As someone who moderates the AoE2 subreddit and has seen >95% of all the posts there in the last several years and I could confidently say that I have never seen this feature requested even once.
The community was polled (What is your opinion on Auto-Scouting? - Poll Results - StrawPoll) showing 55% negative reaction with a further 25% awaiting further information before deciding. There’s apparently very little interest in this feature, particularly for it being implemented in ranked play.
It would be nice to understand where all the requests for this came from.
Thanks for reaching out, @Plus2Joe. If you’re really disposed to take community feedback in consideration for the auto-scouting feature, my request is that you gals and guys don’t get to change it a whole month after implementing. At least reach us in a short after the release (like a week or two) with some polls, more discussion topics, and try to be transparent about your results and considerations on the feedback.
Sorry, but 55% ??
On my understanding the negative reaction (green + blue) reaches about 29%. Whilst acceptance (salmon) gets 21%; acceptance with reservations (both purples) 26% and uncertainty (yellow + orange) 22%.
Still a good chunk, and need to be taken in consideration, but not as big as you may suggest.
They announced it will be implemented in all game modes, including ranked. Therefore the options that want it disabled from ranked are imo also negative reactions.
If they remove the feature from ranked games clearly it’s a lot less controversial, though still the amount of people that want it strictly not in the game outweighs the number that like it.
The thing is being a good player it’s not always directly related to have a good exploration. My scouting is good, yet I’m not that good. On the other hand, great players like Sitaux, or even MBL have a not so good scouting. Imagine how much can change the game, si one of the best players in the world can take advantage of that
Scouting is one of the major elements for the gameplay along with economy management and military control. Scouting is essentially the ability to gain information.
Even players decently high up 17++ voobly will forget their scouts after/during feudal age at times. So when player can forget about scouting and still gain information, this is where we’re giving them handicaps that shouldn’t exits.
It’s on the same level as receiving extra resources when your economy is bad and you cannot manage it. This is definitely not a game element that should be automated.
Scouting even by accident can give you valuable information that can change your strategy or affect your overall decision making, it can have huge impact in a game.
You cannot even compare it to having auto-reseed for farms as one is QoL improvement that does not affect strategies or meta itself, where as auto-scouting can actually affect the ability to play forward or doing sneaks or having hidden bases out in the map, which is more common than you’d imagine. Even accidentally finding an enemy trying to expand his base can cause major set backs and lose games.
Chances of auto-scouting affecting overall gameplay of all players above the newcomer level is ridiculously high and we’ve got explored mode already for newcomers who struggle with scouting. So this addition is just replacing already existing solution to a problem that is not a problem.
I’d be totally cool with this being an option in the lobby like all techs or cheats. Maybe it’s not for everyone, but this could really help my family when we all play. Sure, maybe it doesn’t belong in ranked play, but I don’t think anyone can be angry about it if it’s an optional feature. Nothing wrong with expanding features to appeal to other skill levels, especially in friendly matches. Not everyone plays online against strangers!
My issue with this feature is that even high-level games have huge dependence on map scouting.
Some high-level players don’t scout small, unexplored areas of the map due to the low chances of their being resources there compared to the time and attention investment required to scout.
There was a HC3 qualifier match yesterday where poor scouting almost led to a loss for one of the contestants - a small 4x4 gap in scouting in the very corner of the map (beside a forest) was where the only remaining map gold was located near the defender. He didn’t scout it until well into the trash wars, where he was losing badly and the other player had acquired gold.
Auto scouting would have removed that variable completely.
I don’t care if tournaments ban auto-scout - this example illustrates the fallacy of auto-scouting, and the things it takes away from the game.
This is exactly why it’s important for the devs to be more transparent on future updates in the game. They have a small team audience and so they don’t know exactly how the public will react. If they allow the player base to be aware of future implementations before release then they will be well informed on how to best implement new changes before or shortly after they are in the game. Updates in the past weren’t known until release which prolonged the unwanted features until the developers received enough feedback.
I think the automatic scouting should be an game option. This way we can choose to use it or not. I don’t have any problems with this implemention as it allows you to remove one job to focus on others
There’s cons/pros to it that’s why if they do implement it hopefully as an option that needs to be enabled/disabled
It honestly reminds me of a game called Empire Earth, from a similar time when AOE2 released.
It was a game heavily inspired by AOE2, and it had auto scouting. But it was so bad that my units ended up doing stupid things.
This time, 20 years later, the AI behavior is much more polished, so i would expect scouting to be far far better and actually useful.
