First of all, happy anniversary to AoE3, 20 years is no small thing, unfortunately because of how things are there is not much to celebrate.
That said, some clarifications.
- First, I write this as a member and player of the AoE3 community, without answering to anyone, I am just expressing my personal opinion based on everything I have been seeing and perceiving these last few years.
- Second, I am not looking for popularity or creating controversy with this thread, I am simply calling the age3 community to reflect, I just ask that you read it and understand me.
- Third, I’m very tired of keeping things to myself, I want to express it and share it now, I don’t know if it’s a good time, but whatever.
- Fourth, sorry if I offend someone, it’s not the intention, but I also want to be honest.
- Fifth and last, I’m under DNA in a lot of things, so I’m sorry if there are things I can’t delve into as I should.
To begin with, a brief summary of what has been happening, although it is already public knowledge. AoE3 came out on October 18, 2005, developed by Ensemble Studios, 2 expansions came out (the last one developed by Big Huge Games), then there were many years without anything, without support, the game was kept alive by the community. On October 15th, DE, developed by Forgotten Empires, came out, a disastrous exit, poorly balanced game, with many bugs, optimizaton problems, terrible marketing campaign, etc, but a super important event for all fans because our favorite game was coming back and luckily the project was able to get on track in a very satisfactory way (at least for me).
Then a lot of updates came out with a lot of content, maps, skins, new cards and I could spend all day naming everything new that we got. New DLCs and some very interesting tournaments also came, but unfortunately all good things seem to have an end, because a few months ago World of Edge made the very sad decision to cancel the DLC that was promised to us and since then we have not received news or explanations.
After the summary, I want to tell how I lived these 5 years, analyze why things developed as they did and the reasons, I insist, according to what I saw and lived.
There has already been a lot of talk about World of Edge, I think we all express what we think of the team and their way of doing things, I don’t feel like going into that, we all agree that they have made mistakes, so I’m just going to get to the point and say what in my point of view WE went wrong and should correct in the future.
-
Bad advertising and marketing campaigns: I am not a graduate in the area, but even I realize that it is not well managed and better campaigns and better use of the networks could have been made.
-
Poor communication with the community: WE has had a hard time talking to the community, when it has done it has not gone well, it could have done things better. Now I think it’s improving with AoM and the other games in the saga in the communication area.
-
Complications with employees and equipment: Here I want to be careful and not to bother anyone, but I think it is already public knowledge that several employees have been disassociated from the company and that has obviously negatively affected the operation of the company, that is already an internal issue that is 100% their business, we have nothing to do with or opinion.
They made more mistakes, but there has already been a lot of talk about it and WE has taken the feedback and according to what I see, they have improved a lot, I see better communication and work from WE over the other projects.
So what’s up with EliteRifleman? Do you get paid to speak well of your “bosses”? Have you become an “Elite Bootslicker”? Well, I’ll leave the answer to your criteria, for me WE ruined a lot of things, but at least they’re trying to improve, and that idea of improving is the main idea of this thread.
With all the failures and mistakes that WE has made (which are not few) I personally attribute to him 25-30% of the responsibilities for the terrible state in which Age of Empires 3 is as a project. The other 75-70% of the responsibilities for everything that happened, in my humble opinion, is held by us, the Age of Empires 3 community.
Well, probably, after that last sentence of mine you will already be flaming me, insulting me, saying that I don’t understand anything and I am a bootlicker and blah blah blah, but please, keep reading, I have explanations.
I want to bring this up for debate guys, I really think it is very important that we debate this and talk about the role that the AoE3 community had with the decisions made, because these last 6 months I have been reading the forum, the discord servers and the social networks, the conclusion is unanimous.
World of Edge is to blame, they are traitors, they hate AoE3 and we as players deserved better.
I deeply disagree with that idea, and I have an extremely unpopular idea, I think that WE has mismanaged things, but the ones who have made most of the mistakes were us, the players and members of the community, and worst of all, we never took responsibility for our actions, it is more than obvious that the group of people who make the decisions were not going to give us more chances, We don’t deserve it and we did little and almost nothing to win it.
At this point you may not want to read anymore and think I’m an imbecile, it’s okay, as I said above it’s not my intention to gain popularity (something I haven’t had for a while), my intention is to call for reflection, think what you want about me.
So well, if you keep reading, then I’m going to tell you what I think and see that the AoE3 community has done in these 5 years. I clarify, not all the members of this community are like that, there are several very appreciable and very well-intentioned members, but they are very few, I obviously do not enter that select group of people, I also contributed a lot to this deplorable state of the game and the community, I made many mistakes and I subtracted more than what I add.
The first thing I want to say about the community, is that it’s too toxic, too toxic. For those who don’t understand, a toxic community is a group of people where conflict, disrespect, and negative emotions predominate. This type of environment is characterized by harassment, control, destructive competition, and manipulation, which generates psychological stress and harms the well-being of its members.
