You don’t have to break a sweat every time. If you really want to win in a competitive environment, it’s natural that you’ll have to try your best. If don’t want to try hard, you’re not that interested in winning, which is legit by the way.
Matches are (allegedly) balanced, they should give you a fair but challenging fight. Winning is only going to make it worse, demanding even more effort from you. You can’t both win and have an easy time.
In practice, you’re just asking to be a not-so-great player because you don’t want to commit too much. You can already do it regardless of balancing and pro players. Tryhards climb the ladder, non-tryhards stay in the lower leagues.
The pro-scene will INSTANTLY die in the moment the devs decide to not consider the highest elo for balancing anymore but instead balance for the casuals.
All tournaments will be gone.
Do you really want this?
The e-sports part is a big component of advertising the game and bringing new players in, keeping old players interested as well.
Anyways in an elo below plat, there is only chaos.
People until plat usually lack a lot of basic knowledge and execute things either poorly or slowly.
Balancing there doesn’t matter at all, since you can win against a player of that elo with any civ in any matchup.
In an elo of let’s say diamond plus, things start to get more tight.
Balancing REALLY has an impact there and the higher the elo, the bigger the balancing impact becomes.
In top ranked play, let’s say top 100, the differences between player’s knowledge and skill become smaller and smaller, without balancing for that elo, 90% of them would just leave the game out of frustration.
This shouldn’t happen…
You can try fun stupid strategy but expect to win less often.
I like trying fun stuff too and play more casually but that just means in in gold 3 instead of Diamond 1 (the max i reached when playing more seriously). And im fine with that.
It’s a different thing.
I do non-meta stuff but I still make moves that I believe can help me win the game. Otherwise I can delete my TC at the first second.
Whether I’m really winning against other players on the ladder has nothing to do with whether I play the game to win or not.
Because the latter is natural. I may not be a pro chess player, I haven’t learned a lot of pro chess plays, and I’m very likely to lose to chess pros, but I still don’t expose my king intentionally.
But if the game moves against the direction of encouraging extreme higher-level competitive gameplay (which I don’t think it’s the case and I hope not), I can’t even have fun doing that. When you want try something out you face meta meta meta and you’ll have no fun if you don’t join the meta.
Yes, they can focus on the competitive to balance the game, but do not focus too much on the competitive because it does not allow you to evolve the game, try new things, give greater variety to the game and a long etcetera…
Don’t worry, 6 more civs are coming and the pro-scene will soon disappear.
The game will become a joke with that expension and the casuals will have fresh food for a week, before they get bored as always.
Ever since it was a thing, people started to base their enjoyment of the game on “this pro says this that pro does that” and gain pride from the elo of some pros that are not themselves. And they want to drag everyone into that hell.
Then game developers believe the higher caste espoooooorts players (who resist anything new forever, including those that could be sold) generate more income than the lower caste plebs who also buy the game and maybe also every DLC and shelf it after having played most of what it has offered.
RTS is especially proven to be NOT suitable for esports. Multi-tasking already is anti-sports and also anti-humanity. You need good macro, good multi-tasking AND also high apm and good micro as in every other esports game to play esports RTS. It’s not fun to watch without sufficient understanding. The “simplest and most straightforward” RTS already has a much higher barrier than most other games. That’s why it is replaced in esports by other genres (including one that evolves from it) that are easier to watch, and better display the personal skills as well as teamwork of the players. Every time people tried to make RTS esports again it failed utterly. The only success story is RTS becoming MOBA and we can’t recognize it anymore. Then every RTS that tries to be MOBA failed even more miserably.
Almost all of those are for the average player to be able to play better, the opposite of doing it for esports. Esports would lean into making the game more balanced at higher level and prioritizing viewership. The model they went for was easy recognition at a glance for intermediate-new players, reduced game duration (since RTS is a huge time sink for the average gamer)
Even if the game doesn’t have an esport, the game will still be balanced for all skill levels. Heck the gameplay right now is far more balanced for average level players than it is at the top level. There have been really busted civs (formerly Rus) and really bad civs (English/French) for many patches now at the higher level because they are harder/easier and get balanced around people that aren’t that great.
you read correctly, and to add to this, i don’t believe MOBAs would exists if RTS was so perfectly suited to esports style (SC did manage it for the most part thanks to flawless networking, smt most RTS screw up, including aoe, none of aoe have the multiplayer in esports capable state (where’s the Gproxy equal devs))
aoe in particular tho, you have 4 resources, a casual viewer will struggle to keep track of all that during a match
just like FPS games, not every RTS should chase esports, just like not every FPS does, i’m not sure whats so hard to understand here, feel free to disagree but this is the reality of this matter
Mmmh the question wasn’t for you, unless it’s an alt account…
That whole discourse doesn’t make much sense. MOBAs born out of the incompatibility with esports of RTSs… The argument itself that RTSs are not suited for esports because they’re too complex…
The audience of RTS esports are RTS lovers. Analogy: I don’t care about football, I don’t watch football games, doesn’t matter how complex or simple the sport is.
And, final note, AoE4 isn’t born out and doesn’t live for esports. It’s a plus, important enough, but a plus. It does a lot for an active community though.
I think developers can create two sets of models. One is more suitable for esports, and the other is more historical, allowing players with different needs to choose and switch between them. Different models do not affect multiplayer online, but can only be seen by themselves, so that everyone doesn’t have to argue anymore.
I think that at least in the competitive gaming sense, Age IV is doing well.
In fact, I think that the only limitation for more players making Mods or joining multiplayer are the economic limitations due to the minimum requirements that the game asks for, which in itself surprises me that it has so much compatibility for even 2014 computers.
However, to use the editor or at least for 4vs4 multiplayer without lag, it is necessary to meet the minimum requirements. And for this, in some countries it is difficult to buy a Gamer computer, even one of those that say mid-range (4 GBg GPU, 16 GB Ram), unless you save for one or two years’ allowance, or the savings of a few months of work.
Was it AoE3 that had the home cities? That’s one of the only things I remember about that game, and the cards. I really enjoyed customizing my city and seeing it in the menu. Also the cards made it feel like I was bringing a personal element to the strategy.
This game has zero immersive qualities. Completely forgettable. I don’t feel like I’m immersed in the culture of the Abbasids when I play them, maybe just because they didn’t get a campaign. And in general, different civ’s units of the same class are not that unique, tiny variations on the cost or stats. The only personalization is choosing landmarks.
Maybe the campaign, variants, and heroes will help with that. But in general the game needs a lot more to look cool and feel immersive. I don’t like the UI, wish there was more options.
And yea the AI is trash. So you go to ‘casually’ play pvp but the matchmaking is so awful, I frequently was getting matched with people way out of my skill range, or against premades. Oh, don’t forget the hackers.
If you do the campaigns, a few challenges, then some AI practice before learning to pvp, well sucks to be you because now you’re probably too high level so no one casual wants to play with you in custom.
Agreed. The ‘pro’ scene is just a minute percentage of the player base trying to out meta each other and leads to an over representation of 1v1 in balance concerns.
Most of the people I play with don’t want smaller maps, shorter games, closer base spawns or scarce resources to artificially intensify and shorten gameplay.
Most people including pros don’t want that either, just usually less sloggier games. Usually that involves having a reason to expand to the middle. When playing any pvp, it’s not particularly engaging gameplay running max pop armies at a tiny section of wall with like 2-3 keeps defending it and uncapturable sacred sites.
Heck Altai, a map with close spawns and sparce resources is definitely one of the lesser liked maps. The online map pool tends to lack variety in map type is the biggest issue usually (combined with some maps that are just unfun to play)