Yep, Jordan announced he stops doing full time AoE 2 and looks for a job as his financial situation doesn’t really allow staying full time
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Oh, good, see. he stopped doing full-time AOE2 content because of his financial situation.
See! As soon as they cannot make enough money, they just decrease content or leave.
This is the reality. You guys answered your own question and proved my point.
What a joke…
Most gamers play in their spare time. This is normal.
In order for it to replace a job, it has to provide money that replaces a job’s income. That’s not the same as not playing the game anymore, or not liking the game anymore.
This is true of all games. You were originally talking about AoE IV pros, and I was pointing out that this is all pro players. If you don’t like all pro players, then I misunderstood. I thought you were just ragging on IV (again).
Your point actually was this:
In case of Jordan, he loves the game but can’t continue to stay full time due to financial reasons. He however will continue taking part in tournaments if his schedule allows it and remains part of GL, his team.
AoE 4 pros is a different story and I don’t know too much about the current pro situation to make a conclusion here.
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Everyone is talking about pros, esport, etc.
I am one of those guys tbh.
I wanted to compete. To main my civ, to love it, to spend much time understanding it.
Played Delhi from the begining, had some fun but in a week everything became dull to me.
Tried other civs, mostly the same.
Horse → archer → pikeman → horses.
I got bored and I left, decide to wait some time until I come back.
In this time I decide to watch tournaments and got bored even further.
For this people who said that they are pushing the game toward e-sport, they don’t know what e-sport is.
In sc2 you can pick 2 civs, play 100 matches and have totally different game with turn arounds, unexpected moves, sneaky strats.
In league or dota you can pick exactly the same characters for 100 games, give it to different teams and you will see totally different playstyle, strategies.
Battles are exiting to watch, game forces you to make mistakes, put you in bad position so you can adapt. That’s why top players in e-sport sometime lose, because someone put effort to make some strats, put them in this awful spot and this is exactly the time when you can see who are the best players.
Best of the best, think fast, adapt fast, and even if they are behind they think how to equalize or get ahead by raids, farming, faking strats into fast tech.
Sometimes in sc2 you can see magic happen even if the person who have 3 times less army is winning because of positioning , control, macro.
In league or dota is the same, people who master the game have this sharp mindset, even in 1/4 hp they can catch the right moment and make quadra or pentakill, splitpush you to death.
I am not a huge dota fan but I rememember watching Miracle team vs some other huge team.
His team got absolutely destroyed, like 1-15. This guy decide to get items for splitpush with Morphling and won the game by himself. I was literally watching in awe.
Everyone have the same tools, just his constant decision making from first minutes to the last minutes was excelent.
That’s e-sport.
Everything can turn in a minute or even in a second.
People adapt every game .
Playstyles of the players can varie so much and that’s the beauty of it.
Best deffensinve players defend some imposible attacks, while best attackers execute their attack with such a precise movement.
Best macro players get the eco of their last unit while they are fighting, making you look like a pumpking in long games.
Even the cheesers put some sick strats, that even pro players who play the games for 10 years can be thrown off guard.
Next time someone talk about aoe 4 is competitive and e-sport, please read that post.
I am seeing a lot of campaign and pve players talk here in the chat, but they have no clue what e-sport, competitiveness is.
As someone above say, people are here for the money, if the tournaments aren’t that big every big streamer would have left the game long time ago.
For someone coming from the core rts games like wc3, sc2, aoe2 this is easy money, even Demu said it.
I want everyone to have their content released.
Ofc someone wants to play pve because history, someone wants to play vs AI with pause because of stress and I really hope everyone gets what he wants.
I love history and I love competitive games with good battles and good base managment, with good strats and dinamic turn arounds.
I don’t see any of it here.
Best wishes,
Twinsen
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Did all these games release and next day they were major esports titles?
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This isn’t how a metagame works.
