Just had a session and the pathing is as bad as ever. In fact I think it’s worse. Melee units just refusing to move. They didn’t even just start chasing and then stop like they did before. They literally disobeyed the command 3x times and refused to move. This game is a joke right now.
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That happened to me too
Sometimes a unit just stop moving (not sure why) on a group of units
What I have to do is to select only the unit itself and move it anywhere. After it starts moving then I can select all my units normally
I think is related to Attack move or Patrol on melee units but not 100% sure
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Villagers are definitely bugged. The most common issues with them are them getting stuck on resources like wood or gold and not finding their way out of it. So you keep smashing the idle villager key but the command doesn’t register the stuck villagers. Villagers often wall themselves out of the base and occasionally the TC rally point decides to send them half way across the map. None of the villager bugs are game ending necessarily but they are really annoying. The melee and ranged units on the other hand, they might as well be on No Attack stance sometimes, they’re so bugged.
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At this point I would only trust them if they show a video demo of before/after. They claimed to have fixed everything in the past and yet nothing critical is fixed.
Such insignificant patch is still better than none I guess.
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I think a reasonable trade would be that players start showing the developers demos of pathing issues (alongside descriptions of what’s being done, recordings etc) so the devs can show the intended fix in return.
Perhaps you could even post those recordings in the II - Report a Bug section!
Until then, just writing about ‘yeah melee units refuse the command’ from majority of the players will net you the current response.
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If you check my profile I probably have reported 100+ bugs, mostly with either video or replay.
I even made it easier to read with a compilation here:
Literally never seen this. All they reply is “how do you repro”, “we’re tracking this issue”.
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Let’s go one step further and just have the players fix all the bugs themselves 
. I like the thinking, but the idea that more effort from players will translate into more effort from the devs is not something I see any evidence for. I get that “bad pathing” is a little vague, but there are a number of demonstrable components of this that have been laid out pretty well. And the treatment is similar, if not worse, for things that are more straightforwardly broken and well documented (e.g. Modify Attribute/Replace Object HP bug where the bug was “tracked” months ago, but no updates or signs that it’s being worked on are to be had for the asking). All we can really do is keep bringing attention to the issues and hoping that the squeaky wheel gets the grease eventually.
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If only aoe2 is open source 
I believe the combined intelligence from playerbase could solve pathing issues even quicker.
The User Patch and current Voobly version are good examples.
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The ‘you’ was more general not specifically you. That’s great what you have done, though I’m not sure if it’s in the correct section. the II - Report a Bug section gets more developer feedback. After all, they have their own forms and everything for bug reporting.
Yes? This is what you suggested here:
My comment was moreso aimed at the rest of the posters here who just whine about bad pathing without making it a bug report.
I mean, if it were that easy the devs would have fixed things already. There seems to be this weird belief that the devs are gleefully leaving bugs in and getting enjoyment out of players encountering the bugs. Do you think they go ‘haha!! yes!! look at that player losing a vill because the vill decided to path in weird circles while luring a boar’? I think you’d rather want to assume the devs would want to get the bugs fixed as well.
Rather I think the reason why the bugs don’t get fixed is, as they’ve said in this update, fixing something can break something else. Probably they haven’t found a good solution yet. After all, it’s in line with the old IT adage ‘fix one bugs, three more bugs appear’.
The best way to go around it is to report the bugs in correct places, with detailed explanations of what you did, what patch was this on, with video evidence if possible. Them even mentioning ‘yeah we’re aware of this and are tracking this issue’ is miles better communication than many other games get from their developers.
Wasn’t it sort of proven (by Spirit of the Law I think?) that the DE pathing is still much better for villagers and military units than in HD or Voobly? I think the video might be a little old now, as the main villager problems then were them just getting stuck in eachother, but even with that the pathfinding was better for DE.
I think most of us know better than to caricature the devs as moustache-twirling cartoon villains. Surely they want the game to work well, but in for order that to happen, they’ll probably have to reevaluate their priorities and allocate a lot more effort towards QA. Which may in fact be happening right now behind the scenes, but we can’t really know until they actually deliver results. Regardless, I’ve been advocating for a more quality-centered approach for a couple years now, as it seems like it’s a much lower priority than it should be. But it’s likely that there are some external restrictions on how much they can focus on this, i.e. competing priorities from management, deadlines, etc.
Yeah, seems that’s about all we can do, although honestly I do think “whining” gets results when enough people do it - it at least signals what the playerbase is most upset about and has probably been the catalyst for at least a few recent changes (Romans in ranked, more campaigns coming to RoR, probably even the recent focus on pathing). If there was more that could be done player-side that would actually have an impact, I think I’d be happy to do it.
Problem is that there isn’t a fixed reference point for pathfinding in DE - it’s almost constantly in flux. So the peak or ideal state in DE is probably better than HD/Voobly, but it frequently falls below that. IIRC towards the end of last year and beginning of this year, and during several prior periods, pathfinding was actually pretty good, especially compared to now, which is why people have suggested reverting to earlier versions.
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I remember he did some testing for villager efficiency. The scenario is ~20 vils on a main gold iirc. Yes, for the same duration, villagers collect more in DE.
But that’s only one scenario. Voobly doesn’t have the unit freeze or villager zigzag/detour, which is way more absurd imo. I can prove that because I recently played some Voobly being sick of DE pathing.
