Context: 1st set of last round qualifier between Nicov and MbL: game 1 of the set Nicov had a significant lead, MbL game crashed and restore was not possible. Players was for forced to restart a completely new game, MbL won the new game 1, every player retain his own maps and series end 4-3 for MbL. No one can know how the set could have gone if AT LEAST a game 1 restore would have been possible, so the set was completely screwed (worth noting that there were a major tournament qualification on the line, with at least 650$ prize pool on the line).
On addiction to this, other issues that made MP nearly unplayable such as lag, aging up bug, alt+f4, crashes, haven’t being addressed yet and situation is probably even worse than when LotW was released. At the time, even if I wasn’t too interested about the new civs, I bought the DLC to support the game and hopefully see some effort put into improving my overall experience with the game. Now I feel my support wasn’t worthy at all.
To put it simple: why, as an MP player interested in the competitive scene, should I care to have new civs, if I can’t play or see them played properly due to the plethora of technical issues that are plaguing the game and apparently aren’t prioritized by the developers? I would be really glad to buy new DLCs to support the game, but until I won’t see any actual result on the technical side of the game I won’t spend any additional money. On the other hand, why should the game need devs support if it isn’t getting less unstable and buggy over time?
I think everyone who’s pissed from months of bugs and unsolved MP issues should reconsider their decision to give additional support to the game, maybe this will help to give those issues a little bit more priority.
Yeah, the game is about to get 2 years old, the bugs are not even close to be fixed, they keep adding new bugs every patch, the latest brought back units jumping walls 11.
They have ruined the balance by introducing more and more civs with new features outside original design, as result the balance is never going to finish at this rate, specially cause they keep adding broken civs to sell more.
Just looking at campaign progress and achievements i can say once more that the active and actual player base are not interested in campaigns(around 97% of all), the multiplayer community doesn’t want more civs, we want a playable game.
STOP adding civs if the multiplayer only knows about 5-8 civs, there is no variation in both 1x1 and tg, your MM motivates players to pick civs like if they were playing a tournament so RIP random civs encounters, your map choices also kills motivation to even play the game.
The mutliplayer has never been so unbalance, boring, laggy and bugged before, talking since gaming zone and excluding the big failure named HD.
I Know that having such issues is frustrating, but in what way is related to adding new civs, just look at AOE 1 DE, frozen at the same civs, and some severe bugs still persists (the armored ele animation man), so no, telling them to not add more content doesn’t guarantee that they will fix all bugs.
And is that a different situation than aoe2 is experiencing? Ok, we have some bugs solved from time to time but for every bug solved new ones show up (such as age up lag spikes).
Even if I’m not at all an expert, I can understand that the game code is old and it’s hard to fix it without screwing up something, but does it make sense to continue to pay for an unstable and buggy game, knowing that it probably will never be definitively fixed?
In addition to this, the fact that major problems that should be solved with relatively lower effort, such as alt+f4, poor lobby system (no rank available and even unable to show more than 100 lobby) and lack of spec chat, haven’t been addressed yet and we don’t even know if they will ever be (while we get unrequested and underused content like battle royal and quick play), it’s honestly pretty tilting.
“In its best state ever” is meaningless if it’s still far and away worse than any other mainstream game in the metrics already mentioned. It just means that after 20+ years it isn’t QUITE as ■■■■■■as in the old days.
New civs is the thing which sells. The only thing I could see being viable as DLC type aside new civs, considering the reception towards new campaigns is at best lukewarm (saying this as singleplayer enthusiast who doesn’t like 'em either), are new client-side graphics like unit or building sets.
yeah, one of the best rts games ever made is crap man.
and you want to compare to other RTS on the market? like what? Starcraft 2? dieing as we speak.
Warcraft 3? you want to complain about DE go look at what BLIZZARD did to the remaster of that game, it’s an absolute train wreck.
so please tell me, what RTS out there is alive and growing like AoE2 is?
oh i agree, RTS is very niche and we haven’t had a great new title in ages that wasn’t a remaster or rerelease.
we’ve had some good ones that are indie made but those have smaller playerbases.
We can agree to disagree then. OP says the game is “nearly unplayable” and I cannot agree with his statement… I play it everyday and find it a very enjoyable experience. I also think a “plethora of technical issues plaguing the game” also seems like an overreaction. Yes, the game stutters when someone clicks up. Yes, villagers pathfinding is not great. Those two somewhat affect gameplay but are far from putting a game at the “unplayable” category.
Yes, players altf4 when they dont like the map. But thats not only dev fault but also bad player behaviour.
It wasnt nearly unplayable when I used my 56k connection to play with 500ms ping Huns x Huns back in 2001.
And to say other games doesnt have similar problems? League of Legends with the playerbase, viewership and prizepools it has often faces similar problems with bugs, broken champions, weird pathing… So much that Riot developed “Chronobreak” to be able to rewind a match (same as a Save Game AoE has had for 20 years) in case it bugs out during an important game. Bear in mind it was not developed on a 20 year old engine by a small team of devs, eh! Do I need to mention bad player behaviour?
Why do you keep pretending that the alt f4 is only because players don’t like the map, players don’t like their team mates, i insta alt f4 when i get paired with 1100 1x1 elo players, they are way too low to play at my level, unless they are my friends i wouldn’t waste my time carrying them, you can’t call that bad player behavior being forced to play with people not even close to your level.
The game is good for single player experience, but multiplayer is a mess and everyone can agree on this, the rant increases the higher your skills are, see the top players don’t really spend time playing team games, while before DE they were always playing at certain hours, suddenly they just stopped playing after several years of playing at the same time, that is weird don’t you think? specially cause the game is playable and totally fine and growing.
The save and exit feature was developed by ensemble studios, not by a small dev team, you know what DE devs did? they just removed the option to save a game and restore it ranked, like it was implemented in voobly +10 years ago, now you can’t save and exit properly, i don’t see any improvement done by that small dev team, but well we have events and newer icons.
The rts genre is basically stuck in time, new generations just like quick games, the most successful games have really short games but a healthy player base that allows you to get a new game in the moment you just end one, the mobas are also getting stuck and losing more players everyday, so we can’t really have a match making designed for a 200k players online daily to a 22k players monthly like aoe2.
Funny to read all that stuff. All these problems what you describe here are happens so rarely but yet you are screaming like you facing this all the time. Playing since the release and had only several crashes. In MP theres only problem with people who alt f4. If you not liking the game why then you still playing it ? You can go back to voobly where everything works fine in your opinion
I experience a lot of times game slowness or lag, like units respond to commands with a fraction of delay, animations skip frames, sudden hiccups for half a second and so on. With large team games this is really bad.
Even if I host the game on a server which has 40-50ms ping.
I tried everything, lowering graphics, installing on SSD, reinstalling, nothing changed it. 1 out of 2 games I get this. I play mostly 4v4 AI games with 200 pop cap.
