I am not tying an objective value to the data. The data is an objective measurement. A user makes a review based off of their pleasure or displeasure, approval or disapproval.
There’s nothing else to my comments, if you’re seeing that it’s what you’ve read into and projected onto me.
All I’m doing is showing a chart that shows that there is a large ratio of negative reviews to positive reviews in the first week after the release of a patch. This has never happened before.
I’m not projecting anything. This is what you said:
You’re not talking about the ratio. You’re explicitly tying it to the changes in this patch.
I’ve seen you argue against bad faith criticism before. I strongly recommend you don’t ignore it now, just because you have a known and established lack of confidence in the design changes in this recent update. Which is also not projecting, because you’ve literally said it yourself. No?
I don’t want to be putting words into your mouth, but c’mon, own your opinion on the game man. I’m talking like a human here. I don’t know how the changes are going to shake out. But I do think that prior to this update one of the biggest gameplay concerns was with siege and how boring it had become.
I understand my bias and how it can impact how I approach analyzing a subset of data. The reviews are overwhelmingly negative at this point in time. “Not being felt positively” was the most neutral way I could imagine characterizing that.
It’s also pretty invalidating to have been told that I need to wait to see how people would feel about it. It’s something I’ve been told since the PUP notes dropped. That response is fairly predictable at this point.
My lack of confidence in the design of this game is based on their inability to address simple problems. I haven’t been able to change my profile in-game for over a year. It took them months from release to allow players to change colors in the lobby. They only just now gave players the ability to pause, and it’s probably going to get tweaked over the next few months.
It takes a history of success to build faith in someone’s ability to succeed when doing something. Personally, the people making this game have shown me that it would be an error in judgement to expect them to get it right on the first try.
That also has nothing to do with evaluating the history of positive/negative reviews.
It’s been said enough already, we’ll go in-depth on the public response to the patch when more time has passed.
This is entirely fair. I could go more into detail, but I don’t want to make you feel like your opinions are being invalidated, and honestly it’s off-topic anyway.
I don’t share your developer outlook on the developers, is all I can say. But that’s not to say your opinion is invalid. Another time, though
All the gripe about elite army tactic is empathically an overreaction! Because if you calculate the new elite melee infantry kill breakpoints you’ll see they die to respective range units by 1 to 4 shots sooner which equates to almost negligible differences in large fights.
For example:
Season 8 elite spearman with elite tactics and all blacksmith range upgrades would die to a fully upgraded archer in 9 strikes. Would die to a fully upgraded crossbow in 9 strikes and finally to a fully upgraded HC in 4 strikes.
Season 9 the same spearman with aaid upgrades vs the 3 enemy ranges units kill breakpoints are
To archer: 8 strikes
To crossbow: 7 strikes
To HC: 4 strikes
??? This is the huge nerf???
Let’s keep ot going season 8 spearman elite upgrades all BSM defensive upgrades vs maxed out horseman, knights and maas.
Season 8 breakpoints:
To horseman: 16 strikes
To knights (no charge): 6 strikes
To maa: 9 strikes
Season 9 breakpoints:
To horseman: 22 strikes
To knights (no charge): 6 strikes
To maa: 10 strikes.
Do all this for maa breakpoints and see for yourself how much of an overreaction the negative feedback to new elite tactics is!!
Down vs HC’s in 7 shots → 6.
Down vs Xbows in 9 shots → 8.
Down to CA in 16 → 13.
Down to Horse archers in 18 → 15.
Down vs Archers in 44 → 36 ( longbows 36 → 30).
Down to Mangudai in 44 ->36.
Cant for get buildings tho:
Down to TC in 72 → 60.
Down to Arrow slit outpost 27 → 23.
The units that counter the maa, still counter the maa - they observe the smallest benefit. They units that the maa is supposed to be a counter to (by virtue of durability) have benefited by around 20% increased damage vs one of their counter units.
This is most relevant to the endgame too, where heavy units are generally expected to be overwhelm light units.
You have it backwards. In large fights, 1 attack difference matters more since it compounds as a snowballing effect. As for range, 1 to 4 less shots, is to 4 less units needed for a kiting critical mass - which is the function HCs are headed towards with snake powder.
All in all, the new Elite army tactics is a win for light melee units with low hp since the lost the least, a win for light ranged units since they benefit the most and a major loss for maa in all situations.
Yea, there’s a valid point here on the new elite army tactics - game is knights and archers all the way down now.
I actually agree with your analysis; the changes to Maa are impactful because the kill shots were already low (7 shots now down to 6 for HC . 9 shots now down to 8 for xbows). But still not HUGE? More like meaningful.
The hopes are this slight; yet impactful change along with other changes will likely nudge cavalry units back into the fray. Prior to season 9, 1 v 1 main engagments, esp late were predominantly infantry exclusive compositions as the only bio units. Maybe these changes will invite melee cav back into the main encounters?
What did RedditorSlug expect them to say if that was the real reason for review bombing? “We can’t use hacks so we are review bombing the game”?
I don’t know mandarin, but Google does. Here’s 10 of the last shorter Chinese reviews:
Retreat, no wood
Unbelievable update, if you don’t curse for a second, you will be a god
Idiot update
The history of change is the same
Just two words! Shit!
Once updated, it’s a new game Thai pants are spicy
What changes were made to the broken version? The mentally retarded retreated into cnm.
What’s in this update is so disgusting
Rubbish game, crashes inexplicably
The latest update is really rubbish
silly game
Pure garbage update
What’s interesting to me is that these people with hundreds of hours never bothered to review the game until now (because if they had, their negative reviews wouldn’t show up in the recent reviews). So I know they didn’t give a shit about the game. But they do now.
