Alright, so it’s not INTENTIONALLY neglectful.
The support team and devs just evaporated. Since the beginning of universe, they all acted fully on their own behalf, so we had in-time bugfixes back then, but this year they stepped into a wormhole and got transferred to an alternate universe.
There was not such a thing called company or management. We only have a flat, non-hierarchical, indie team. Nobody would ever move them to the other project, or prohibit them from interacting with the community, or neglect their work on social media, or lower the priority of this project, or delay patches that are already finished.
This worsened support is definitely NOT the result of some higher-up manager repurposing the crew that once worked on and managed the game to other projects but purely accidental.
Dude still believes there is one coherent group called “DEVELOPERS”, and they are the only people who manage the game, and they act totally independently, make all decisions out of their own wills without any supervision, have the freedom to do whatever they want, and I was pointing at the developers.
I wonder what the series of videos and icons that pop up at the start of the game mean. Maybe they are just graffiti from some random street artist.
Maybe dude should be howling at the moon letting everyone know the game is managed by an indie group.
Yeah I agree. That’s why I was talking about bad management from somewhere up there somehow. I just think it’s a cost saving thing. Using the same people across multiple projects so NOBODY gets the support they need. Look at AoE 2, same thing. Bugs breaking the game and that is the beloved child of the franchise.
So I kind of agree with you. But I also think you are very funny.
I mean I have always been pointing at the bad management (i.e. lack of care from the company, not the developers) all along so I don’t know what you’re trying to correct.
“Intentional neglect” means the company has less care and low prioritization towards this game, so we got worse support.
Maybe because I was using “they” which was ambiguous?
It more sounded as if it was a “someone, somewhere is sabotaging the game” rather than what you are actually saying is: “the people who are making these decisions don’t care and it has led to bad planning and awful support and communication.” I think we all see that for sure. It’s not so much a lack of content but really just a lack of communication and the ability to even address the smallest thing within a timely manner.
They don’t really have any sort of media director who engages with the community and is part of all the big discords talking to people. They should hire someone for that at the very least there is conversation. But I’m actually worried because there are many segments of this player base that are incredibly toxic.
Whatever reason it is, or whoever specifically is responsible for it, the company in general has neglected the game and missed almost every single opportunity (they don’t for the other two games of the series).
Even when all games in general receive slow bug fixing and poor communication, this game still always gets the WORST among all. When support was good, we got the least good. When support is bad, we get the worst.
(I’m not counting AOE1 because it was almost officially abandoned years ago.)
This becomes particularly unacceptable if (according to the devs) those bugs have been fixed a month ago.
The least malicious speculation is “they do not care about how the game and its players are doing”, and that alone has done far more damage than developers causing bugs.