You aren’t making an even comparison is the point.
The AoE DE games are releases of games that already had active player bases who likely make up the majority of people who picked the DE games up. Since these people were already playing, it’s unlikely they would drop off after a month.
It’s unlikely that you gained a ton of new players who were just interested in the campaigns the way you will with a modern game. Not everyone cares about PvP, and they may not even make up a majority of RTS players in general.
You would need to compare the Age 4 to other new RTS games and try to compare how they retain PvP players to see how Age 4 is doing (and even that isn’t a guarantee for the long-term outcomes).
Thanks for your thorough explanation, I understand now.
As for how people communicate: the balance issues is subjective and should be toned down a bit I agree, people need to have a bit more patience and see how things develop. But other than that I notice even with myself the amount of really bad bugs and the bad communication from the dev team makes me angry at them for charging me 60 euros. I’m a patient guy but I never felt such frustration with how a developer treats its own game and kills its player-base within a month time.
Like, it’s realy baffling to me how bad it is and how little Relic realises. The list of errors they are currently tracking is a joke and a direct insult to everyone that made a bug report. I kind of understand the current (angry) sentiment of the community.
While I understand, the community has been extraordinarily negative and arrogant since well before launch, so I see why the communication hasn’t improved; there’s not a ton of incentive to do more.
The patch notes for this patch even included a decent amount of explanation for many of the changes and yet the forums are still full of armchair developers with no credentials throwing insults as though they know better.
Quality communication is better than constant, but useless communication and there doesn’t seem to be any gain for putting in the effort because the posts made are the same anyway.
I’m nearly 40, so I’ve been spending full retail price on games with a fraction of the content as modern games, no multi-player, no ongoing content, no built in match-making (vs 3rd party services like Game Spy), etc.
With the number of hours I’ve put into the game I’ve more than gotten my money’s worth, and if you consider the AoE2 content I also got the deal is even better.
I paid to play a game, not have developers post on the forums; most players never even visit them.
Since the developers are clearly continuing to support the game based on the current patch that made a ton of updates and the future roadmap they already shared, I frankly don’t see any issue with the cost of the game.
Frankly, I would be far more upset if I hadn’t been able to play the game for the 45 hours I’ve put into it just because some people want features that aren’t implemented yet.
There’s nothing stopping people from not playing until they feel the game is done, but not releasing it would prevent everyone who enjoys the game from being able to do so.
Well it’s a multiplayer title. You can’t rip and play it before buying.
They got you.
I think it’s super bad for the business releasing a game in an unfinished state.
But it’s their choise.
I don’t think it will be fixed, because in a few weeks age 2 de will have more players and even in age 2 there are still a ton of bugfixes and optimizations needed
I’m not expecting them to reply to each and every post or have a written update every day or sth. I WOULD like any response from them with bug reports but even if they don’t…I would like to see those bugs eventually appear in the list of bugs theyre tracking. However not even that is happening. The list of bugs theyre tracking has literally not been updated since release and they put a link to it in their release notes as if it’s something we should look at. Then they release an update which just breaks the game even more. And again: it’s not like we can talk about this or report this bc they simply don’t even read it.
You don’t know that, you’re choosing to believe that.
No company is using their forums as their official bug list. They’re going to have an internal system for reporting, prioritizing and updating bugs which we don’t have any access to.
The fact that they don’t have someone updating the bug list is not an indication that they aren’t listening, it’s an indication that someone involved in the budget isn’t willing to budget for a community liaison to keep the list on the forum up to date; disappointing but not an indication of what the dev team is doing.
When the community is constantly negative and takes anything other than getting their way as an insult, there’s not really a good way to justify to executives that money should be spent communicating with those people. When those people likely aren’t even the majority of the actual play base, there’s even less reason to spend the money.
To be clear, I’m not saying that I agree with the decision making; I think you need to invest in the communication to build the good community, not decide how much to invest based on how well the community responds to what communication there is.
