there are many threads with such complaints, why dont one of you go on discord, sit with me, and we’ll go thru all the keys until its fully functional and done?
im happy to do unpaid testing. you can take all the credit for the good work idc.
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not entirely sure why we’re still talking hotkeys, why we ever had to talk hotkeys
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because if actually tried custom keys ull find a lot of issues, which are actually easily fixable, its a simple case of missing out on many buttons / buildings.
btw, this wasn’t a critic flying your way, this was for the forum managers
point being, if hotkeys were done properly to begin with we wouldn’t be discussing it non stop
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oh ty. yeah i mean if they actually just did basic testing on custom keys they’d easily spot out plenty of issues… its a bit hard for me to understand why theres such poor quality control for a $60 game. and its not like this is even complicated stuff.
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safe to say it barely made it into priority list, not suprising given to put it lightly, slow and inconsistent support the game got so far, its just not comparable to how far the DEs got in the same amount of time in comparison, or og releases even, yk the ones that didn’t have easy patching system
i’d say they are putting way too much attention towards balance changes, while also slipping it up fairly often, even tho balance is imo the least of aoe4’s problems
I am a forum moderator, but I am not sure what I can do. One of the major reasons I never installed the game after the pre-release beta was the horrible hotkey design. I understand it has improved since then but not to the franchise baseline, such as in AoEO (similar to AoM and AoE3).
All I can do is politely and firmly state that the game is not up to our standards. This is true for many reasons, hotkeys among the top of that list.
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you can tell them to spend 30mins with me, watch my stream and i can point out all the most obvious hotkey issues
people actually have already listed quite a number of them properly formatted but seems ignored. lol
i’ll add you’re one of the moderators and insiders i hold in high regard since day 1 because you don’t blindly defend and still have guts to drop criticism where needed, in healthy doses ofc, there are a couple of others that you probably already know by usernames
back on topic, its hard to say if the missing binds will ever be fully patched up given how little attention there seems to be on this matter
Balance isn’t remotely similar. There’s basically zero overlap.
It’s often posited as a competition, but they’re different things that’ll likely be handled by differently teams.
we can only really speculate to be fair, all conclusions of mine are based on what i can actually observe, aka patch notes over time
I was interested in the remappable keys only because the letter G used in the siege seemed somewhat uncomfortable, but then I bought a keyboard where I can configure the lights of each key and I no longer had the need to reassign keys, therefore I have not reassigned anything , but I’m a fan of hotkeys and I don’t use control groups in buildings
shrugs
I’m telling you as a programmer, one involves programming and the other doesn’t (unless new mechanics or features are required). Balance teams in games development are usually separate and don’t always even require that much technical knowledge.
In Relic games in particular, balance is achievable mostly through the Attribute Editor, for example.
I’m not saying people aren’t making decisions, but it’s not “focusing too much on balance” because the effort estimations and people involved are very different.
Kinda like how people working on art and people working on balance are separate. Similar thing.
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thing that would clarify our misgivings would be the following, knowing who all is part of aoe4 post launch dev team, not by name, but by role, yk programmer count, artist count etc.
the problem is that balance that is required to make the game more interesting requires extra mechanics as you suggest
For sure (not sure it’d actually help but I think folks would be surprised), but it all comes back to us wanting specific things getting fixed faster at the end of the day. Nothing wrong with that.
Just don’t like the “balance or X” tension. They don’t impact each other (and heck balance teams aren’t traditionally resource-heavy to begin with).
Like with hotkeys it’s easy. Relic have never done this before. Ever. Folks can use this to go “wah bad devs then” but everyone solves a problem for the first time sometime. It’s just the waiting and the slow communication that gets reasonable folk frustrated.
have never done this before? its there, its just incomplete because they miss out stuff. there are some missing buildings, some missing units, some missing actions. they just need to test properly.
if work is sloppy to this extent, what do you wanna call it? good work?
MAP NAME IN LOADING SCREEN ADDED AFTER 1 YEAR = GOOD DEV WORK? this is something so hard to do such that it takes 1year+ ??? something SO NEW?
but i understand how you think, you side with devs simply because you identify yourself as one. and you feel devs are underappreciated. i wouldn’t be surprised if you feel this underappreciation because people expect more of you. and so this causes you to relate yourself to relic devs and hence defend them.
i am a systems person, linux servers sort, i dont exactly code, but i have collaborated with c coders, asm coders and higher level ones and there are those who are simply diligent with their work and the efficiency of their code and product. as i say many times, its not hard to notice the difference of the work. in this very complaint i have here, this is not a matter of skill, but a matter of diligence.
and bad can be inclusive of a lack of diligence, lack of skill, lack of creativity, and even lack of comms. im not going as far as to just say bad as per your words but i must point out there is quite a bit of lack of many things that would sum to what i’d call ‘good work’.
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i’ll take the blame for mixing balance into this thread, back to hotkeys, the fully remappable was a standard for a long time, with relic games too, grid is a fairly recent phenomena (post 2010 more or less), to clarify, i love the grid LAYOUT, but its the concept of making grid PANEL (all hotkeys obeying one hotkey panel) the default that i take an issue with, it shows less effort being put into such costumization, its ok to have it as an option, but if thats all you offer i will point it out in criticism, which i did for aoe4 before the current system was implemented, despite its flaws, its at least here now
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Literally have never, in this engine or I think any previous one. It’s new tech for them.
I literally said:
I have nothing against people wanting more fixes, or faster fixes. You need to stop making things up about me, all because you want something to argue against 
Maybe Homeworld had them, but no Relic game has had fully remappable keys integrated into the game options. You could do it manually in older games by editing config files but there were limitations.
How do I know this? Because this isn’t a new request lol. Relic game fans are generally more accepting of the grid approach, but wanting proper remappable keys goes way further back than Age IV.
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im going through this quote with you until you correct yourself.
They have done it, they just didn’t go through the items, aka lack of testing. Tell me its otherwise, dont change topic.
And look, deep in your heart, you know you’ve been underappreciated by people as a coder. Yes/No?
I don’t make things up for argument sake. This is something you’ve done in that other thread. Everyone saw through it.
Don’t sway from the conversation, come tell me, does it take 1 year to add map name to the loading screen? Is this something new of great complexity?