There is no community more toxic than ours, it’s crazy if you ask me, because that toxicity is transversal, our best players are toxic, mod developers are toxic, content creators are toxic, tournament organizers are toxic and even some official moderators of AoE3 are toxic (me, I am toxic person).
One of the biggest controversies we went through was Red Bull Wololo, AoE2 and AoE4 received tournaments, just like AoE1 received a kind of tournament or event. The marginalized one was AoE3, something unacceptable and incomprehensible for the community, but the explanation is very simple, we do not have a competitive scene, we do not have serious tournament organizers and above all, we do not have professional people to take care of, if we compare ourselves with AoE2, AoE4 and even with the Vietnamese of AoE1, we are light years ahead, professionalism in AoE3 is non-existent, despite already having 20 years of experience.
We don’t have a single player who is professional, I think we don’t even have a semi-professional player, all the players in the TOP 100 of the Ladder are casual players if we analyze it objectively, none of them charge a salary to play, or monetize their content at a very low value, despite the fact that some have an incredible level and dedicate many hours to the game.
Not only do I say that they are not professionals for not charging a penny to play, they also do not have a culture of professionalism, I do not want to give names but I know that everyone knows who I am talking about, we have players who cheat in decisive games, players who cry that the game is unbalanced when they lose, players who think that tournaments have to be made to their needs and desires, players who do not even respect the times and schedules to play, players who do not respect the rules of the tournaments and who do not even bother to read them, and who on top of that when they are punished for violating the rules they speak garbage of the organizers, all these attitudes tolerated and strongly supported by the community as a whole.
Look at the competitive scene of AoE2 and AoE4, they are super professional, the attitudes of our best players could never be accepted or tolerated in high-level tournaments made seriously. People like Viper, like Daut or like Capoch are strongly respected because they are professionals and gentlemen, our “professionals” do not compare under any circumstances, and now I ask them: Should we really be surprised that we are excluded from the most serious and professional tournaments in the world? Red Bull and World of Edge see that, they are not blind.
Not only is there a lack of professionalism on the part of the best players, there is a lack of professionalism from the organizers themselves, I previously created AoE3 tournaments with a certain attempt at professionalism and fun from the community, and I handled myself with a very poor professionalism. Despite this, I had the opportunity to organize tournaments with much more experienced people, and let me tell you, those people managed a professionalism equal to or worse than mine, and we are talking about people with years of experience.
I managed to get some advice from the heavyweights of AoE2 (example, LordPatito), there I was surprised, the professionalism that exists in the competitive scene of AoE2 is very advanced, very well organized, with clear and excellent rules, made with consensus among the best players, with very good and effective methodologies and means, their tournaments always develop normally and end with everyone happy and satisfied. When I tried to bring some of that to the competitive scene of AoE3, I found a big wall, a lot of rejection and refusal to change or improve, it was impossible to replicate what AoE2 has in AoE3, the mentality is very different.
The AoE4 community managed to bring and adapt that culture to their own scene, the results are in sight, and apparently AoM is following suit, meanwhile our tournaments never end well, without “dramas” or controversies, we don’t have normal tournaments, we as a community never did the debate and never made the attempt to improve our competitive scene despite that strong warning we received when we were excluded from the RedBull, the only conclusion we reached was the same as always, “World of Edge is to blame, because they hates AoE3”, a real shame.
The tournament organizers were unable to create professional and serious tournaments, despite this there were some attempts that were very good, but unfortunately those tournaments could not continue and again I insist, in my humble point of view, the attitudes of the community were decisive, despite the fact that there was a group of people who always supported and gave their best, who donated funds, lent their time to organize, players who respected the rules and a few others who gave positive feedback, the sad reality was that the majority percentage of the community was only limited to toxicity, they limited themselves to undermining the authority of the organizers, to trolling in the live streams and servers, to create the famous “dramas” and make life impossible for the organizers.
Of all the organizations that held tournaments, today there are only two organizations (you know who I’m talking about) whose tournaments and events leave a lot to be desired, the rest of those who dared to venture into the competitive sector of AoE3, changed their game or retired from the business, if you ask the reason, the answer is always the same.
I particularly stopped doing tournaments because I no longer had the mood to waste my time on something that only generated stress, headache and I did not enjoy doing at all.
Let’s cut with the issue of tournaments and the competitive scene, I hope I’ve been clear about that, because that’s not the only reason why the relationship with World of Edge was severed.
