What my surprised: Aoe2.net does show your nation, but i dont really know the source. It seems like steam is leaking your nation, even if you say to steam that you dont want your nation to be shown. aoe2.net still knows your nation from steam.
I’m a little late to this thread, but could AoE devs please incorporate a way for us to make up custom names for use while playing the game? If I stream in a non-Microsoft streaming service, I want my AoE game name to match my streamer name or some other name of my choosing; not my Steam ID name.
There’s no way to hide your Steam ID in AoE… so your Steam ID name gets plastered all over AoE (the score, the details bar at bottom, the chats, the trade window, stats window, etc.), therefore I don’t stream Age of Empires. That simple. I’m sure I’m not the only one. Seems like Microsoft would want to encourage people to stream their game. How hard could it be, how detrimental would it be, and how much $ would truly be lost if we could customize our AoE player names? If nothing else, then AT LEAST for private matches that aren’t going through AoE multiplayer servers, which are streamed using services completely independent of MS and Steam?
I want to keep my streams separate from Steam because I don’t want random friend requests or chats on Steam that result from stream broadcasts. How is that so hard to fathom? And there are other reasons. I just don’t understand how it’s acceptable that our Steam ID gets broadcast in the AoE game for all to see.
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I don’t understand why you cannot either change your steam nickname or create a new steam account only for your streaming AoE2.
Surely you can. What is stopping you from doing that @Darkness01101 ? Is what I mean
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You can create an alt on Steam, pick the name you want and use it just to play AoE2.
This also solves the problem where someone is trying to hide gaming habits from their boss. Simply create another account, it doesnt take 30 seconds and you dont have to buy the game again.
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Thank you. If I remember correctly, you can view someone’s last few Steam aliases. So even if you change it, the last few are available to see through Steam profile view? I’ll have to look later to confirm, but I think it is true.
As for alias, couldnt someone still view your account, what games you have, send friend request, Steam forum activity, etc.?
Plus, you have to remember to switch it over just for AoE, then switch it back when done playing.
Just seems like it’d be much easier and more customer-friendly if AoE would just let you create your own profile name for the game itself. With the old AoE2:HD, I enjoyed picking a new name every now and then for games with friends.
Takes one layer of fun away when you can’t just change your name from the AoE main menu on-the-fly like you could before, and make it a Medieval/Middle Ages-specific name. Takes another layer of fun away when you don’t want to stream AoE due to ties to Steam name.
I don’t see why everything needs to be connected with one name.
You can make a Steam account private so that no one who is not your Steam friend will see anything more than what your Steam name and avatar are. You can also make an entirely new Steam account to for a new AoE2DE profile without buying the game again via family sharing on Steam. As far as I’m aware that would also be private, no one would be able to publicly see whether a Steam account is using another account’s game via family sharing.
The easiest way to go about this would probably be just to create a new local account on Windows from where you create a new Steam account, that way you wouldn’t have to log on and off again (on Steam) and it would be lower risk of mixing up the Steam accounts. The Steam nickname could still be used to see your matches but no one would be able to know it’s you if, well, they don’t know it’s you.
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That’s awesome! Thanks for the info, I didn’t know all this. I appreciate it. Gives me good things to try.
I still do hope we could modify our AoE name in-game someday
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Add some character to your name to keep it looking the same but really they won’t find you if they search (unless they are already your steam friend). For instance i use cyrillic r instead of English p. People think I’m a noob at cba because i don’t have 500 ranked 1v1s haha. They are the stupid ones for thinking my 1v1 elo matters in any other situation
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