The game is now dying

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
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I know most of my topics gets ignored and since aoezone is ded, this might the last place to talk about it but at least i want you to notice it, instead of the common 100 civs petition daily.

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We have been losing active players, those numbers are even lower than during the aoe4 nonstop 200k usd events, but why?

We are not talking about covid now, in fact the peak of the game was on 2021 several months after the pandemic event beginning, those numbers are nothing but the pure image of the current situation with the game, bugged, awful path finding, punishing match making system, forced settings, etc, i can go all day, but the devs need to actually work on that instead of moar roman like civs and moar +20 hidden attack blast damage flying unit mechanics.

All the efforts need to be focused on the game stability and match making evolution into a more friendly environment rather than the punitive system that some minorities pushed into the game cause in order to grow we need to keep the numbers and the players interested.

Learn from your biggest failures, starting with the punishment patch, followed by the release of broken units and mechanics cause you have been changing the game so badly, everyone who know how to play disliked SR or diskthrower cause they are just broken and are completely irrational, instead of fixing the code that got broke cause of those mechanics being added, the devs should have focused on the game path finding and stability period.

Look at those numbers, it shouldn’t be like that, specially after the xbox port who in theory should have added more players meaning more active users and they should be reflected even on steam cause the boost on activity, but the thing is…it wasn’t a success, even i was expecting more players from that platform but the numbers don’t lie(see aoe2 insights about xbox numbers). The roman expansion with its 47% negative score which by the way broke the game so bad that at this point it hasn’t been fixed.

Those numbers should interest to all users around despite if you play SP with hacks enabled, cause the tendency is to keep losing players cause there are no conditions to keep the players interested on the Multi Player, the devs need to act quickly to change that tendency cause the players change their interest so fast, remember there is a big RTS game coming soon that might steal the pro players again and all the attention which could annihilate all the S+ tier events due to the low viewership, without pro activity and events, this game won’t be different than the hd and voobly.

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I can play with data too

Steady number of players until April 2023, then a big drop and then it starts to recover. BOOM! DEATH AVERTED

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Return of Rome did not outright break the game as you declared. For many players, it has worked fine, and I’ve never had one crash. A couple of people on Steam continually start threads basically saying that Return of Rome is a scam. Those non-constructive threads by the same individuals probably don’t impact the game much, but who knows. Maybe they could possibly turn off potential new players. I am now playing AoE II much more than I have ever done.

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The monthly player breakdown on SteamDB actually shows that while the peak is declining, AoE 2 DE gets more average players.

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I don’t see that? Apart from the initial release hype around AoE 4’s release with almost 74k players on Steam as well as some free weekends for AoE 4, AoE 2 was always ahead in player numbers which can be seen on SteamDB if you align both games to release.

The Xbox port was actually a huge success as AoE 2 was the most popular game on Gamepass after its release. I also don’t know how the figures on Xbox should boost the activity on Steam? Like, those are two different platforms and if you can live without the scenario editor, the Xbox port features basically the same as the PC version since you can also just plug in mouse and keyboard.

Return of Rome did not break the game. Yes, it brought some issues such as resetting hotkeys due to changes in the game structure but this isn’t really gamebreaking. Also, the negative reviews on Steam mostly refer to the lack of campaigns from the original.

I seriously doubt that Stormgate will annihilate the competitive scene in AoE 2 as 2’s playerbase is just too loyal to switch. I think AoE 4 is more in jeopardy here, since most of the pro players there come from Blizzard RTS. Stormgate is also being developed by former Blizzard employees, so they definitely know what the pros need.
It’s most likely that players like Viper or Hera will take a look at Stormgate for curiosity’s sake when the game is fully released, but will continue to focus on AoE 2.

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What did you mean by this?

Yes, the peak of the game was on 2021 after covid boosted viewership numbers for Red Bull and other tournaments, people were still very often WFH in 2021 and had more time to play AoE2? Your suggested reasons have been plaguing AoE2 for ages, yet with all the bugs that the game has had in 2021, they had peak players.

What are the forced settings even?

In reality, while all the bugs and whatnot do cause headache - some bleeding over from Xbox patch (apparently you can’t select Villagers under TCs because of the Xbox patch adding some border that makes selecting impossible… on Steam version too?) that have yet to be fixed - they are nowhere near the sole reason why the game or viewership numbers are declining.

More than likely is just that now after the pandemic has mostly ended, people return to their jobs if they aren’t allowed to WFH any more, several places are having economic problems from a multitude of reasons so sponsorships aren’t that willing to promote the game any more, and Twitch has also been mishandling their creators so it isn’t that lucrative any more, forcing the top but not the top players like Jordan to stop streaming full-time.

I will not deny that the buggy state of the game is in some part hindering its success, but it’s also nothing new. The game’s spaghetti code causing problems has been part of the game since its launch, and since then every expansion’s launch as well. Instead of Shrivamsha Rider, we had Coustilier. Instead of Chakram throwers, we had Obuch. If the devs could fix pathing immediately, they’d already have done so.

