Hi and first of all congratulations on the successful launch ! Been following DE closely last year helping out every way I could to assure a stable release. Love the love poured into this and really enjoy the game!
One thing that worried me for well over a year now is the fact that there is currently 4 or so ways you could play Age of Empires II online. The “community official” way being voobly if I’m not mistaken. Thankfully we don’t have issues finding opponents on DE at the moment but nobody can predict what is to happen in the long run. And I would hate it if the game were empty and you’d spend more time searching for games than actually playing.
But then it hit me - why not go a step further and make it both innovative and fun while keeping everyone under the DE umbrella? imo it would be very beneficial for everyone if you could organize “official” events such as tournaments and time-limited achievements. I believe I’m not the only one when I say that I wish I could enter a tournament with people ~my skill level and experience a “skill budget competitive” aspect of AOE II.
And the way I would suggest you organize these events would be the WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment) business model. The way WWE works is they have monthly PPV events where the event’s match card is divided into “tiers” so to speak - leaving the main event for the end of the night, with “pre show” lower tier matches going live beforehand.
Imagine if we had monthly events (free or small entry fee or combination of both) where on a given day you’d have an elo 1500-1600 match (matches), elo 1700-1800, elo 1900-2000 and so forth… you could even organize a team to cast these and people could watch live on a streaming platform.
You’d have to meet a quota of ranked wins or %win rate in order to get into the pool for these events, and winning these games (or just participating) could earn you a unique profile picture ingame or taunt or unit skin…whatever works!
Heck it doesn’t have to be just one match per elo tier…maybe a full on tournament on a given weekend quarterly or a “tournament season” on top of these events…or scratch the WWE idea altogether and go with the way FIFA handles clubs and they have seasons and playoffs and all that.
The bottom line is - I believe it would be a very worthy investment to do something like this and keep everyone playing under DE instead of wandering on other versions of this game.
I understand there’s like 0.5% chance you might do something like this, but I really would hate myself if I didn’t post this for even a slight chance of some form given to DE would really make me happy and I believe be healthy for the game and community.
Thank you for reading! All the best brahs and brahettes!
Thoroughly agree. This would really benefit the community, we need everyone to play in the same palce and for that to happen we need to offer some kind of incentive to stay in the same game so that everyone can always find someone to play with whichever game mode they like.
Although I find this type of things very improbable to reproduce in online competitive games, due to smurfing and other inherent problems to the online gaming.
But to ask for events and other investments for the community on the remake of the most popular AoE entry I absolutely endorse. Everyone would benefit a lot from this. Just look, for example, what Blizzard did with the Starcraft Remaster: former pro players championships, community graphics for the game… That brought a lot of satisfaction both to players and Blizzard itself.
I would say that in that case ranked play as a concept is flawed as people can smurf. I’m sure they could work something out ! Glad to see support for the concept, there’s multiple ways of working something liek this into the game.
You mention community graphics - would be great if we had for example seasonal events where participating in online games would somehow unlock an exclusive skin for your units. this would make players stand out and keep “grinding” the game… SMITE has a similar model in their seasonal play, Diablo III as well.
All in all there seems to be multiple ways to create incentive to play HERE and to KEEP PLAYING here. I hope they work something out !
Wouldn’t say that it is flawed, but rather that has some flaws, as far as any other system would have. People smurf even in real world competitions. The problem with your proposal is that not only the rewards atract system-abusers for its values, but the filter is too easy to cheat. A deathmatch tournament (with losers brackets and etc.) would work better, for example.
Absolutely. People have been asking a chicken skin to Eagle Warrior for ages by now.
Why do people play on Voobly if theAoE games, themselves, have multiplayer built into them? Up until two weeks ago in these forums, I’d never even heard of Voobly
Voobly is the only reason this whole community still exists after microsoft shut down the MSN gaming zone in 2006. HD never had a stable online experience while voobly offers a larger variety of MP features.
In this 2nd re-release they still can’t match the functionallity of a community effort called voobly.
Yet they have the audacity to change our way of playing by removing ranked lobby, forcing us into a limited matchmaking system. They take away our beloved and iconic game assets and artstyle with huge spec requirements as a result. Only to allow fancy high res graphics with lower clarity, and useless features in competitive rts such as zoom. They default a right click drag behavior that is slower and less responsive. They make changes to random map scripts against the will of the community. I’m just hoping that I will be able to play the game that I love in the future.
Look at SvenSvensonn’s post and you will see why. He is literally the point I am trying to make in this thread. You can’t just copy-paste functions from voobly and expect people to come to DE. I think there needs to be some sort of “this is the official way to play AOE” aspect to it, which is why I propose regular events and tournaments, leaderboards and so forth. That way even people who prefer voobly would be “forced” to come over if they want to compete “officially”. it would be like proposing to a soccer player to come to FIFA play for Manchester Utd. or stay in his local league nobody has heard about or cares about. You get peer pressure you get all these different social forces which drag people to DE instead of other platforms. This is also why people prefer to buy original yugioh cards rather than play with bootleg cards even though bootleg cards are 90% cheaper and easier to get.