It’s wild you say this about DotA when the top picks dominate the meta. The devs adjust the meta by buffing and (shock horror) nerfing heroes.
Do you know what that’s called here? “forcing” the players to change their playstyle.
It’s seen as a negative, instead of an intended course correct.
If I understand you correctly, the off the cuff player moments where they shine with split-second choices are what are missing in Age IV.
But that’s a separate problem to build viability. How long was Invoker the top of the DotA meta? Anyone remember? There are plenty of other examples. I never really followed LoL.
You need to separate out player choice, with a competitive metagame (which optimises heavily for win rate - see how Puck has changed over the course of DotA’s lifespan, or Treant even). You also need to weight how long these games have been around.
What was balance like in year two of DotA? Year two of LoL? Year two of Heroes of Newerth (as DotA 2 barely existed at this point)? Year two of SC2?
You’re talking about games that have had decade(s) to balance themselves. And you’re talking about exciting, game changing moments, which exist even in a stale meta, and build diversity in the meta. They’re separate things!
What does AoE IV need, that these other games have, for you?
He really is not talking about meta.
He is talking about gameplay. AoE4 doesn’t deviate significantly from the rock-paper-scissor enough.
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When talking about e-sports, as he is, the two are directly linked.
The metagame evolves out of the possibility space of the game. But it’s optimised massively for the skill of the best players in the game.
Let’s take DotA 2. It has over a hundred heroes, and you or I could pick any of those and maybe get wins (assuming you’re not secretly a high-level DotA player). At the competitive level, a fraction of those are viable. Often a small fraction (though obviously DotA 2 benefits from both originally being a mapmod with years of development, and then another ton of years under Valve’s stewardship).
Valve regularly nerf and buff these heroes all over the place. It affects this fraction. Their competitive viability. And thus, it has a knock-on effect on the metagame. The developers do that here, and they’re criticised. Because people often seem to take the developers altering something they rely on as a bad thing.
So I’m genuinely interested in @TwinsenOdyssey’s e-sports perspective, because I see it resonating with people critical of AoE IV . . . but some of these people are also critical of the game catering to competitive gameplay. Maybe whatever line he’s splitting, is exactly what the devs need to hear.
or to word it a bit differently, while rock paper scissors was always there, it was always possible to work around it with pure brute force and numbers, in aoe4, the rock paper scissors seems much more literal, not something you can even briefly ignore, unless you have the right counter unit, well good luck doing anything (vills killing spearmen analogy applies well here), to be fair, its ok to design a game like this, but we imo could really use some softening to the counters, or rather, unit shouldn’t always only ever be any good vs like 1 unit/unit type and suck at everything else, its better to have it be great as counter to this unit type, but still a good backup to like 1 or 2 more unit types, smt i think aoe4 could use more of, its all over og aoe games for a good reason
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I didn’t mean meta at all.
If you are familiar with rts you will understand what I mean.
Every game has its own buffs and nerfs of certain stuff.
They have some core game and by releasing new characters like dota or lol etc., whole meta shifts.
You may say, Invoker is Op or in league master yi is op, but the game have core. Plenty of different playstyles, plenty of stuff to do on the map.
You can gank, farm, ward, invade, securing objects, counter gank, splitpush, strong team push.
Every character have different tools to help with that, so if you are top 10 players you may strugle play one character, but even in GM everything is viable, just something is better if you want to earn money more easily. That doesn’t mean you can’t play your character and reach grandmaster.
People in dota 2 , lol and in sc2 prove that.
You can reach GM in sc with only reapers, unit which isn’t viable that much except for scouting.
All this stuff are nuances , but the core gameplay is there.
In aoe 4 the core gameplay is lacking.
The civs aren’t distinct enough.
The maps aren’t that engaging.
The buildings of civilization are not engaging.
Battles are totally awful to watch and play.
Forcing enemy to make mistakes is almost non existing , because everything is so deffensive and one guy wanted to buff defensive playstyle… if this happen you probably better go and play city builder game, you aren’t here to fight, you obviously want to play while watching something on the tv.
