In the first 20 seconds daut comes out with the big reveal, he played the game! He isn’t supposed to say civs and stuff like that, but he stated his overall opinion.
What this potentially means is that aoe4 could possibly be taking pro player advice and taking their opinions on balance! This is a great call because we can go straight into the game and have a balanced game on the first day! Of course this is just me speculating, they could of course just be giving it to him early but not taking his opinion.
But assuming they are taking his opinion on balance, there could be many other people testing the game, another thing to consider is that the game is coming out fall, so now is probably around the time in witch the beta comes out. In my opinion, this is very exiting because that’s means the game is almost on its final stages before finally being released. What do you all think?
There has been a community council that has tested the game in various stages of development for about a year and a half now. We don’t know everyone who has been on the council but it has included pro playesr from all the different AoE games, and also people who represent more casual members of the audience.
AOE3 DE is the best example showing only pro or top players are involved for the balance will make the game balance mess, due to most of people don’t have their skill.
There is an endless fight within any RTS community.
“If a faction can be easily dealt with by high-apm pro players with perfect macro and micro, by doing that exact one thing right within a small time window, but also easily exploited by lamers if the opponent failed to do so, shall we call it balanced?”
Plenty of extremely talented and experienced
players from all five Age games have been playtesting and giving feedback. The developers have been really excellent at creating the council and giving us an opportunity to give them feedback, advice, and do our best to represent the players.
+1
we see frequently RTS games fail because they are designed for APM, not Strategy.
That’s why Starcraft 2 has soft and hard counters.
A hard counter describes the situation where one unit is effective versus another unit.
A soft counter describes the situation where one unit is effective versus another unit, but needs skill to pull it off.
I would consider this way.
Everyone has the right to say their opinion, for sure these people should play the game for some time and know the game well.
If only one person say A is OP, sure we will not consider as opinion, but if there are already some people complain about it, sure this is already a problem.
The reason why AOE3DE mess the balance is although most people are considering several civs are OP but pro and top player aren’t, dev did nothing to that, finally became the most OP 2 civs players are complaining each other OP.
However AOE4 is not released yet, I think we still can wait and see how is the game.
Very well said, I think if a civ is truly OP more than one person would say it’s OP, it’s about finding trends, this means having a good enough sample size. And people who decide definitely should have at least a few months of experience with RTS games
On the positive side, at least they are dealing with balancing seriously. Where the previous devs left with TAD was a balancing disaster. Now at least many more civs are viable, though new civs and Japan are generally OP (but considering the first version of TAD was ashigaru wars, at least they have been fixing it).
Also once they mentioned they nerfed Aztecs because they were exceptionally strong in lower score matches.
I don’t know they (3DE dev) take it seriously or not but some issues are being complaint by many people and without any action from them until I quit that game, not only about balance.
For the balance their partiality are extremely obvious you can always see full of the most OP civ complaint posts and comments with more than 50% in balance topic, but dev just took no action or waited for at least 2 months to take action then buff them back more OP within 2 weeks due to most of that civ players got used to OP, some issues were only 1 topic complaint with the most UP civ dev still nerf it.
For gameplay issue, herding frequency was adjusted by them and got not less than 5 posts complaining since 3de released and 99% players agreed that should be adjusted back to original version, 7 months passed dev still ignore all of these complaint .
You are also active there you know which issues I am talking.
To be fair I am not saying that dev are doing everything wrong, but their reaction and efficiency are unacceptable to me, and I know aoe4 dev are not the same one so I come to here and expect better feeling from here.
This is aoe4 discussion I think we don’t need to go so deep to discuss which civ are op and what they did, but above mentioned is what I got from 3de dev. You know these are truth or not.
The aoe3 devs actually are now recruiting update testers, and yeah, I agree with everything you are saying, they said yesterday actually that they will start recruiting update testers, for now I think they are just testing bugs, but late down the line maybe they can test balance too? It’s still unknown
I do personally agree with many of the points about balancing that have been brought up on this forum.
But keep in mind the forum is a small community and has a strong echo chamber effect. I think the problem is the devs are not really convincing why they made or did not make certain balancing changes. The only way to convince people is to show the actual win rate on different score levels, and I wonder why they are not providing this data.
I have mentioned what I 3de dev ignored to people including not only balance problem.
I can understand every balance adjustment will make some people happy and some angry.
However gameplay issues are not, the example I showed has 99% people agreed, and not only this gameplay issue people wanted dev to improve.
