I’m part of the ‘‘top’’ treaty players community and in the past ~2 months the pool of active players shrunk from around 40 to a max of 10 players. Thats not ALL the treaty players but those were the ‘‘best’’ and most active. i think it is representative for the larger playerbase.
Why did these people stop playing? frustration. the game is in a bad state right now and we feel like there is nothing done about it. Im not talking balance, fresh content or staleness whatever, im simply talking about gamebreaking and annoying features/bugs. And it gets worse with every single update.
this list is sorted from slightly annoying to literally unplayable.
hunts backherding/wandering too far off
Vills murdering every animal in sight or boxing herdables coming too close to them
shift clicking explorers to build several TPs results in them just walking off and doing nothing
shift click in general is buggy af
Vills getting stuck in mills
vills, explorers, units getting stuck in TPs
pathing in general is sub optimal
kill xp not showing when you went into game options during the game. this gets annoying in artillery war because you cant see if the enemy artillery is actually dead until some models disappear
game feels sluggish and unresponsive / not snappy at all.
almost everything you do has a slight delay to it
Deleting a building leaves behind rubble and it takes way too long until you can build something new. imagine youre fighting all over the map, need to delete some mills to build barracks and you have to wait a few seconds until you can place said barracks. annoying
cant gate more than one section at a time. you can however select them and spamm gate, but due to the fact that the game is ■■■■ slow it takes around 1-2 seconds for each gate. its not uncommon to spamm 10 gates quickly because your ally needs access quickly. have fun going away for half a minute from your fight to do that.
if you and your opponent start building walls in the same spot and the scaffolds overlap, the player that finishes the wall cant gate any of it. in treaty we often spamm side walls to restrict movement and have time to react, often resulting in half the map being filled with ungateable walls.
in longer games sometimes your vills wont build or gather at all.
memory leak
when treaty ends at 40 minutes there can be massive lag for up to 10 minutes where you sometimes cant even move your screen. awesome experience
no reconnect feature at all, who would expect such a futuristic feature in 2021 anyway…
internet doesnt cut out, game still disconnects
game crashes when selecting homecity to send a shipment
game crashes when you open opponents deck
game crashes during treaty period without anything specific happening
OOS
Now this might seem over dramatic for some people, but i assure you, all of the above arent things that happen sometimes. the crashes and OOS occur in about 50% of the games, the lagg at 40 in about 95% etc. all of this resulted in most of us just quitting the game for now or in some cases for good.
why waste time on 40 minute build up if you crash at 39 mins. considering most of us only have time for 1-2 games of treaty in the evening why waste your limited time for something like that when you can play something else? and im not talking about supremacy. treaty is the reason i got the game, if i want to play a rush game i will play something properly balanced and more responsive like sc2.
and it isnt the pc aswell, for example my 64gb ram, core i9 10900k and rtx 2070 ti shouldnt be using up to 99% of ram JUST for aoe3, keep in mind i restart after every game anyway because of the memory leak. with 16gb of ram you might aswell just uninstall anyway.
anyway, these are the reasons the playerbase is slowly dwindling away and its just sad you get a beta version of a game 7 months after the release.
I play a mix of treaty and regular games, and I have not noticed any of these issues other then workers sometimes don’t build, basically always walls in my case,
Now I have noticed several of these problems while playing AOE3 on ESO, but not AOE 3 DE
This is so true. There are like 3 or 4 threads about this already. This is so frustrating to deal with.
Also strongly agree. Specially when it comes to shift click as its a fundamental mechanic of this game and we need it working.
Its really frustrating when you tasked a vill to build something and he didn’t because of the shift click bug.
I have found ESO to be very slow and laggy, takes so long to connect to games and find one that runs well, me and my brother basically have given up playing until he gets a computer that can run AOE 3 DE
dont agree with the “active playerbae is shrinking” point. I regulary look at the playercount since release… the month after release was like 15000 players at a time, since then its consistantly around 5000… and now with the USA DLC it is between 6000-7000
as you can see while the peak player count is like around the release the average player count is going down. i’d interpret it as someone logging in, seing no proper games hosted and logging off again.
to me that is a clear sign of people coming back for USA DLC and slowly leaving again.
the core of the game is flawed and players tend to not endure that for a long time…
or try playing treaty ranked, good luck finding a game under 10-15 mins. and if you finally find a game its against someone who doesnt know anything about the game, resulting in a 2 min bash after 40 and +0 ELO while you loose -30 if the game crashes on you
i am not talking about a BIGGER playerbase im talking about keeping players. nobody buys a DLC for a dead game. contrary to aoe 2 this game has fundamental flaws. and mind you, everytime they patch it it gets worse
friends recommending games, content creators streaming your games and making videos about it etc is the marketing that helps a game stay alive and grow. if the game is a buggy mess recommendations go down, less people stream it and watch it. DLCs are a short term bandaid and the return profit of said DLCs goes down the smaller the core playerbase is. thats really not a hard concept to grasp
Not at all, that will just lead to a stale playerbase, and kill off any chance of Growth. Growth is everything, a product that is slowly dying is still dying, and not worth investing more into.
what? who is going to buy the DLC then? is there just someone sitting at home and gets a notification on his mobile phone ‘‘hey african civs are now available for aoe 3 DE’’ and that person then goes online, buys aoe3 out of the blue, ignores reviews and then proceeds to buy the DLC aswell?
no, with DLCs you can ADD to the existing playerbase, but you cant attract new people if the average player count is dwindling.
thats like apple thinking ‘‘nah we dont need people to be satisfied with our product new customers will come with the new iphone anyway.’’
companies rely on a loyal base of customers to buy the new product regardless because there is 0 marketing cost involved. thats literally how it works and if you cant see that i cant help you to understand that
