It’s been 8 months now since the game was released. The game has gotten a decent amount of balance patches, keeping the meta evolving and as balanced as one could hope.
However, I usually spend about 10-30 minutes just trying to get into a game. I mostly play team games, so getting 6-8 people together takes a few minutes with the size of the player base this game has, understandable. But my issue is that most of the time the lobbies don’t actually get people to the actual match. The issues are:
- The game fails to connect a player
- The countdown timer gets stuck at zero followed up by a connection error.
- The countdown timer never shows up followed up by a connection error.
- The game crashes on startup, after the intro cinematic, when connecting to a lobby, when the match is about to start, during assigning teams, in the loading screen and during the match. My game crashes about once every 3-4 games I play, this is the same with a friend whom I play with.
- Unfair matchmaking in team games. About every five games I get matched up against people who have 600-800 more rating than me. These games feel extremely unfair and just completely one sided.
- There is no way to reconnect to a match after a crash or a connection issue.
- There is no way to send a bug report or even see one anywhere. You have to go digging through Windows log files to see the issues and even there the messaging from the crash is vague at best. This is a developer problem, since the names are coded confusingly.
I’ve been reading through forum and steam discussions and only seen a few people making comments about this issue and non of the developers or community managers have acknowledged these issues. What is going on? I’ve never played a game that has this many issues technically and no way to actually do anything about them. I like the game a lot, but I really don’t have the time to sit around on my PC for over an hour and not get a decent match started. For the past few days I haven’t been able to even play after a crash in the lobby since the cooldown after leaving lobbies is applied even for crashes and right now it’s an hour. I would like to hear from the developers or community managers if these issues are being worked on or are they simply deemed non critical right now?
Perhaps try uninstalling the game, reboot then reinstall it completely.
I used to have crashes too after an update. Reinstalling fixed it for me.
The countdown timer never shows up followed up by a connection error.
I think that happens when another player exits the game because they don’t like the odds of their team.
The game fails to connect a player
Some people quit the game while loading or right at the beginning to drop the game without incurring the waiting penalty of 5-10-15 minutes.
I’m in a pretty good position to analyze the networking issues because I play most of the time with a friend, I work as a networking software engineer and I’m studying game development. I’ve tried installing the game again, same issues continue to happen at the same rate, same with my friend.
This one doesn’t. It happens because there is a bug in the lobby matchmaking. I’m not sure, the log files for the game are all over the place and really hard to read at least for me, but it has something to do with having an issue loading in players profile icons.
True, but not what I meant. I mean the lobby is created but one person is missing. For example a 4v4 lobby connects 7 players to pick their civs and you can see the map etc. But one person is missing. Because I play with a friend this has been one of us many times. For the person missing from the lobby, the game still shows it’s searching for a match while the others wait for them to connect. It’s again a bug in the networking where the person gets stuck.
I’ve been trying to figure out the reason for all the issues and I’ve been going through my Windows log files and trying to find something that would explain what’s going on but there really isn’t much to work with.
I also have to add, the amount of people who leave at the start of the match just to avoid the penalty for leaving in the lobby is getting bigger and bigger. For 4v4 especially it’s getting to a point where it’s an actual issue.
I play regularly a couple of team matches every week. I find game in less than 5 minutes. I rarely encounter error connection, and if happens is only in the lobby.
Try to play at a different day time, maybe you play with people from otherside of the world… I have notice that if I play with Asian people connections issue happens more often than European people (I’m from Europe).
Try custom games instead of quick matches
Update from today:
I’ve played 3 matches to the end. Between me and my friend, the game has crashed a combined 12 times. We’ve gotten two matches that ended in sync-error. One match that ended in a crash during loading was against players who are top 10 in the 4v4 ladder, while I’m at 1400 elo. We both reinstalled the game today as well. We both have great PC’s and no issues with other games. I really hope someone from the developer side acknowledges these issues.
Have you tried to play alone without your friend to see if the problem persist? Maybe one of you have some connection issue
The problem lays with mods after updates, and microsoft onedrive.
For some reason your steam files are being synchronised with one drive.
Disable the sync for your AoE IV folder and your crashes will be solved.