So, since I’ve been getting into DE over the last few months, probably about the first 3-4 months were great, no issues at all. Suddenly, 2 months ago, during matchmaking, I would start dropping just before the game starts, at the end of the countdown, or somewhere in between. This also happened on a second computer that I used, which was totally unrelated, after I installed DE there, to play in a completely different country. (at my parents’ house)
Months have gone by, and I can’t join games for an hour or more because of this idiotic bug, as you are banned from joining for “leaving”. The last patch map rotation seemingly fixed it you would get the odd error when trying to match make, but not get dropped and have to wait for hours.
Fast forward to today, and we have a new map rotation and guess what, 2 times I’ve already been booted and had to wait.
This is honestly the most frustrating bug, and after reporting it, it was said it was “known’ but months have gone by and nothing has been fixed? What am i missing this is a SEV1 bug. you CANT play the game when this happens
The severity of bugs depends on how many players are affected. Not sure what is going on with you that you have the same bug on 2 different computers but there might be some common thing between them that could brake AoE2. Sometimes it’s Windows updates or GPU drivers that are to blame and not the game developers.
Also yes the devs are fixing bugs, every patch has a list of fixed bugs.
But no they will never fix all bugs and they should definitely not stop making content to fix all the bugs first. If they would make nothing new until all bugs are fixed then they would spend years, if not decades just fixing bugs with 0 new content. And since you can’t sell bug fixes (not anymore, that used to happen like last century) they have to make new content to make any money.
not really. lobbies have been buggy/broken since release. pathing gets better, then worse, then better again. each update completely breaks saved games and recordings
Upgrades will always break replays. Replays are stored in a way that only works with the same version of the game. Most other games have the same limitation.
Either replays would have to store much much more data or the client would have to build in an automatic version switcher for you to be able to watch old replays.
no? this is just completely wrong? I just checked some games from my steam library that are currently installed:
-total war warhammer 2: the oldest save I have is from 2018, loads totally fine. there were tons of fixes, upates, DLC and content update since then
-factorio: any save after 1.0 (game leaving early access) still works. if you bought the DLC, you can convert the save
-against the storm: when you buy new DLC, you don’t get all the new content until the next game/cycle, your meta progress/save still works.
-deep rock galactic: survivor. Recommended you start a new save after it left early access. Existing save still works
-Terraria: any old save is still playable
what you are saying is just false. aoe2 is the only game i currently know of that has this issue.
yeah, that’s fine. The kind of upgrade i would expect in a definitive edition. being able to roll back to previous patches would be a nice addition anyways. the current situation is absurd
WarCraft III Reforged had the same problem (and maybe still does – I don’t know if it still gets updates). But that’s well known as an example of how not to make a game, so perhaps not relevant here.
Whatever the case is, it seems the QC is so lacking that it’s very frustrating. The fact that they know about the issue of people dropping just as the game is about to start or during matchmaking is absolutely frustrating. I see it happen all the time even in parties.
I was only talking about replays and not save games.
Those are 2 entirely different things. Replays store all the inputs but they don’t safe the state of the game itself.
Safe games store the state of the game.
In other genres of video game this might not be true because they function very differently. Like a racing game might safe the actual position of cars in a replay.
I haven’t tested old safe games in AoE2 yet but I would be surprised if they actually brake with every patch.
The problem is that this is a complex issue. It is likely not just one bug, it might be a combination of many many factors.
The game
Microsoft servers
Your ISP
the routing between your ISP and Microsoft server
the routing between Microsoft and the other players
Your computers network
So it can be very hard to test. If the bug doesn’t happen to any of their test systems doesn’t mean it can’t happen to you.
ah, fair enough. wasn’t entirely clear. yes, for replays i can accept that they might break. Although i think keeping datasets for older builds around wouldn’t be a huge ask. HD lets you choose which dataset you want to play with
I installed DE for the first time in a while, just to check. loaded an old barbarossa campaign, and all my vils now have the malay farm bonus where food gets deposited directly. and stuff like this:
stuff like translation has also gotten objectively worse. i had a look at the tech tree and “infantry” gets called “nearby units” in several places and “ranged units” gets translated as “removed units” or “distant units”. it’s atrocious
Some of the German translations are actually better then the original but there are sometimes cases where 2 units have the same name or where 1 unit has 2 names in different parts of the UI.
It’s kinda funny.
Like Traction Trebuchet is “Mangonel” and Companion Cavalry is “Hetairenreiter” like in AoM.
probably a few years old. that is meant to be emperor in a barrel
the thing is many of these things are new issues afaik remember. those translations were better in HD. iirc they were even better at release, but I don’t know how i could check that. However these translations were better in the CD version (if memory serves right) and they are better in HD.
How do they fuck this up so badly? they have correct (or at least better) translation strings lying around, but are actively picking worse ones. It feels like they had some auto-translate program go over all strings that had to be localized and not a single native speaker went over it to proofread.
Smash Ultimate used to have the same problem with replays, but somewhere down the road, they figured out how to prevent replays from being deleted with each balance patch. The AoE2 devs have no excuse.
I really do miss the UserPatch days where you would double-click on a recorded game file, and it would launch the correct version of the game while loading the rec. Really simple and great user experience, made it much easier to play back games and record videos.
As a side note, I wish we could play old builds like we can do with Minecraft. It would be cool to play the old Indians again or experience some of the campaign scenarios before major DLC changed them.
By hiring a different company for the translation.
Also a lot of developers just ship like excel files with all the texts that need to be translated without providing much context so translators can easily make mistakes.
I remember in the release version of AoMR they mixed up columns (architecture) with columns (spreadsheets).
Or maybe they are actually just using AI now, at least for some of the texts.
Smash Brothers is a completely utterly different game and it makes no sense to compare that with AoE2. You got like 8 players each controlling 1 character and not 8 players each controlling 200 units.
This is generally a cost benefit kinda thing. How often do people want to watch replays from older AoE2 version and how much work would it be to implement that feature. They would basically have to implement a way to load older versions of the game within the game, or alternatively change how replays work by making them much much larger files.
So they could invest a lot of time, money and effort into making older replays work, but would that be worth it? Wouldn’t you rather see them fix gameplay bugs, balance civilisations, improve path finding or make new campaigns?
Also adding a feature like compatibility with older replays means that feature has to be maintained in the future. The devs might shy away from improving the engine because they know they will have to put extra work into making old replays work. Every path finding improvement means replays stop working and they need to implement an emulation for the old path finding.
I agree with that. No reason to not give us access to older version of the game, they can disable Multiplayer in them to prevent server issues.
That would also kinda fix the Replay issue as you can now just load the older version to play them. Not very convenient but how often do you guys want to watch old replays? And if so how often are they from different old versions of a the game. If you want to watch an old tournament, then all the matches are on the same version.
