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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
At least they could make it structured, like maintaining the Known Issues page so that every critical issue has a status, and ideally give an ETA for planned solutions, or mark them as “blocked” if no bandwidth.
The best scenario imo would be devs hosting a weekly stream. It doesn’t even have to be a Q&A. Just play some casual TG, and a lot of issues we are talking about would be seen. And they could comment on what they have tried on that issue. Even if no progress is made in months, this would at least assure us that the devs know the problem, instead of asking “Do you see this in real games? Not just scenario editor?”
Yep, that’s the dream. Something that shows there’s a well-laid plan and an ongoing process to execute it. And I do appreciate the frank disclosure that pathing is complicated, and is being worked on, but the timeframe for any fixes is completely up in the air as far as we know. And months-long silence about other matters gives the impression that those things are unimportant. There was an announcement of some significance at the beginning of the summer, but it was fairly vague, and hasn’t really manifested into much of anything beyond mostly Xbox and RoR fixes. Even a follow-up response along the lines of “We’re short staffed right now due to the summer holidays and most of the QA team is working on a different set of bugfixes, but in September we will start working on these issues you mentioned…” would be immensely helpful. Strong communication can really help smooth out a lot of other difficulties, but without it, it’s really anyone’s guess what’s going on. Discontent breeds easily in the comparative vacuum of communication.
Oh, I don’t think it’s malicious at all, mainly just a matter of suboptimal prioritization that could be, and hopefully will be, adjusted. And this isn’t such an obscure game that hiring another member of the coding/QA team should be prohibitive, if needed. All the more so if the Xbox port was the (financial) success that many are claiming.
That’s understandable, but they only have to jump on the ranked ladder and play just one game themselves and they’ll already experience most of these problems with pathing first hand. Obviously there are lots of different issues, but it’s basically all the same stuff. Villagers getting stuck, not walking in a straight line, melee units freezing / refusing to move / not chasing / losing aggression, ranged units cancelling their shoot animation etc. Does anyone know if any of the Devs are active players or are they just programmers?