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It does seem like the devs aren’t doing enough testing and QA on pathing. There are bugs they said they fixed but continue to happen, such as lumberjacks and miners just going idle for seemingly no reason. Or units not moving to a waypoint if there are too many buildings in the way. They just stop where they are and it ends up clogging up a narrow path until you select them all and get them moving again. These are all incredibly frustrating and can hurt your position in the game if you’re in the middle of a battle.
I’m glad so much work is still being put into this game so many years later, but I really, really wish they would actually fix existing pathing bugs and improve pathing without creating new issues. Many of their patches with regards to pathing either don’t fully fix the issues they say it fixes, or it creates new issues entirely.
I would really love it if they spent a couple months fixing & improving pathing and nothing else.
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Sure, for like, design changes and stuff that doesn’t require that precise documentation/effort from the players, that can signal displeasure with something that the devs can take into account. But saying that ‘waah, pathing bad!’ on the forums is not a constructive way of reporting a bug or making it known to the devs.
IDK, I would hesitate to say that, since when that person made the pathing comparison, it was also at a time of frequent complaints. Thankfully those concerns of then were fixed, so it’s also not like devs aren’t doing anything. But anything good gets forgotten pretty quickly. I’d hazard a guess that reverting to earlier versions is impossible when the earlier versions were before Xbox and ROR integration, that might’ve had some effect on pathing or whatnot. You can’t just revert an expansion. 11
Unfortunately, that doesn’t really pay and they’ll also need to put out new content that may or may not cause new bugs. People aren’t going to pay for a bugfix DLC, or a subscription model, or a battle pass system.
But not fixing it means some of the casuals will slowly start leaving or play less and potential new players joining Reddit and the forums and seeing all the problems could be put off from buying the game (or at least put off from getting seriously into it). I know that would definitely put me off if a lot of the posts were about how bugged the game is. I would probably just be like “Oh they need to sort out all the issues first, so I’ll play something else and I’ll come back when it’s fixed and playable”. Honestly I’m almost at that point now anyway.
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How many go to forums to check if a game with 94% positive rating on steam has some issues. And, in thecase somedo that, are they really going to drop it after checking a few people complaining on a forum or value more the weight of almost 100k players saying the game is good?
That was DE on release, too. I don’t disagree that there are a lot of problems, but the way people go about it is wrong.
It’s not like they don’t want to fix it, it’s that fixing it is hard.
It’s especially painful when I watch the discourse around AoE2 elsewhere and people try to bring up complaints of the silly event skins they do as if those were valuable dev resources that could’ve been spent on fixing bugs. Because those two are definitely fields that have the same workers. 
Ok if this event mod nonsense is okay, then why aren’t the graphics teams creating more hero skins, making sure the scenario editor eyecandy items for ROR are rendered properly and making sure the game graphics are fleshed out properly. Like not having a hussar representing the mounted Samurai unit, just one thing yet to be fixed to date.
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I agree that people should be more precise and report bugs properly. Once that’s done though, “bad pathing” is an acceptable shorthand for the currently outstanding issues. As I expressed earlier, I don’t see any further upside to superfluous documentation once an issue is marked as “tracked.” Although AFAIK most of what people are referring to has already been documented in the bug report forum, but that is worth double checking. And yes, the player response is critique-worthy and can be improved in some ways, but this is surely true of the devs as well. Whatever their constraints, the devs are the more powerful group in this situation by far, so let’s not try to absolve them of all possible agency or accountability for their output. There are definitely things about their approach to quality and communication that they could improve.
Yes, well, part of this is human nature I suppose, but the other part is due to the frequency of regressions in the DE era. I made an appreciation post for an Editor-related major bugfix about a year ago, but that same feature has been re-broken several times since (and is currently broken for some important applications). So you might understand if I, or others, are less than thrilled, and less than supremely confident in the approach that’s being taken towards quality. Which is a shame, because it dampens my appreciation for the many excellent things that have been added in the DE era.
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I saw some pro players straight up calling gg on games due to bad pathing.
Sometimes, bad pathing is a convenience issue. But when you are fighting and you need your siege/monks right there, bad pathing will immediately break a game. You won’t get off more than a few shots with your mangonels usually, and bad pathing will just end that play.
I’ve been seeing a lot more of “units are stuck” over “units aren’t moving properly to their destination”, after this patch.
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I don’t disagree, though I feel as if the devs simply don’t have that many on board, so some areas will struggle. I think Age 3 DE players were recently very disappointed over promotion or something, and in the forums someone said it was just them doing the social media management. While AoE2 is the primary game, I can’t imagine them having the tools of an AAA game studio at hand.
Besides, what else can they say but ‘we’re aware of this issue and tracking it’? Would you just prefer ‘we have no current fixes to these bugs at the moment’ repeated all the time? I would argue that the constant replying then could be repurposed for some other developer time. 11
In your case, I suppose it’s the story of ‘fix one bug and five more appear’ again. They seemed to fix it and then something else broke it again. However I would still hesitate to attribute this to some perceived malicious approach taken towards quality. Again, I doubt the devs are trying to take notes from Musk in how to handle their product. More likely that if they do try to find solutions they’re unable to test everything and every possible scenario, so if something does break they might not end up catching it until a patch gets released.