The lobbies are BUGGY and finding and joining a game is time consuming. This MUST be fixed.
Stability of the game and eliminating the frequent crashes. This MUST be fixed.
Monetizing multiplayer. For example, adding a $2 or $5 per month subscription of some kind while still keeping multiplayer free to play. That gives you incentive to keep improving multiplayer and gives you the funds to do so. Without it, you’re spending time chasing single player features to try to sell more copies, when you have a big user base of return “customers” that are willing to spend money but instead are getting frustrated by all the bugs.
Everything else is secondary to above three items.
Hard no to your third point. You seem to forget that a considerable amount of the user base consists of singleplayer gamer. I can get access to dozens of games for that prize each month if you compare that for example to XBox All Access which is from Microsoft.
Sell campaigns or new architecture/unit sets if you don’t want to release new expansions. This alone would sell like hot cakes considering all the requests there are for more appropriate Viking architecture etc.
#3 doesn’t affect single player at all. It helps multiplayer because it gives the company incentive to continue to improve multiplayer. Follow the money.
Regarding the price, go play the other games then. For a lot of us, we want to play AOE2 multiplayer but the bugs make it hard and frustrating to do so. You can see a ton of people complaining about it in the forums and it’s most of the complaints for the game.
What you guys don’t realize is that free = buggy. If they aren’t making money off it, what’s the point of them improving it? If they don’t improve it, then it’s a poor experience. If it’s a poor experience, then people don’t play the game. They have to figure out some way to monetize it beyond selling a copy forever for $20, because then it ends up dying like it did before.
The game is not pretty stable There are consistent crashes of the game, closing out the entire thing, mostly in lobbies. You can see the many bug reports on the forum.
Monetizing a game on the multiplayer side is very difficult without introducing power creep features, and we definitely don’t want those.
We also have a player base that is more than likely going to be wildly against a subscription service, as a good chunk of them have been playing for free for over a decade.
If you ask me, a good way of monetizing the game would be via sales of professionally developed cosmetic mods and similar content, it keeps the art team busy and it would be entirely optional.
An example might be a visual upgrade to your buildings when playing certain civs that other players can also see, things like flairs in your TCs, or on the more expensive side, maybe alternative architecture skins that you can equip for your favorite civilization, that might make them stand out from other players that are playing the same civ.
Adding a level of personalization to each players town that is visible to other players (without becoming cluttered, which is a real risk, see: TF2) is probably the way forward.
RTS games have never worked on a subscription fee, players are just not interested, and the game will just die off in 2 months, as people will refuse to pay, or mod the game towards private servers.
Then name some RTS games that had a subscription fee and died off because of it. You won’t be able to
$20 game purchases were the old way off thinking back when we installed with CDs and it was one-offs purchases and they created expansions for another one-off purchase.
Subscriptions are the way of the future and it allows the game to be maintained long term. You can have free and for-pay features, like what Fano suggested above. Without monetizing it though, it will die off just like it did before.
First I heard of it. Looked it up and it was $29.95 on sale as a one-off purchase in 2009 (its release year), not a subscription. It died off in a few years. Like I said, one-off purchases = death.
No, it had a monthly subscription, that gave you boosters for your money, with which you could expand your deck-style armies.
Your idea has been tried already, and failed miserably. RTS is not as popular as MMO, and even Pay to Play MOBAs fail, all the heavily populated ones, that actually make money, are Free to Play.
RTS is a relic of gaming, and cannot be modernized in any way, nor do even new fans of tjhe genre want it modernized (as evidenced by the success of old games, when compared to new ones), much less monetized.
It is a bad idea. Has been tried and failed Miserably. Would never work, and would immediatly kill MP.
thats a big NO. because they would just kill the mods and then sell them to us, when modding is clearly available right now. dont become like csgo and sell skins, that is simply retarded.
if they do that, we’ll just all go back to pre DE which has modding and support of multiplayer through wololokingdom or voodly and ditch this game.
The idea of monetizing the game by adding any sort of subscription has to be the dumbest suggestion on this forum (and there are A LOT of foolish ideas)
There are many other ways (cosmetics, architecture sets, campaigns) to monetize the game if MS really needs to get more money out of aoe2 (which it does not).
Having to pay for multiplayer would drive most players right back to voobly or HD and DE would be dead within a month
The game comes with four faction decks and 3000 BattleForge points, which allows you to buy an additional 12 booster packs bringing the box total to 160 cards.
Use points to purchase booster packs so you can customize the game with as much or little as you like.
It’s only dumb to people who don’t understand basic supply and demand.
Look at Chess.com as an example. It has an excellent user experience. Free to play and subscriptions built in. The subscriptions have allowed them to continue to improve it and maintain it, while other “free chess” websites have long folded.
There are consistent crashes of the game, closing out the entire thing, mostly in lobbies. You can see the many bug reports on the forum.