.

stuff like Monaspas dealing extra damage to buildings on release is what any competent team should catch with automated tests and tools (or even a single person play testing it). The fact this is happening shows that they have huge amounts of technical debt and a deeply flawed testing process

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34

It’s a relatively small team building tools for an engine that no one else uses.
It’s not like this is Unity or Unreal.
I have no idea what kind of projects you have worked so I can’t judge how comparable they are. I was “lucky” enough to only work with Unity so far, which makes it very easy to write your own tools for the Editor using C#.

How would you design test cases that assume such a bug can even happen. Why should a unit do unexpectedly more damage vs. buildings?
That seems like a an edge case to me.

But I am curious if they have some automated testing like letting a new unit fight every existing unit and look at the outcome.

35

exactly this.

with something like the aura bonus of the centurion they should have already had a very similar test case to the monaspa (which is what I mean by it gets easier and easier to add new content)

and it’s not the first time that a new unique unit deals unepected bonus damage with a unique kind of attack. The exact same thing happened when coustilliers on release dealt double damage to archer units with their charge attack on release.
An edge case bug like this happening once is understandable. Making the same mistake again is embarassing

36

What we discuss here, what we think it seems fair, or don’t think seems fair, ultimately doesn’t matter, what matters is the sales. Warhammer 3 had recently a controversy with an overpriced DLC, there was a lot of outrage even mainstream media covered it and eventually the company (because you can’t really say the devs) buckle down and doubled the content of the DLC so that it’s worth the price it was given.

Why did they do this? because the people were upset? the people were upset, yes, but this didn’t matter. What did matter is that the DLC didn’t sell. And with the fanbase upset it is likely the next DLC will not sell unless they do something about it. Like Cyberpunk 2077.

I’m not saying AoE2 is nowhere near the level of Warhammer 3 and Cyberpunk 2077, it’s not, those were the worst case scenarios to put things into perspective, what I am saying is that ultimately people vote with their money.

A lot of people are dissapointed with this campaign-only DLC, some of the content because they wanted new civs, some with the content because they wanted actual campaigns and a lot with the price because they believe 13$ is too much. Yes, we are free to talk all we want, but ultimately, if the DLC sells, we were wrong they were right. If the DLC doesn’t sell, we were right they were wrong.

Remember Bethesda’s famous horse armor DLC? for the small price of 2.5$? It was literally just a horse armor, that’s it, that was the whole DLC. For 2006 standards were much better, so naturally people were upset. Gamers had more of a spine so to speak back then. Bethesda’s really was a pioneer in predatory DLC tactics (again, not comparing it to AoE2, giving extreme examples for perspective). So a lot of people were upset. What happened next? the DLC sold.

The horse armor DLC made more money/effort than the Knights of the Nine DLC which was a real DLC, not what would eventually become cosmetic DLC.

You had 1 full fledged DLC for 10$ that required a lot of effort from the developer. And 1 horse armor for 2.5$ that a modder can do in 30 minutes (and I’m being generous here). For ever 4 horse armor purchased it was like 1 Knights of the Nine purchase. If it wouldn’t have worked companies wouldn’t have done it.

It’s funny how in 2006 people laughed at the concept off $2.50 horse armor. Bethesda was roundly mocked for selling $2.50 horse armor. Saying that nobody would buy it. And yet they did, and now we have 100$ in game items and weapon skins that cost 5 times more.

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37

I’m of the opinion that regional or even thematic DLC packs were the wrong approach to expansions, and that it has limited the creativity of the developers by forcing them to focus all their resources on staying with the theme of the DLC. Like how I’m AOE3, Morocco was cut because it didn’t fit the theme of African Royals, and not for any other ostensible reason. Now the developers at stuck with making Poland and Denmark, which aren’t really popular player choices, because they feel like they have to make a Baltic DLC.

We can think back to Conquerors where it was a grab-bag of new and interesting civs covering literally all places and eras of the Middle Ages. Could developers even conceive of a DLC with an Asiatic, European, and American civ all packed together at this point?

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38

Toltec, Chimu, Thai, Songhai, Vandals… that wasnt so hard

Even throws a semi European civ in that was more associated with Carthage

Wait Im sure I can find myself posting this somewhere over half a decade ago

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39

Of course, we as players can easily come up with concepts or even fully fleshed-out proposals, but the developers appear to have limitations in their business plan that prevent them from pitching a DLC idea to Microsoft and receiving approval.

I wonder if game publishers have found that it is easier to market DLCs with a regional theme? Or is it that research and design are easier on the back end of development?

40

I fail to see this as a net loss to profits. Other than UU and certain civ specific buildings everything is already designed for bear

41

Part of this is also that the Base Game and the DLC in question got review bombed. They know that a “mixed” or “mostly negative” steam review causes reduced sales

It’s pretty close. Bugs in the base game not being fixed and extreme inflation in the DLC. sounds exactly like warhammer 3 to me

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42

True, that’s when they began to break out.

Might be hypocritial of me for saying this because I’m not a campaing fan, but it’s just a campaign DLC, and one you can already find on workshop. So really you can play it without paying. I agree that the price is too big, but as long as the DLC is not something that’s core to the game. If there’s a civ DLC with 20$ that’s going to be bad.

Which well, just apply the Warhammer 3 treatment. But I’ve seen from Return of Rome that Microsoft is better than that.

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43

I’ve already changed my steam review of aoe2 to negative

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