And for that reason, i do not support scouting being implemented in the game as it heavily slows down the flow of the game in the feudal age and will most definitely end up getting your scout killed if you’re careful, and since most new player’s would not care much since it is automatic, the scout will become a disposable unit that is destined to die instead of a scouting and rushing units in certain strategies. No need to compare with pros, just clicking your scout and Shift-Right Clicking at several places in the mini map for scouting in a 1v1/2v2/3v3 will take anyone about 3 seconds and is well worth the effort.
An analogy, if this ends up being implemented, the community will ask for Auto Build Orders, Auto Mills, Auto Lumber Camps, Auto EVERYTHING. That is suspiciously similar to Mobile Games, which this game isn’t, We have much more control over our inputs with keyboard and mouse. Do not quote me on this, this is just a loose analogy. AOE2’s foundation is unlike mobile game, it’s a different type of game.
The RTS META for AOE2 has become heavily dependent on scouting, and even though it’s a nice bonus help, it’s not necessary at all and the new Shift+Clicking at different places to scout without having to pay very close attention was a far better and most appreciated addition. Maybe we can have this in the game if the community has a huge want for it, but I’d prefer this to be only accessible to people as a checkbox in the settings who have completed the Art Of War Mission so they would be aware of what they are dealing with. On top of that, during Competitive games should not have this feature on it’s launch (if it ever does). It will be a unbalanced experience.
Because at the moment there seems to be a pretty clear tendency, especially if we look at the fact that the devs seem to prioritize making things automatic over changing things that are actually wanted by the community (improving matchmaking, ranked system, lobbys, spectating…).
I don’t think it’s good to be naive and think the devs will handle everything perfectly fine if they already failed to do so multiple times (game crashes, insane Cumans, horrible pathfinding, weird map pool,…). Don’t get me wrong, I still think the devs are great, as they indeed listen to the community and make this game become better and better. But that should motivate us to give an opinion and show them what we want, not to just be silent and think “they not what they’re doing - no need to complain about anything”. The way this game stays great and becomes even better is if community and devs work together. That includes pointing out negative things.
Yeah, you need to test things and not just throw them into the game even if most of the community doesn’t like it. Implement it slowly. Make it an option in custom games. Most of the people would be fine with that. But don’t go full yolo mode?!
I think that’s wrong. Pros will have uses for it, as they have with auto-farm-reseeding. It’s just that pros wont use it at the start of the game. But if the game hits mid Feudal Age, the Scout is still alive with some HP and they are busy microing and managing the eco and pretty sure the clicking auto scout to get vision of the whole map, find relics etc. will be a convenient and easy thing to do, while before even for pro players not everyone was doing this consistently and it was a clear strength of people like Viper to go for those things.
Of course that’s somewhat speculative, but it’s just to show you that I wouldn’t be so sure that pros wont use it. They just wont use it at the start of the game.
Well, thats too simple. Microing unit is definitely some clicking that requires a lot of skill.
I still see your point though. I just think that in lategame there is so much possible clicking to do that it’s a good thing the reduce something that needs no thinking about it, but only remembering. You will still not be able to do (nearly) everything you could be doing.
As mentioned above, I do think if there’s so much to do that you can’t handle everything even if you reduce some monotone stuff - go for the reduction and let the players focus more and the clicking that is more related to decision making and skill.
Btw. noone is saying atu reseeding was the greatest change the game ever had. It’s just a small QoL change which was certainly not need, but still is a very small nice addition to the game. If it led to more and more things being automatic I’d completely agree that it was not worth it. I just hope the devs don’t continue going that way.
Yeah, absolutely and I think that’s by far the biggest problem with this new feature.
I thinki we all need to remeber that the success of Age2 comes from it being a great game with great mechanics which was and is fun to play. It being hard to manage everything at once is part of it being fun to play. There are enough simplified rts games out there. They are not as successfull as AoE2 for a reason. So please just don’t make things automatic which normally need a precise input by the player - Scouting, fighting, producing units, managing which vills work at what ressource. Even further so if the point in the game where this is done is not too overwhelming anyway (like the early game where scouting is one of the biggest aspects of the game)
Scouting is a micromanagement task, so, why not automating it? If the problem is that it gives too much advantage in multiplayer games, it could be disabled in game settings.
The domino effect towards auto-everything is not a so bad thing, if every automatable task is related only to micromanagement and not to overall game strategy: for example, auto build orders or auto lumber camps or auto villager tasking are very bad ideas, because they are very important strategic decisions, so they must absolutely be manual.