Hello, the game is at its worst moment since its release. Most of the players who played 1 year ago have stopped playing due to the huge amount of maphackers out there.
The balance in civilisations is also terrible. Certain strategies of some civilisations are practically unpunishable. With every new patch, you change a lot of things that affect civilisations a lot, and you have situations where certain civilisations that were unplayable are suddenly the best, or civilisations that were just fine are now unplayable.
More than a half of the matches I play is against premade of chineese people that is maphacking. Today, I’ve played 6 matches, and despite the people who simply quits in the first minutes of the game (happened 1 time today), I review every single match, only to discover, to no one’s surprise, that in almost in each of them there was someone cheating.
I think the game is at a point of no return, given that most of the community has simply stopped playing, and situations like someone maphacking, which used to be a very, very rare situation, nowadays what is rare is not finding anyone maphacking in a game.
On top of all this, the matchmaking has been broken for months. I have detected many situations where simply, despite there being no premade in front (all players played separately), the game assigns all players with the highest elo to the same team. This is something that has been said on the forum for many, many times, and has never been corrected.
For example, if you are diamond 1, you can get matchmaked with a gold III and a platinum III vs diamond 1, conq 1 and diamond 3. Happens a lot. Then you check if they are premade, and the conq 1 guy wasn’t premade, but you get the plat and the gold guy in the team.
Also, I can’t avoid the feeling that people cheating are getting away with it, while those of us who just want to play and have fun are being punished. For example, with the lax matchmaking system and lax banning system, it’s normal that over time you get to know which players are cheaters, however, if you try to skip the match, you’ll be punished.
Nowadays, playing a fun match, where the teams are balanced, and there is no cheating, is really difficult.
Talking about the technical part of the problem, near 3 years since the launch and we have still buggy unit paths, no reconnection, no match cancel when someone drops in team games, and more things that are basic for a multiplayer game nowadays. Also is very usual to get the infinite “Assigning teams” window, and if you just exit, you will get a penalty.