Are we getting any updates?
Again, don’t blame inferno. He is not in charge of this and can only say what the company allows.
I don’t know if anyone still remebers. Exactly a year ago, the game had a major game-breaking bug where the 8 crossbow card was non-functional. It was very easy to fix, but they took almost three months to patch it.
That card is very essential to several civs like French or Portuguese. It makes those civs somewhat unplayable for a while. I sometimes even lose to extreme AI because of that. It was a time when the game had 10k+ concurrent players due to the F2P trial, and I don’t know how many of them were driven away by this and several other bugs.
And it lasted three months. During that period there was almost no communication either. No reply to bug reports. No communication on patch plans. We didn’t even know when they became aware of the bug. Back then some people thought I was overreacting, so did you enjoy the three months without 8 crossbows?
It’s not the devs fault though because their actions were determined by the management and they could not release a patch unless approved. I know the devs should had already been focusing on AOMR at that time, but it shouldn’t prevent them from releasing a quick, simple fix.
So it’s not that “well who cares about communication. I can play the game without watching twitter or forum or discord”. This lack of care from the company would eventually directly affect your gameplay. The bad communication is one of the many demonstrations of the fundamental problem. It is the most apparent, and may be the only one that is observable, but it shows the company cares or knows little about the status of the game and its players. Not to mention it seems they are somewhat trying to move AOE3 players to their new games by intentionally downplaying the game and delaying its communication.
When the DLC eventually comes, we all know there will be bugs or imbalance, which is inevitable and acceptable. But who knows how long it will take them to fix it this time? If there is a major bug and no one tells you whether they knew it and when they are going to fix it, will you still have the incentive to continue playing the game, knowing that the bug may persist for another few months?
I know the AOE3 community may have a tradition of disbelief in the official developers because it “survived” for a decade on community patches and mods without official care. But it took a long time for such efforts to realize and stabilize, and most players would not go out of their way looking for community patches. They would only try the retail version and most would leave if they don’t feel like it. That will also hinder the development of community patches because of lack of players and feedbacks. When Tilanus and his team worked on the Napoleonic Era mod, it took years to reach a playable state. When they worked for FE, all the bigger updates we had were made in two years. However inefficient official support is, it is still more efficient than anything else (as long as there is one of course).
So the real thing I’m urging is some basic support of the game. It does not have to be frequent or major, but it should happen. As resources allocated to the game is limited, I’d rather prefer in-time, small fixes than major updates. In the meantime they need to provide at least basic information about their plans.
TLDR: The lack of communication is a result of the lack of care from the company at present, and the latter is the real part that should be improved.
On Monthly Challenge (9.1)
So the one-year community challenge of skin unlocking (which to me is a more like a filler for the long vacuum, but at least it is an event) has finally ended. And now we have…a restart!
Do you really think the majority of players who are still playing now have missed that skin and really need another month to reclaim it? Isn’t the whole purpose of the thing player retention? Do you think those people who only open the game once a week for the reward will do that anymore if it is a repetitive reward from a year ago? Maybe you really do because you cannot even find one employee in the whole company who has played the game once a month.
There are a lot of past awards that people are more likely to miss. You can easily come up with another series of filler events or challenges if you don’t want to do much additional work and I could do with that (though I shouldn’t if this is any other game).
So nobody foresaw the event is going to end yesterday and made any action in advance? You have 12 months to do one thing, and you still refuse to?
Does anyone from the company also remember there was an Aztec skin that failed and will be granted in the end? I’d even do with another month of challenge for that skin. And yet that did not happen either. The whole thing seems to just have rolled over automatically. Hadn’t anyone made the herculean task of adding it back to the schedule? (You have 11 months) Nobody even walked up and turned the thing off?
Are you telling me nobody has ever touched the game for the past year? Are you literally not going to do or say anything before the DLC? (and hell knows when that will drop)
BTW and nobody said a word about the event reset either. We don’t know if this is an intended reboot for people to reclaim past rewards (which of course needs to be advertised) or an oversight that will be fixed. Just like the civ rotation calendar. It has been obsolete for long and nobody thought of updating it. Did you even realize it exists before people pointed it out?
And we are now in the midst of the long weekend in US and we all know nobody will come up and do anything about it. Just let the car run without anyone at the wheel for three days or three months who cares. Like this is not something as important as a civ name change that you’ll need to work through the weekends and write a whole article about right?