Another important point is the “power groups” that were formed in the community, in which there are clans, there are communities, there are fans of players, content creators, among others, who far from living together and existing peacefully like any community, hate each other deeply and are strongly opposed. But, you will say, EliteRifleman, there are many toxic communities, what surprises you?, what surprises me is that our community is small compared to that of AoE2 and AoE4, and despite that, it is strongly divided and is capable of creating all kinds of dramas and controversies permanently, to give you an idea and without exaggerating, 7 out of 10 situations or dramas that arise on ALL the platforms that the saga has, that end in suspensions, bans, or direct intervention of a WE employee or a volunteer moderator, come directly from the AoE3 community, we who are proportionally 4-5 times less in size than AoE2 and AoE4, generate 7 times more dramas than all of them combined, the AoE3 community became a small hell, how do you expect WE’s treatment of us to be if we are like this?
And you could say "Hey, but we’re only expressing ourselves because they’re incompetent and don’t tolerate criticism", let me tell you, you’re completely wrong, we’ve been generating drama and controversy since the day Definitive Edition came out, and to this day we’re still doing the same thing and we don’t stop for a single week, it seems that we as an AoE3 community are unable to communicate with World of Edge in any other way than not be through drama, which is ironic because the main criticism of WE is the lack of communication.
If we continue like this, let’s not expect a different response from them, and I want to clarify, I’m not saying that we forgive them everything and stop with the criticism, because the criticism and feedback that the community makes to WE for the way it was handled with Age of Empires 3 is justified and should reach them, whether they like it or not, but there are lines that as rational people we have to know that they should not be crossed and that not everything goes when it comes to criticizing.
Going back to the “power groups” that hate each other and are divided (and the reasons why they fight are worthy of Kindergarten), and again I tell you, you all know who I’m talking about, I can only say that they are pathetic and I am ashamed of myself for having taken sides with some of these little groups in the past. These small groups have agendas whose purpose is to influence the balance or decide how the game is going to develop although it is something impossible and useless (completely crazy if you think about it, but they have reached those limits), that it seems that their actions and way of handling themselves is exclusively to destroy each other, they went so far in their internal struggles that in the process they destroyed any window and opportunity that the World of Edge itself has opened for them to build something interesting, all for “power” and “influence” in a game, I repeat, IN A GAME!!
And the worst, they have not realized and refuse to accept that their tantrums are one of the reasons why we are as we are today, giving themselves the luxury of going back to the old slogan “What happens that is World of Edge hates AoE3 and that is why they marginalize us”, completely wrong and unable to realize that they have done everything to destroy rather than build. These “power groups” as I like to call them, are the main responsible for the fact that today AoE3 does not even have a coherent balance, everyone already knows the sides and they usually blame each other, I particularly blame each and every one of them for everything that happened.
I don’t finish yet, because we need to talk about content creators, the blessed content creators. Look, our community has and had some very large and important creators, with streaming channels, videos and social networks with a lot of experience and size. One of the legs of the aoe3 community is them, because they are the ones who bring players and make the game grow, but as I said before, even our references in the area are toxic.
World of Edge has tried and insisted with content creators, offering them all kinds of incentives (believe it or not) and do you know what content creators did? They started leaking things, yes, which is also public knowledge, because we have all received leaks and no one has any idea where it comes from. What was World of Edge’s response? You know it too. Faced with these blatant facts, content creators had the audacity to go to their platforms to insult the company and reinforce over and over again the old acquaintance: “World of Edge hates AoE3 and that’s why they don’t give us new content so that I can bring players”.
Again a shame and also an inability to realize that they are part of the problem. There is a well-known stremear, but surely you already know who I am talking about, who has the audacity to proclaim himself as the number 1 reference of AoE3 and the only thing he does is embarrass us with everyone, and there are a few stremears like him, who use their platforms to encourage hate speech, who leak things, who insult and mess with the personal lives of people they don’t like. We have that kind of content creators, and no serious company could ever bet on them, because it is an almost certain loss. Those content creators who don’t add anything are also responsible for everything that happened to the community and to Age of Empires 3. The few content creators we have had and who have been worth it have escaped to other games or have retired permanently, the most emblematic case being that of the well-known Australian stremear and content creator.
Comrades, I think I wrote too much but I have much more that I want to say, and I could be all the time and even write books about it, but that’s it, I already vented. I don’t care if you agree or not with all this I wrote, I will probably receive a great wave of hate, but I am not interested either, I wrote all this to generate awareness, self-criticism and above all invite you all to reflect for at least 5 minutes.
My final conclusion is that we have to put aside the stupid slogan of “World of Edge hates AoE3 and are traitors” and look at what we did these past 5 years, be self-critical and try to improve the Age of Empires 3 community, because for me and in my extremely unpopular opinion, we are the main culprits for the decline of the game, and only we can change the situation. I think we still have time.
Whether you like it or not, we need to rebuild our relationship with World of Edge. All members of the community need to change, put egos aside and start building things, hold good tournaments, support and teach new players, and avoid further drama and controversy over meaningless things.
That’s the only way we’ll save Age of Empires 3 Definitive Edition.