I also wonder why is it mostly the Chinese players that are upset. Maybe they really liked siege. Or maybe it’s a cultural thing.
It makes no sense that a person would play the game for several years and have no opinion just to save it for a review bomb. The game wasn’t interesting enough to them to review for a long time. People don’t review many things in their library, usually it takes the game leaving an impact.
In this case, people are so upset with the changes they felt the need to post a review. There were several days of no positive reviews on release of the patch as well… that literally has never occurred either.
So the theory of the entire chinese fanbase conspiring to review bomb the game, holding back for a year for a patch they didn’t know was coming, kind of confuses me.
Ohhhhh, it’s actually just assuming chinese players are all hackers, and throwing all of their feedback in the garbage because of their shared ethnicity.
Weird that chinese players get treated so poorly, it’s almost like the english speaking fanbase has a historically strained relationship with chinese players, and are quick to blame unrelated issues on them.
Because I’m sick of seeing the chinese speaking players get slandered. Yeah, some of the reviews were complaining about not being able to cheat in game any more.
But now the conversation is shifting to saying over 100 reviews from exclusively chinese speaking people are astroturfed.
I’m sick and tired of the deep rooted racism I see from this fanbase. It’s a coinflip in a team game with both english speaking team mates and chinese speaking team mates to see the english speaking team mate harrass the others.
This goes way further than whatever petty feud we have @ArdeiGras1576
I think it’s fair to watch out for generalisations, especially when it comes to racial demographics, but at the same time assigning qualitative weight to what are very reactionary reviews which at times don’t even specify the problem . . . is premature.
Can you argue which demographics use hacks more? Do we know what markets are affected more or less by these kinds of things?
I think it’s very, very strange to assign so much weight to “well they’re obviously reacting along the specific lines I did to these design and balance changes” while undervaluing every single other possible factor.
I don’t have a petty feud with anyone mate. I just replied to one of your posts on another thread a few minutes ago. You immediately PM’ed me to say it’s harassment and that you asked me a few days ago to stop “badgering” you (which I don’t remember happening btw). I tell you sure no problem I’m fine for us to ignore each other. And immediately after you reply to my post?
I won’t engage with someone who thinks I’m harassing them. Please do the same. Thank you!
Gorbmort, you work in software engineering right? I assume we are both in the field of computer touching.
For three years this game had nothing, absolutely nothing, to detect or prevent third party programs from reading or altering code.
The hacks being used functioned in the same way as Cheat Engine. There were no guardrails for anything.
We have no way to identify every cheater. Chinese hackers were more readily identified, but that means nothing when doing a full survey.
It tells a lot about the fanbase with the targeted nature of hackusations, and it falls in line with the roughly 300% year-by-year increase in hate towards asians (in western countries).
Earlier you responded to ‘reactionary’ in a way that told me you understood that word as meaning quick to react (which is not the definition). This reaction to chinese feedback is obviously being informed by people’s pre existing bias towards them. I would say I’m surprised that you hold water here that you didn’t then, but I mean I’m not a moron. It’s really obvious that people were going to react this way.
Well this part is true, if you really wonder why, it is because they also have their AoE forums similar to the ones on reddit, and one of their largest communities has ~180k registered members. Just you know, the number of AoE4 players who speak Mandarin are almost equivalent to the English speaking ones. They also had tones of discussions and opinions on these changes. Their voices are not heard because most of them don’t speak English, and perhaps the most straightforward way to express their feelings about the patch is through commenting on the platform where they purchased this game. Which is of course, on STEAM.
On ladder at least, last time I checked on aoe4world, they didn’t have much more players than the other big countries. But even if that was the case, the number of negative comments from China are completely disproportionate to the ones coming from the rest of the world. Ofc you could argue that they live in their own bubble and we can’t draw any conclusions as to why it’s happening, but the point is this could also be one of the reasons. After all, the hack tools are mostly sold on Chinese websites. As I understood from someone in our community who is currently “hunting” and reporting the hackers, only the most expensive ones still work. And before people are quick to accuse me of racism, I’d like to clarify that I’m not from an English speaking country, or even a Western country, and I have no stake in this. It’s just a known fact that most cheaters are from Russia and China.
I’m a software developer, yup. I’m not familiar with what this game did or didn’t have, and I’m barely familiar now. This kind of information tends to be held close to the developers’ proverbial chests, because mitigating hacking is a cat-and-mouse game of trying to stay ahead of people trying to hack the game.
I’m also very familiar with suggestions, accusations, and real instances of racial stereotyping. I get it. I get the point you’re trying to make, and in the absence of wanting to get political, I’m more sympathetic than you might realise.
However, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the game finally got some kind of update that did some kind of concrete damage to people using cheats, and subsequently the game receiving a ton of negative reviews.
Does that mean all negative feedback is therefore from people unhappy they can no longer cheat?
No. But at the same time, there is a very real demographic of people who will be. And these people are unlikely to say outright “because I can no longer cheat”. It’s 2024. Brigading Steam reviews has become incredibly normalised, and people are very smart about it (even if they’re just following instructions from someone else).
Does this mean brigading is actually happening? No. But it’s a theory you need to be open to, just as the developers need to be open to the idea that their siege changes are unpopular. However, the people who will have the data will be the developers. They’ll be able to cross-reference Steam accounts with people who have been flagged for cheating, and they’ll be able to cross-reference global data (e.g. not just this forum, and not just Steam reviews) on siege usage across factions, playtime, etc.
They will have more data than we could ever have. To that end, we should be as open-minded as possible, and that’s what I’m trying to be.
