Lobby browser should work like if we are in 21th century

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
1

Hello,

The Lobby browser is totally bug and not fun to use.

Bugs make us lose a lot of times for exemple :

  • When host go in lobby browser, the game at the end of count down won’t start
  • Sometimes in lobby browser it display 8 players but there is 7 and we can wait many minutes like that

Lobby browser is very slow, you actualise the lobby browser and if you click directly on a game with 6 players you have a high probability that the room is already full.
Why does it take 30 seconds to tell you that the room is already full?
Why it display room full (8/8 players)?
Why do we need to update lobby browser to see the “actual” number of players in each room?
Why sometime when you host no one join and someone create exactly the same room and it full in less than a minutes (ex: cba)
Why do you always have to accept to play with mod?
Why do you always have to download it again (when you have the last version) ?
Why do we have to wait for host to be ready to download files?
Why can’t we remove the 5 seconds count down?(if there is an error it’s to late because if someone remove ready at the wrong time it will crash the game of others)
Why my computer melt when I am in game menu ? (it consume the same power than when a game is launch)
Why not giving explanation to error (most of error display only x and a number)?
Why when we are in a lobby and we go in lobby browser we have to actualise to see other lobby and why we can’t join them?

6 Likes
2

Very important points are made here.
The browser is so bad to use. It just lacks basic functionality. I mean come on. If you’re a dev, test it once. You will come across so many inconveniences.

3

I also agree the lobby browser (and in general, the game’s UI) is very archaic, however some of the points listed don’t have much to do with the UI. For example, your lobbies may not fill because people simply don’t want to join yours, the other hoster may be a popular one within communities (or posts join codes in their communities) and thus fill faster.

Most importantly, I’d say having to refresh (and then scroll back to where you were) is archaic and the lobbies could update on their own. The Xbox patch introduced new bugs to the lobby browser where you cannot even see all available lobbies any more, which is really problematic when you’re not in any communities, since the only way to see an available lobby of interest is if you know people in particular lobby (so you can search by name)… or are in that community, to see the join codes.

The entire search functionality is clunky and takes ages to show you games sometimes. There have been times where I try to spectate a game, and it takes several minutes for game to show. I don’t think the game had any spectator delay either, if that might’ve been the reason? But same thing happens when you’re in the lobby browser and try to see a lobby from the invite code, it can still take ages seeing the lobby show up (and yes, the search is correct)… :person_shrugging:

I’d also add that the social aspects of the game are horrendous, playing with friends and joining ranked games is just obnoxious, nevermind that if you actually play solo and find new players, playing with them again is just such an awful experience. I remember a time where I found few new people to play together with, and had to resort to finding their Steam page through AoE2.net (can’t do so now, because the sites are broken!) in order to send them an invite.

At the very least, make it possible to copy text from the lobby chats to get people’s Steam Friends codes, or make it possible to see recently-played-with players from Steam. And please, make it possible that when you have a party, you can actually chat with eachother while in queue.

Here’s to hoping for promised UI overhauls from the upcoming megalarge patch (which isn’t the PUP, afaik?).