This is the Only "Official" Forum I Cannot See Devs At All

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
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Yes, no need other talks.
If any of devs read this, please reply me to show me you are still listening.

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I think I can see a feedback loop here:
Devs communicate something wrong
→ community becomes toxic
→ devs avoid talking with the community
→ the communication becomes worse
→ the community becomes more toxic
→ etc.

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Yeah, communication is clearly a big problem with this company. It’s one thing to have no dialogue at all, but they’re terrible even at conveying the content of future releases and they keep giving the playerbase false expectations that they won’t deliver on. People are now saying that the devs should stop experimenting altogether, as if creativity itself was the problem, but I think they should just stop trying to surprise us with new dlc concepts and instead be very clear about those early in development and keep room for taking into account the community’s reactions and feedbacks. People like surprises, but they don’t like bad surprises, and the devs have proven that they aren’t so good at anticipating the community’s reception of their products.

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4

Other developers/publishers do weekly dev diaries.

They talk on what they are currently working on of shine light on some of the upcoming content.

I think they are afraid of sharing anything early on because some people are too stupid and do not understand the concept of something being unfinished.
When the GTA6 stuff leaked a lot of people complaint about how unfinished it looked like. How stupid can people be?
“I went to the pool and got wet, so awful!”

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Yeah, not every company should necessarily be like Paradox in terms of communication, but AoE’s team could follow their exemple to some extent. They don’t even need to show us unfinished stuff, for a classical civ focused dlc they could start with sharing the general concept, then tech tree, then UU’s, campaigns, etc.

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6

The only times they responded to the V&V controversy were:

1- When a user said the promotional art on the Steam page was made by an AI, someone came out to say it wasn’t AI.

2- When people got worried the free version of the scenarios would be deleted to force people into buying the DLC, Filtydelphia himself came to say those versions would not be removed.

But when people complain that this DLC has moslty recycled content, and the reviews on Steam are terrible? Silence.

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It was the artist’s husband. No one from the dev team adressed the controversy itself.

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At least there was a response, and I very much feel like FE told the artist to respond, but since she doesn’t like social media (or something of that sort, I don’t remember), her husband spoke out instead. I don’t know the guy, but I doubt he was checking the forums of this random-ass game to see people’s opinions on his wife’s art. I’m sure it was an “official” response of sorts.

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Even if it was on FE’s request, which I’m not convinced of, I wouldn’t count it as a FE response, let alone an official one. Afaik the guy doesn’t even work for them, and I’m not even sure the artist was still in contract with them.

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I report bugs on a weekly basis and I see devs responding there all the time, even on regular discussion like this sometimes they respond too

if you are on enough you’ll see them.

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11

Thank you for your sharing, I believe there really are active devs now.

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12

I miss the days of Cysion doing a dev blog on the Forgotten Empires website. I greatly enjoyed his article about designing the African architecture set.

We need more stuff like that.

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There have been a reply by FE when someone asked if the Georgian shield was AI created

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As much as I agree with you, in the end, it may just end up being a distraction from actually getting work done on the game. Not to mention toxic comments suggesting on how to make it better, what they should do, (how to do their job.) etc


edit: Even I’ll admit, I have done some of this too
 (I do regret it but, my intentions are/were good.)

I would love to see more feedback requests from the devs but, yeah
 I doubt it will happen as much as everyone would like.

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15

As mentioned in this thread, everytime a serious question pops up (AI usage, possible removal of free scenaros) and their reputation is on the line someone shows up being quite transparent.

Look at the recent civ additions and Indian split. People have asked, shit made sense, they did it. Plus, there are people who oft complain their idea about a new civ they posted here just popped up in a new DLC.

They’re always reading it here, believe me.

And I do believe that lengthy final portion of their last post about the DLC is a soft reaction to criticism. That chat about making the game ‘a giant christmas tree’ sounded like as if they always planned on being more generous regarding content addition. So, to stop the PR bleeding after VAV, expect free stuff coming up this year

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