Exploits and Fair Play in Age of Empires II: DE

We want to take a moment to address the growing frustration about cheating and exploits in the Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition community. Our teams have been monitoring the situation closely while addressing the issues behind the scenes, and that work is still ongoing.

Fair play is important in Age of Empires, and cheating and exploits ruin the player experience. We are aware of the issues you are facing, how it affects your ability to enjoy the game, and we appreciate hearing your voices. Your help, support, and love for Age is what has kept our community thriving for all these years.

While teams continue to work on solutions, we ask that you continue to proactively report any behavior that violates the Code of Conduct, both in game and with a support ticket. The Support team reviews every report and takes appropriate enforcement actions as quickly as possible.

Reports can be made in-game or by contacting our Support team with a ticket on support.ageofempires.com. Instructions on how to make a report are located here.

If you contact the Support team, then the following information will help get your reports actioned on as quickly as possible:

  • The steam ID or player ID of the account you are reporting. You can pull those from your preferred tools, or ageofempires.com leaderboards.

  • Date and time of the match.

  • A recorded game (if you have one) as well as any other supporting evidence you have, screenshots, Twitch links, etc.

We understand that the lack of immediate resolution or updates on your reports can leave you feeling uncertain, frustrated, and that your voices go unheard. Rest assured our teams will continue working to provide an infrastructure to improve fair play and act on accounts who violate the Code of Conduct.

25 Likes

Until banning permanently locks out players out of the game, banning them won’t do anything, they just come back with a new account. You also need to make it that family share accounts can’t use the ranked ladder in any way, because it reduces how easy it is for banned accounts to continue cheating.

20 Likes

Agree.
Even if banning may satisfy the punishment instinct it might probably be a better choice to monitor and try to figure out how the cheaters do this and then close the it-

Whilst this is active I recomment to suspend the early leaving system until it’s solved.

1 Like

Our teams are doing both!

When I say the work is ongoing, I mean our development teams are working behind the scenes on systemic measures to address cheating and exploits in game.

In the meantime, our Community and Support teams have been collecting information, documenting the problem, and enforcing individual Code of Conduct violations.

21 Likes

If you did something to finally hit family share, that would be great, otherwise the cheaters keep coming back.

3 Likes

This wouldn’t work since some people are falsely banned on aoe2 and they need family shared accounts to play the game. The devs should stop banning and muting people for trivial reasons then this wouldn’t be as much as a problem. Removing the family share feature would be a foolish idea since people allow actual family members play on those accounts, it shouldnt be ruined for everyone because the devs didnt want to update 20 year old code. Also, people use family shared accounts to reduce queue times since at higher elos there are longer queue times. Overall, the devs shouldn’t have charged us 20$ when they just recycled the code from 1999 and called it a day.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone complain about being falsely banned. The devs basically never ban anyone, and if they do, it’s usually for a valid reason. You most certainly don’t need family share accounts to play the game, especially if you’re using it for ban evasion. For those legitimately using it for family members, they shouldn’t be playing ranked without purchasing the game as well. And for anyone reducing queue times using it, that sounds a lot like smurfing, and should be banned. Basically, I strongly disagree with everything you said, there is no good reason to allow family share accounts to play ranked, if not ban them outright.

12 Likes

This statement is outright foolish, the devs do not have your best interest in mind, there are tons of examples of false bans. Just because you did not hear about them doesn’t make them insignificant. The persistent censorship from the devs is reprehensible and must be stopped. Until the false bans end people will need to family share to play the game. In regard to ranked for family shared accounts, you would want to play ranked with your family shared account since you are playing with your family with an account that has the game. Also people have different accounts for different strategies which they need family share for. TheConqueror753 remember that the devs are not on your side. If you push them to do this they will charge money for more garbage content and continue to ban people for little to no reason.

If people are getting falsely banned, the correct solution is not to use family share as ban evasion, it’s to contact the appropriate support channels and appeal the ban. I think your insults to the devs won’t end up going you way, because there’s nothing that makes it acceptable to insult them, if you don’t like the game, leave, it really is that simple. And even if the devs aren’t on our sides, they still need to keep the game running, which means they won’t go out of their way to alienate the playerbase.

9 Likes

You are clearly someone who hasnt dealt with age of empires support. It takes weeks for them to respond, they never answer questions and even if you are innocent, you wont get unbanned. The only solution is family share. Otherwise people wont be able to play the game that they love.

I think to provide more clarity on this it would be helpful if some statistics were published: eg how many reports are you receiving, how many people got warnings/timeouts/bans/other consequences. average response time for reports, you get the idea

Another way to improve this system would be if I were able to see who I have reported and what actions were taken/if someone has acknowledge the report

I dont think banning all family share accounts is a good idea, it just excludes people who are using it legitimately. I think a better idea is making it so that a ban for one account bans (or maybe just times-out?) the others in the same family share.

11 Likes

I’ll pass along the feedback. Our Customer Support team is looking into ways to improve the existing reporting tools, including acknowledgement when reports are received/actioned on.

12 Likes

Good morning.

Maybe this could be a strange question:
If a cheater come back with a new account, considering that the account is connected to an email address, is it possible block directly the email address blocking the access only to ranked multiplayer matches?

Thanks.

2 Likes

You clearly dont know what your talking about. You can get easily false banned.
What i hope devs would do, if you get banned, you would get reason for it and when/what game it happened with timestamps/logs etc. Because current system is just crap of horsesh1t imo. Like Getting banned for verbal stuff when you have tried to communicate with your teammates? :joy: :rofl:

Well if your “communication” is stuff like

Then no wonder you get banned 11

Maybe you should start communicating in a constructive manner?

4 Likes

I cant tell if your joking or serious rn.
Guess i cant express my feelings here anymore without someone else twisting my words.

As i said, if you get banned for wrong reason, of course its bad. Maybe devs should fix it with teamgame/ranked system and game wouldnt die wouldnt it? Because current state of the game is bad/worst state of games lifecycle right now.