But guess what won’t sell? A DLC that fixes bugs. So you need to keep adding new civs and hoping they don’t break more things if you want to continue making sales to support yourself. I don’t think ROR was a success in sales, but the other DLCs have I think all sold relatively well? And so will the next one with new civs.

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Player count hasn’t even reached a new all-time low yet and it’s currently increasing, not decreasing, just like other poster pointed out

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Me personally, I haven’t been playing because i hate feudal rushing. :rofl: i’m a turtle player, but turtling sucks nowadays.

The game has thousands of viewers but not so many players, if there was a way to turn some of the viewers into players, that would be incredible. Just look at T90’s videos, he gets hundreds of thousands of views!

The game also has too many modes breaking the playerbase into little bits. In my opinion, Quick play and all the other modes should be gone. Only have Ranked and lobbies. Ranked should be more relaxed than it is. A new player jumping into MP will probably lose a ton of ranked games until they get matched with a player of similar lvl, and that can be hard for some people. I remember when i started playing ranked, after playing TG. I got matched with 1600 elo’s. Lost all 10 placement matches in a row! :rofl: :rofl:

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and it didnt even counted those smurf trolling the beginners here.
TBH, TG is aweful to play, full of solo players vs duo team (and mostly with smurfs in these duo teams)

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Well if you come along with artificial created Hiobs messages you shouldn’t expect to get high response.

All numbers are going down for television, games etc.

Why? The pandemic is over and people spend more time with their families and friends.
Especially if we have nice summer weather.

There’s litteraly no reason to dramtize this or try to associate with “mistakes”.

Aswell as I agree that some of the stuff decs did, like the punishment system, were really bad ideas. The game isn’t dying because of that. Damn, the wast majority of players doesn’t even play ranked.
And ofc we can, maybs should talk abou this. But please don’t bind it to selectively cherry-picked stats. It’s not helpful in any sense.

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Just some questions:

  1. Did you correct the numbers for smurf accounts? If one player has multiple accounts, then you still have to count them once.
  2. Only Steam numbers are shown. Why did you ignore Xbox Live on PC and on the Xbox? You need to include that part of the player base as well.

If you show some number, then please show the full story.

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Last 3 months:
Age of Empires II; DE
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I’m guessing he is either talking about the limited number of map bans or the inability to increase the maximum population or resources etc (standard game settings). Single map players like Arena clowns or Arabia only players want infinite map bans and don’t like being forced to play other maps.

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The graph that i showed takes the same months in comparison, you can see it starts slower on 2020 cause game was basically new, july is about to end and there is a tendency undeniable, that graph shows the peak of players during january to july, so it doesn’t show average or lowest active users it shows the best possible numbers and you don’t need to be a genius to understand the big differences, 2022 was a really bad year during the first half of the year cause of the aoe4 thingy, so basically having lower numbers than that year in the same frame of time is actually bad, like i said specially cause of the xbox port and dlc released that in theory should have boosted those numbers, there should be higher numbers simply because of that.

I am not the only one worried about the near future of the game and its current status just to let you guys know.

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I worry about near future too but also i am far away from statement the game is dying.
Amount of bugs and poor content dlc ROR are not good but players are too loyal to drop game so fast.
I think we can see the real trend by the end of this year. Will we see new big tourneys? Will we see some good fixes for pathfinding, matchmaking and etc? Let’s see…

P.S.
Keep in mind we dont know the real amount of players because we have Xbox Game Pass and Xbox One players now.

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2020 (and 2021) were dominated by Covid tho. As someone pointed out earlier, many were working from home.

AoE 4’s launch didn’t affect AoE 2’s player numbers at all if we just go by Steam numbers:

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man this OP is so confusing. Like I’ve read it like 3 times but half the stuff is just random jibberish that I cant understand. I’m half convinced he just wrote a bunch of fluff so people would think its a big deal but ended up writing nothing of consequence. No offence.

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There are as many players of AoE2 HD as there are of AoE3?
Wow

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Yes, I would say AoE3 is more dead than AoE4
AoE2 will never die

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it’s funny how can you expect him to provide the number of smurfs?

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Yes, for me AoE 4 has it more complicated than AoE 2; when Stormgate comes out, AoE 4 will drop a lot of players (and I’ll even try Stormgate), but AoE 2 will continue to have the same number of players as now…

Yes, because RoR was actually a dlc from AoE 1 DE to AoE 2 DE…another dlc as DoI would have done it better…

I don’t know if it’s good for AoE 2 HD or bad for AoE 3…

It also doesn’t help that the AoE 3 devs maintain a radio silence about the updates… AoE 3 players complain about being second base in favor of AoE 4, just yesterday one dev announce in Discord that the next update will be released next Tuesday, in August and the patch is supposed to be from July… but we are no longer surprised…They throw an event for a month and then they don’t care about the game until the next event…it’s very frustrating…