What WE has done, should have done and why it is far worse than simply an “end of support”

Age of Empires III: DE III - Discussion
1

I still see happy and innocent outsiders asking “why are you guys raging over a common end of support”. Here is why.

Typically an “end of support” is like a formal letter expressing gratitude, and a final small patch that addresses the outstanding problems. But what has WE done?

  1. Half of the letter is excuses like “we made up a fake announcement to make you feel included”, aka BS. And what company will announce something when there is zero work done? Or when it was not even planned?
  2. They didn’t really formally announce the end of support. They hid it in the last part of the letter, yet still sounding like they will offer “customer support” (but no real support).
  3. The game still has outstanding yet simple bugs. Someone can fix them in an hour. But they feel comfortable leaving it that way. And they lied about last year’s patch with “qol improvements” because there weren’t any. All their compensation is “we understand” (so?).

Tbh, if all they did was cancelling a DLC, we would not have been angry.

And this is ignoring the context of their lack of communication for years, empty promise about improving communication, banning the people they are “sorry” to, battling modders about how difficult it is to program on discord, blaming bug reports for being difficult to read, etc. Because those deserve another 10 posts that will be considered “spamming” :grinning_face:

11 Likes
2

Pretty much on point.
We already had once “the end of AoE3”, when the legacy version came out, and the playerbase was still thriving. Pretty much what happened is that the modders carry on with all kind of additions to the game, etc.
The real problem is that Devs had treated this game with total disdain, like if it was much of a nuisanse than an asset and, in particular had lied to and antagonized the comunity that is loyal to AoE3 as if they wanted us to change our game.

3 Likes
3

They consider this game and its players as a burden.

1 Like
4

There are clearly some bugs that need fixing such as the Dutch Age IV Belanda Hitam that card that won’t let you train Akan Ankobia after sending the card like it is supposed to for example. Also below is a Italy exploit that can ruin games.

3 Likes
5

The lack of just one final patch shows you what they genuinely think about AoE3DE and its community. Furthermore, the CMs proceeded to gaslight us by claiming it was our fault why bugs were never fixed.

This isn’t the behavior of a publisher that is unfamiliar with the game as some are claiming, but one that is spiteful.

And they knew they could get away with it. All of it.

9 Likes
6

Now that you’ve mentioned the context, let’s talk about the context.

Here is WE’s response towards bugfixes on discord:

  1. It’s difficult. It’s just difficult.
  2. The last patch introduced new bugs. So it’s difficult (then why don’t you fix them ffs?)
  3. You guys don’t provide enough feedback.
  4. Even when you do, the CMs don’t understand coding, so it’s hard to communicate the bugs and their fixes to the developers (guess what the developers do)
  5. Ban you from discord

Like I said in the other thread, you need to deeply engage with them to realize how disgusting and hypocritical this company is ---- an experience most of the innocent players of the other games don’t (need to) go through, one that they strictly restricted only within this community, so that they could get away with it.

9 Likes
7

Radical idea, but shouldn’t game devs be able to read bug reports (even poorly written ones) and figure out their own fixes?

I don’t know a ton about coding, but in a program certain sections should have certain functions, so if something isn’t working properly you should be able to at least vaguely figure out the problem is.

5 Likes
8

as someone who has been timed out for over 10 days on the official discord it is safe to say they would rather mute and ban people when their opinions disagree with WE then actually have a discussion.

5 Likes
9

i was muted for the same amount of time then perma banned. It was worth it. I have no desire to go back there even if I could. The more the CMs spewed their lies and corpo speak the angier I got.

I have nothing but contempt for WE and a good number of the people working there.

I still love this franchise, but I despise those in charge of it.

4 Likes