Give players in-game banned civs draft for ranked ladder considering we have too many civs and many balances issues.
Banning civs is a good idea.
Introducing a new button that gives the random civ a priority not the civ picker in both 1v1 and team games.
This is a bad idea. You need to be able to pick a civ. It is not fun to play a civ you can’t play, and also unbalanced. Especially new players can not play all civs. Also in other games it is normal that you can pick a her of your choice for example.
That’s not the point, it has nothing to do with raw power of the civ.
It’s just very annoying to lose a game because the opponent civ has some exotic mechanic or unit that one just didn’t know about or couldn’t judge the effect properly.
Of course, you can blame the player… why didn’t this noob study all the individual tech tree careful enough? The issue is, there is a point were doing this could be – for the casual player – more work than fun.
Any sort of XP pass, that you can find in Activision Blizzard games, preys on FOMO and at worst locks FOMO options behind money. It’s a lucrative way of making money, but completely corrupts the game to a disgusting experience. These sorts of design ideas will kill the game.
Personally, I just think they need to completely rework and restructure the in-game community features. Clans are nonexistent, it’s impossible to communicate with someone in-game outside of a lobby or a game, making friends and adding them to your friends list is obnoxious when you want to do it through Steam (idk how it’s like for Xbox/Microsoft Store, probably worse) - you’re dependent on third party websites to find other players’ Steam profiles so you could add them, as copying from in-game is impossible and manually writing their Friend codes is tedious - not to mention they haven’t implemented Steam’s ‘Recently played with’ feature in the game.
I understand the game likely won’t want to add any Steam functionality in the game, as you’re also tied to Microsoft Store/Xbox and that’ll pose challenges (how to add someone on Steam when they’re only on Microsoft Store? Literally can’t, since… they’re not on Steam), so an in-game version of Friends, Clan, and other social features should be implemented. This will allow people to make friends, and have them queue together conveniently, creating a better user experience and more reasons to come back to the game.
I still find it egregious that when you’re trying to queue with friends on Steam, you cannot even communicate with them until a map is found, where you’ll have only one minute to talk. You’re forced to not be in AoE2, as you can only type in Discord, or Steam groups, or wherever. Not everyone wants to voice chat, and I don’t think AoE2 needs to implement its own voice chat feature anyway, and even if they did you’ll still want an actual textbox field while you’re waiting in the queue!!!
This is so basic stuff it boggles my mind how it’s still in such an archaic if not abandoned state that the game actively obstructs your ability to play with friends and make new ones. The game is currently dependent on communities made through Steam or Discord, and I think that’s unhealthy for the game.
I can’t speak for other games but I’ve never had that feeling in Call of Duty. But thinking a simple achievement screen would kill the game? That’s a massive overreaction if I ever saw one. There wasn’t a single thing in my comment which mentioned hiding stuff behind paywalls or pay to play. You would literally just unlock stuff by playing the game. Except in your case, you wouldn’t because you already bought the game, this would only apply to new players.
This already exists in the game though, you unlock new profile icons by playing the game, through existing ‘limited-time events’.
There’s very clear difference between an XP pass and an achievement as well. Your third point makes it more like an EA / Blizzard game where you’ll have to pay a lot of money to unlock everything, or just grind. And by grind, I don’t mean casual two hours per day (which is already a lot of time). Changing the design to this will later turn the game more predatory, adding more grind to unlock all civs and whatnot. You’ll move away from the DLC design of the game and end up with a subscription.
The game already has achievements and ‘goals’ in the form of profile icons. As long as it’s not FOMO or other ways predatory, it’s fine - but your wording did not suggest that.
Does this game really need to get serious and competivive and attract millions of viewers in the esport scene? Is that how every RTS game should be today?
I despise “serious games” were everyone seem to yell noob and profanities at every newcomer. I want games to be chill and fun - I don’t play ranked for that reason.
I think the game survived this long because it has stayed true to its roots. I like aoe2 because it feels just like the game I played when I was a child, just with better servers and graphics. Anyone remember when no one even played ranked? It was just a fun discussion who was the best. And the game still prevailed despite that…
Changing it into some Dota Battle Pass or Call of Duty formula with unlockables will alienate the experience with paywalls or unlockable grindfests. I would never want to feel forced to play ranked just to unlock a civ for example. What an awful idea really.
