Hi Everyone,
Long time AoM player here. Like many of the old players I play a ton of scenario maps. All of my feature requests here are to improve the experience of hosting and playing custom scenarios.
-
Lobby Browser: The default lobby filter should only show games not in progress. When entering the lobby browser, the default filter should only show lobbies that fit the most common circumstance, players looking to find games to join. There’s an argument to be made to also hide private lobbies. These filters are also common enough that it might be worth adding dedicated buttons for them at the top.
-
Lobby Browser: Add filter for Custom Scenarios
-
Lobby Browser/Lobby: Increase the lobby name length or add a description/notes field. The lobby name is the only way hosts have to communicate with players looking for games. The current length limitation can hardly fit the name of the game you’re hosting, leaving no room for additional details.
-
Lobby: The collapsible chat is convenient, but it should be dockable. Chatting with players in the lobby is too pivotal to hide by default, and interacting with it is a nuisance. The chat for a lobby a given player in should be directly in their face. You can sit in a lobby spamming taunts and chat trying to get a player to select the correct team without them ever noticing.
-
Scenario Player Type: In the scenario editor when configuring the player data, you can specify if a slot is CPU or Human. This functionality existed in the original game but had no functional use case. Now, if set to CPU, it enforces that a given slot is a CPU. This feature add is extremely good but needs more. Now, in the lobby there is no way to start the game with less players. Creating an 8-player map that has considerations for less players is common and should be an option. Suggestion to either add an either/or option in the scenario player data, or have the ability close close/override slots in the lobby similar to the original game.
-
InGame Chat: The F5 chat menu should return, and shouldn’t only be a veteran secret. When the game is frozen, stuck with a prompt preventing you from chatting, lags heavy in a cinematic, the F5 chat menu was the only way players had of communicating to verify that the game hasn’t dropped. Multiple times now I’ve run into players quitting at a lag spike due to them thinking the game dropped and confirmed with them after that they did indeed quit, and didn’t drop.
-
General: A players selected major god should be more verbose. Wherever there is an icon for a player’s major god the name of the god should be beside it. New players shouldn’t have to learn to associate the icon with the god with a mouse hover. One exception could be the InGame scoreboard, but even then maybe there should be an option in the menu to enable god names on the scoreboard.
I apologize if any of the features I suggested are already in the game in some manor and I just haven’t stumbled into them yet.
Thanks for reading and your consideration.
Anhysbys