Ultimately, the company doesn’t have to communicate with players at all to have a successful product so it’s really in the community’s best interest to try being mature and show that there’s value in them spending the resources to communicate with us.
Agreed and I understand what you’re saying. The forums are brutal and childish sometimes. I have only been engaged since release so I don’t know what happened the months leading up to this.
Just, as a new player, yes the game as a single player is fine and good for some hours. But I had high hopes for a good and long-lasting online environment for this game and I guess that hope gets less by the day and by the developments I see happening in this company. Now I said this before and I’ll say it again: I don’t think they ever really took/claimed that position in the current gaming environment anyway (unfortunately for us) so if I’m being honest I can’t blame them either.
Given that they have said they have many hundreds of balance changes planned and dropped a rather large patch here, I think they should be given some credit.
The new bugs that came out indicate weakness in either how they do their testing or how they prioritize fixes (we don’t know if the issue was reported internally, but deemed acceptable to go live in exchange for the other fixes).
Based on their posted plan and the content of the patch I think it’s safe to say that they are committed to fixing the PvP experience, but there’s room for concern on what other issues may go live along the way since we don’t know how the new bugs ended up live and we know that they can end up there.
That’s the exact reason why so many people are flaming in this forums.
They just keep releasing crap and people complain here obviously.
In case of age 2 de the teamgame ladder is still broken 2 years after release and the game is prone to crashing and bad performance.
Even after 2 additional cash grab dlcs.
Still the age 2 mutliplayer from 2000 is so good that people keep playing multiplayer and hope for the best.
Okay, but it’s not crap. That’s your opinion and you’re welcome to it, but the game is a ton of fun to a ton of people so calling it crap is both objectively false and needlessly insulting.
It’s also a worthlessly vague statement since it means different things to the different people who claim it (with some overlap).
This is a perfect example of why they don’t bother to communicate; if they aren’t just saying what you want or giving you what you want then it’s crap, so why bother trying?
They can just release the content and have tons of people enjoy it while you cry here.
Because despite the huge number of posters like you there are people who post useful feedback or make posts that help build community (like posting tutorial videos for new players or analyzing aspects of the game with test data to support it).
You say age 1 de was not crap on release?
I would not say that to age 4, but i would say that age 4 was released in a poor state and it’s a bad decision to start finishing and fixing the game after release.
I use this forums for bug reports and for begging to fix certain things in age 2 de, but the people in charge just don’t care.
Now if I am in queue in aoe 2 de I go here see how things are.
But you’re not comparing it to other games post-release. You’re comparing it to a game that’s been out years, if not decades, with a thriving longterm community and modding scene. The DE versions replaced the base titles, on Steam at least.
What do you want me to play right now? As in right now.
I played WoW:Shadowlands. Was on M+15 before I left and 6 Boss Kills on Heroic Raid.
Switched to Diablo2:Resurrected for a month. Completed Solo on everything:Normal, Nightmare and Hell.
Switched to AoE4. Completed 1v1 Skirmish against Hardest AI. Still trying to play different maps now. 45 min to 1 hour per game.
What do you recommend me to play? I dont want FF14 or New World as I rather play Shadowlands becoz of its difficulty. What else is in there?
BTW, it seems StarCraft2 is still better for me. I play AoE4 becoz it’s something new. Been playin StarCraft2 since it started and I was on and off through the years and I love beating its hardest AI. Many of my 1v1 games in there is ZergVsZerg. So I stopped playing 1v1 Ladder for now.
Because the web app i used can’t do it. You can compare it with the release of other games and still the player numbers go down fast in this comparison.
Jurassic World Evolution 2. A game holding at 77% positive, released near the start of November. All-time high of 20k, now down to between 3 and 4k players (concurrent).
I’m not knocking the game. But this was literally one of the first new releases I looked up on Steam. And you say Age IV is doing badly?