Hi! Over the years that I’ve been following the Age community, I’ve become convinced that it’s the most active and friendly community I’ve ever seen. It consists of thousands of people from dozens of countries who talk, play, and create content together. I thought that our favorite game deserves its own special day of the year, like a holiday. Similar community-driven holidays exist in other fandoms as well. For example, Star Wars fans celebrate May 4th (a wordplay on the famous phrase “May the Force be with you”), and Mass Effect fans celebrate November 7th.
This day could help attract new players to Age of Empires, show the developer and publisher that the game continues to generate strong interest, and also give former players who stopped playing over time but still cherish warm memories and follow the game on streams and YouTube a reason to return for a bit.
At first, I wanted to suggest November 14th as “Age Day” in honor of the most famous taunts and the release date of AoE2:DE, but a weekday evening isn’t convenient for many people. According to Steam statistics, the highest player numbers are on weekends. So I propose a rule: the first Sunday after November 14th should be “Age Day” - a compromise between symbolism and convenience(16th November this year).
What should we do on this day? It depends on how deeply you’re involved in the game world. Here are a few options:
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Active players can simply join and play their favorite multiplayer mode or fight some bots on Sunday evening.
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Those who haven’t played in a while can try the new civilizations or campaigns. A year ago, several expansions became free(Celebrate 5 Years of Age II: DE with a Fresh Deal for New Players - Age of Empires - World's Edge Studio), and we also got The Three Kingdoms and Chronicles DLCs.
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You can also play custom campaigns for Croatians, Persians, Slavs, and others. For example, Ornlu made a compilation of campaigns a couple of years ago (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUtSv0pRZY8).
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You can call up old friends and organize a game night in FFA or other fun modes. For example, there are Skyrim- and Westeros-themed maps in AoE.
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You can put any other activity around the game here!
And here’s one more challenge for the whole community to break the game’s peak player-count record. It’s difficult, but possible. Right now, the weekly peak is about 26–28k players, and the all-time peak is 38k players on Steam. That means we need an extra 10–12 thousand people to log in on the same day. For comparison, that’s about the average evening viewership of AoE streams. Meanwhile, there are 67 thousand active players who played team games at least once in the past month they just log in at different times.
So, to break the record, we need to gather players at the same time on Sunday. Tell your friends about this idea and share it with your favorite streamers and YouTubers their audiences number in the hundreds of thousands, and with their help we can rally the community and celebrate the first Age Day truly brightly!