As someone who like guerilla warfare, this game totally kill my playstyle.
Tried 2,3 groups with horses, raiding, going back, hit and run from different side. Guess what ? Villagers take months to die,if the horses aren’t many, villagers kills them 
, also there is tower near them and the guy just put them in , what a chad.
The other way to defend raid from horses is to put couple afk spearmans, you don’t need to watch them, they will defend by themselves. What is that ? Am I joke to you.
Like basically nothing can stop you farming like a chad except ram rush all in.
To add up, walling is something… amazing.
I was thinking 2 days ago when I watched sc2.
Sc2 is just space people killing each other. In mid game if some lings went to your base and you don’t react they can disrupt a lot of eco, deny upgrades, kill reactors. All this by small raid of few of the cheapest units.
Or basicaly , disrupt your kingdom.
In aoe 4, 20 horses come to your base and they can’t do anything.
Buildings are made by Elon Musk, villagers go to take a shower and sudenly you run in one kingdom between the streets but can’t do anything. Imagine that.
Imaging invading some part of a kingdom, everyone goes to their house, buildings are from titanium and you just scrathing your head and thinking : why would I ever do that ?
I wouldn’t even cover the uniqueness of the units…
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But you’re still describing the meta. Jungle meta has been a longstanding problem in all MOBAs. It’s why the devs make changes to incentivise split push, why triple laning was a thing for a while, why the map was literally changed to that lane lengths could be rebalanced, etc.
You think warding isn’t a part of the meta in DotA 2? You think they haven’t made changes to runes, wards, Roshan? This is all the meta and more. Gameplay opportunities are how the meta is defined.
But I think I understand now.
The e-sports perspective has very little to do with this. You just don’t like the game.
And that’s fair.
I mean, hero uniqueness has long been a problem in DotA as well (Lion vs. Pyro being one of the oldest examples).
But what I meant more was “how would you fix it”. I know what most of the PvE-focused critics would say.
I wanted to know how you’d solve these problems. Because civs being “distinct” is very different at a competitive level, than it is at my (definitely not competitive) level.
Which is why the MOBA argument is so puzzling to me. Hero archetypes define strong counters in the meta. You can’t just run five junglers. I don’t think at any point in time that’s been possible, in any MOBA. Even five tanks was more viable for a time.
I dunno. I know a lot about the MOBA space. I was hoping Twinsen’s argument there had more legs.
Please, stick to moba
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I played RTS first, and RTS after.
You’re the one who raised them in this thread. Positively.
What was the point of that?
Esports, also known as eSports, e-Sports, egames, or electronic sports is organized competitive video gaming . It primarily involves teams competing against each other in tournaments for a cash prize.
This is an e-sport.
See, E-sports players play the game to win money!
Fun is the second purpose.
If you think competitive players intentionally play games they’re not having fun in, you don’t understand competitive players and shouldn’t be putting words in their mouths.
competitive players are different from E-sports players!
You don’t even know the difference?
Still???
E-sports players play games to make money (tourneys with prizes).
Competitive players play the game to win and have fun Typical game or ranked without any prize.
You literally just posted this:
Emphasis:
You can say not all competitive players are e-sports players. But you can’t say that e-sports players aren’t competitive. Of course they are.
“e-sports” players can play the game to have fun and win money. You’re the one who’s insisting it has to always be about the money.
Not everybody wins all the time, yeah? You have to enjoy the bleeding game too 
competitive is not e-sports…
Get educated or learn…
Get educated or learn English…
It is a noun and adjective.
Both have different meanings…
How could ### ## ## ####################
Because it is about money.
Those E-sports players will not play certain games if they are not making enough money.
They will just switch to another game until they succeed.
But they won’t switch to a game they don’t find fun. They won’t stick with a game that they don’t find fun.
Hence, it’s about the fun.
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