Imo they should keep adding more stuff that actually makes the game more fun for everyone, like more tools for custom map makers, better servers and lobby systems. For example: a voting option to remove an afk host in lobby. An intuitive hero system to be used in custom maps. Friends and Clans chat in-game. Stuff like that.
Is this a total joke?
How would making the whole game even more competitive help?
All we need is an Arabia where all the strats are again viable as they used to.
Ofc this will now be very difficutl to achieve for the devs as they ignored the metarization of the two main strats and partially even supported the destructive tendency of the competitive meta spiral by actively nering “off-meta” strats. And with this super elaborated meta it will take a lot of push for every single lost strat to be viable again.
The key is to make the scene less competitive, more ejoying the variety and different options of the game instead of trying to “learn” how to play meta from the pros - and then complain when losing to off-meta strats.
And Hera even said that in his video, that most ladder games on arabia are super repetitive. But the solution isn’t new maps. Cause the meta on these new maps is also super well elaborated. Also people don’t want to cause they would suck on these maps, as they only know to play arabia with the super elaborated meta, they can’t adapt.
The only solution is to bring back Arabia to a state where all the different lost strats are viable again. And wether the expected storm of hate cause the toxic competitives can’t handle to lose against strats they never learned. But if they are competitive, imo this should mean they need to be able to deal with any opponent strat no? No more complaining about “that shouldn’t be meta on Arabia” anymore! You want to be competitive? Learn how to handle situations you can’t learn from a Hera playbook!
And the devs need to be strong and don’t let them be pushed to nerf off-meta strats. Aloow the players to grow on learning how to deal with them themselves.
When something like the FC into War Wagons strats comes up, just leave it for a while (unless the stats show significant OP-ness). Players will find ways to deal with it. And that’s also more satifying than pushing it out of the meta by nerfs. And that’s how you actually learn the game, by trying out and facing different strats. NOT by playing and facing the same meta games over and over again.
The point I really agree on is the repetitive maps, like, I hate seeing the same maps over and over and over again…
Re-realeasing the game just fixing bugs and no new content is the most stupid thing I ever heard, no one is going to pay for ANOTHER re-release of the game just so the bugs are fixed, I don’t know what Hera is thinking, like, only people who care about the online side would even find that remotely acceptable (not even them actually)
As I have repeated above, you wouldn’t need to, because you already have the game. This would only be noobs who are buying the game from now on. And I don’t know why everyone got carried away with the unlockable comparison with other games which hide stuff behind pay walls or pay to play to get better stuff. Of course that would be terrible, I wasn’t suggesting that at all. I literally just meant a cool screen which says new level unlocked and a few free icons, alternate main menu screen or town center visual mod or something.
Personally I don’t even think the game has too many civs, I’m always the one pushing for more civs, but since so many of you keep saying “waaaaaa it’s too many civs, high barrier for entry for noobs to learn” etc. I suggested unlockable civs as a compromise so I can still get more DLC without putting off noobs.
I feel like everybody is just reading the replies and not my post. If you read my post, I said new players only would unlock civs by EITHER playing a certain number of ranked games OR completing single player campaigns.
Unlocking civs wouldn’t apply to DLC. Only the base game for players who are completely unfamiliar with the game.
I think a much better solution would be to allow for customisable random civ pools, in the same way that you can customise random map pools in a lobby. Maybe add some preset civ pools to choose from too, e.g. random cavalry civ, random archer civ, etc. To me, that seems to achieve the same effect, without the need to lock anything.
I think arbitrarily gating content is generally a bad idea. The large number of civs relative to the original game is one of the major selling points of DE, and should be available to players as soon as they’ve bought it. Plus AoE2 has such a wide range of content that no unlock method could be suitable for everyone.
The rest of the suggestions don’t really interest me. I don’t think they would motivate many people in the way you’re claiming, and I also don’t see why motivating people to “git gud” is necessarily desirable anyway.
1600+ is about the top 5% of the ranked multiplayer playerbase, not “mid elo”.
It’s standard to have unlockable things in games, so many other games do it. So there’s no need to research because the successful blueprint is already there in other games. Admittedly harder to implement into a game that already has all civs unlocked, but don’t act like unlockables is a wild insane idea. It’s a very common game design.