I think you misunderstand my post. Actually it’s very important that they copy all the best features from community projects such as voobly and capture age to make it a superior platform. That should be the reason why people move to DE, because it’s the best. Your idea to “force” players to stay relevant by moving to DE would be unethical if it means pulling players away from a superior MP platform. There are still multiple reasons why someone would prefer voobly. That is where dev priority should be before considering such ideas.
I don’t think what he said has to do with forcing, but rather with rewarding.
I honestly agree with this a lot. You can’t just expect that people will happily pay more on a product that delivers the exact same features as the previous with no further incrementations and stay relevant. That would be a terrible way to both advertise and sustain the game.
I don’t think what he said has to do with forcing, but rather with rewarding.
He called it “forcing”, and I agree with that wording if eg; it means that the competition can be used as a measurement for entry into larger tournaments. If you call it rewarding then that’s fine, but they should not be giving out rewards while the platform itself is not on par with voobly. If they make DE a complete platform then that will be our best reward, any of such ideas like organised competition can be an extra treat.
I honestly agree with this a lot. You can’t just expect that people will happily pay more on a product that delivers the exact same features as the previous with no further incrementations and stay relevant. That would be a terrible way to both advertise and sustain the game.
I wish that DE delivers the “exact same”, In reality it delivers less functionality/quality on all key points. Lobby, matchmaking, RMS, spectating, graphics, gamesounds…
At this point it’s not about adding x or y, It’s going to be a miracle if all the basics turn out superior. Like it should be if they dare to take our money again and call it a “definitive edition”.
I see several problems to your idea though it is a good one.
First off, what you’re proposing is basically what the ECL studio tried to achieve before the DE release but it proved to be a commercial failure (read ZeroEmpire testimony about his year running the ECL). So it’d be tricky to relaunch the endeavour.
Secondly, low rated players don’t offer much entertainment when it comes to 1v1 tournaments. It’s slow and quickly repetitive. Low rated matches often end up in the caster explaining everything not to do instead of enjoying the gameplay at work and that’s honestly draining unless the “noob players” come up with legit funny and troll strats. Only 2k+ players offer a solid and captivating show.
Furthermore, good casters are hard to come by. AoE2 requires a mad knowledge of the game if you want to cast it properly. Every civ has its own bonuses, unique techs, etc. They all look pretty much alike from their tech tree yet they play very differently. Halas, we don’t have a large enough pool of currently good/great casters to provide the entertainment you’re proposing imo. T90 + Dave is the best casting duo but you can’t recreate that easily.
Furthermore spectating is still quite broken in AoE2DE at the moment. To be honest, the spectating overlay features are laughable compared to what we recently experienced thanks to CaptureAge. Plus, it’s not even possible to check one player’s profile and download his/her games to enjoy it when the word spread that they were great and that’s really a problem when it comes to casting.
About the ELO comment and smurfs: that’s what IP addresses are for. I’m also sure anti-smurfs procedures could be implemented if necessary.
The AoE2 community is too old for any kind of crap like that to ever fly. Pro-players are well-known and it’s not tomorrow that new players will ever be able to seriously compete with them. Wherever pro-players decide to set shop: that’s where the community will eventually settle and where the money will flow. However, they’re not overly happy with DE at the moment… So, there’s that.
Your idea is great on paper but you need to research the AoE2 community and its history a bit more if you want anything like you propose to ever work.
Woah had no idea this thread caught some interest!
I see what you mean, but I am sure they could figure something out. For example, I wouldn’t stream/cast every game of every player regardless of their rating. My idea is that you have some sort of “playoffs” where players of a given ELO range would commit to having ranked matches with one another (matches tagged with “playoff match” or something), where the best performing players of an ELO range (divisions of say 1600-1700, 1700-1800, 1800-1900 and so forth… or something different so we don’t have too many divisions) - so only the best performing players of a certain “season” would get to participate in a tournament attributed to their elo division.
This would in my opinion leave only the most creative players of a division in the tournament, making for some fun games for streaming.
Maybe we can even reward the players with “titles” yearly so that you’d have different championships to attain as you move up the ladder over time. Would be interesting to see players improve over time like this !
I agree on the casters and spectating issues though ! Maybe Microsoft could make a good offer to youtubers/known casters to do it under contract, and I see how this can sound like wishful thinking - but my initial point was Microsoft would need to invest some resources into this anyways so im just throwing ideas out there…
Oh as far as smurfs go - I think a good report system would do wonders regarding this ! Especially since games can be recorded and players analyzed via different variety of methods - from APM to advancement times, strategies they perform and so forth.
