Imo it’s such a bad game anyway, the fact the players are also so bad they’re claiming to lose ‘just because’ of a potential map hack is like so regressive. There were even maphackers in previous AoE games even though arguably, it took way longer (like literally 10years+), and is still to this day rare, because those games were actually crafted better by the original devs.
As clearly the top players of those games stream, and play in person sometimes, they clearly don’t do that. Yet it’s a testament to the original games that you don’t have to , and the top players can still win against online players who might occasionally do that. They aren’t like top50 players just if they figured how to make a esp or map hack to eliminate the gamble of fog of war, because the original games were better, they were crafted in a way where a really good player tends to beat that anyway. Simply defending or doing things optimally was enough.
I actually applaud them then if they made a tweak. Zooming out is not a hack, if you want zoom out request it as a feature, it’ll be added to the other 60-70% per day of posts that are all ‘bug requests’, ‘missing features’, etc., but it’s an example yet again why the AoE4 game was a big failure. Even the oldest AOE games had features for this sort of thing even if it was like in the form of a command or a .cfg file. Lol. They even ‘addressed’ this issue like in ancient times tbh like 1999 and so on. For copypaste devs of the 2022 era it’s ironic that they just wouldn’t know where to begin to fix such a thing and it’ll likely ‘never’ get changed in age of 4, the forgotten bad game.
Also I just don’t think maphacking (see fog of war or cheking things) is that big a problem. You have lke instant gathering and super simple gathering, akin to AoE3 or even arguably easier. So ‘if’ there’s a 1-d bad balance, it’s still up to you to do that better to win. Even though it’s probably ironically, ‘most prevalant’ on AoE4, which I think is because, as I’ve heard, “it doesn’t even out of sync” when revealing the map and not even need any other trickery applied, or anything like drawing over the screen. In contrast there were such bugs but only like mature and good hackers usually ever made them and then never became ‘top players’ or played the game much with the previous games; aoe4 is crafted in such a way where script kiddies have released multiple map hacks publicly that you can just grab offline, yet it’s only been ~1 year! Ensemble Studio’s actual games protected this probably aoe1 or aoe2 onward and so it’s a lot more extensive to make one, and after like 10-20 years, still very rare to find a maphacker.
I think it’s hilarious a aoe4 player as usual shows low IQ. In conclusion map hacking is not going to make you win/lose in such a simplified game, only for extreme noobs maybe anyway. The game’s so badly crafted that there’s now more than 1 ‘maphack’ available publicly (just looked and found 1), while there isn’t for AOE1,2,3, nor AOM, which are 20 years older. How weird! Zooming out also is not a hack. It’s a preference. At the very least it’s a ‘missing feature’ from bad new devs of AoE4 because there’s really no excuse, this isn’t like Directplay from Windows98 being used here, not having ‘zoom out’ or ‘hd’ in 2022 on a new engine that likely renders on Direct3d9 or 11 is their fault entirely.
Even this sync thing, is a borrowed concept, but they clearly just decided ‘eh let the kids play with the garbage we made’, with the name stolen so they think it was some other game entirely (meaning, age of empires). It’s usually pretty simple to say the desyncer or cheat attempter drops, makes team lose, and loses points, then they learn ‘not to do it again’ pretty quickly. In fact the fact they seem to have made this out of sync in general (for other things at least) and it doesn’t do this is yet another massive fail. 
