Why is the game still broken?

No,

When enemies die, they quickly disappear into the ground and don’t turn into skeletons (unlike the original)

The chat delay is the same part with the censor mechanism, as was proven in the former workaround to the censor

Pretty sure MS published AOK

FE is not MS, mind you

MS is still the publisher

The publisher is not the creator, the developer is. If you are writing a book, it is not the publisher who tells you what to write. Same goes for games.

Realizing something and cheering it are two different things. Demanding change is legit, even though i agree with you: MS will not give away their rights on one of the best known RTS franchises.

First of all, the title of this topic is tendentious. The game has some issues, but describing it as broken is too dramatic.

How would MS benefit from such a move? I don’t see it happening. And if AoE becomes a hobby project for volunteers, quality control could be even more difficult. People can abandon it if they are no longer interested. Let alone issues like copyright, finance and multiplayer support.

Which doesn’t mean they know best how to solve them.

The game is alive, 21 years after its original release.

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And lets add that, judging from this forum, the community does not only not know how to solve issues, they dont even have an idea what the issues are. Just today i read a suggestion that the Elephant Archer should be a trash unit (but without changing its stats) so it sees more use.

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Oh, so you personally know every single person who plays Age of Empires and that makes you conclude that the community is plain daft at best? People who play AoE II (in any of its three iterations) I would estimate to be at least 200 000. SteamDB even suggests tenfold number of players: https://steamdb.info/app/813780/graphs/ - that is still without taking into consideration voobly and HD. So you claim that nobody from this community has the proper skills, and you also disregard the fact that making the code open-source will alleviate communication between those who implement changes and the community? May I remind you that the community IS the backbone for all the new implementations we see? Just as an example from the latest big patch: salamander walls.
So you claim that by making the game open to the public such examples won’t follow? Instead, your arguments are lacking any sense or logic whatsoever: some people on the forums discuss balance changes and tweaks and because you do not agree, that applies to the entire community?

The game has some issues, but describing it as broken is too dramatic.

Tell me, do you really recognise the fact that the game has issues? More specifically, AI pathing, constant crashes and lag over multiplayer? If yes, what makes you think that after a year of general brokenness this is ever going to change? More importantly, if you agree that this isn’t going to change, what sort of a method is most suitable for the current problem, because at this point, the never-going-to-change thing would be a problem?
Once again, I am not bashing at the devs. But seriously, if you care about the game, there are plenty of people passionate enough to contribute to it being redone, from scratch if needed. Communication is the key for this to happen. The devs alone cannot do that, either because of lack of skills, bad communication between them and the community, lack of interest from MS (they already released the game and it is being played, why would they care?), or because of all these reasons. The point is: what is a viable solution that would not lead to the same mistakes being made yet again?

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This whole topic and your style of communication make me think you are very frustrated with the game.

Of course you can ask the copyright owners to make AoE open source, but it is not a realistic idea. The game has been a huge commercial success and the franchise is way too valuable for them to do so.

I understand some of your criticism and the game is not perfect. The developers should focus more on stability and performance than on introducing “gimmicky” features. It was disappointing to see the anniversary patch was full of bugs and they had to release a hotfix shortly afterwards, while in the meantime they spent a lot of time and resources on a new game mode, a new UI, and a dubious prerelease event. It could be they don’t have their priorities straight and you can bring that message across, but describing the game as broken and talking aggressively to anyone who disagrees with you is not the way.

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Sorry if I offended you, it was not my purpose. If you truly understand the issues this game has, you would understand my harsh tone. It has already been a year. To be honest, the game has had its commercial success. I seriously doubt it is going to be bought more than it already has been, apart from discount sales. There is really no reason why the community shouldn’t be able to tackle any issues, given the tools to do so. Nor I understand the desire to hold on to this “remaster” which has been more like a “resale” with better graphics. It is like milking a dead cow.

I have been defending this game for months when everyone was saying it was bad, after anniversary update, the game is unplayable for me and there are other with the very same issues, i wouldn’t say is dramatic at all to point out how bad the last patch is.

Even if you don’t have the stuttering all the time or the huge lag that never happened before, you are all experiencing the broken path finding one more time, most team games are laggier than before running at 5 fps.

So at this point i can’t defend the game anymore, the main reason i left voobly and hated the most of it was because of the lag, i can’t stand the delay at commands, we were used to that in the past but after playing newer games i couldn’t get used to the delay at everything.

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Reminder that TG Ranked is still broken. People stacking with lower players so they can bash worse soloq players. How fun is it.

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lol at comparing to HD, you mean the addition that had an expansion but the multiplayer gameplay was so laggy and bad the majority people went back to the old version of the game for online play.

yeah game still broken, i can’t play 3v3, 4v4 for 3 week. hotfix is a bulls.t

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Hm. I wonder why when removing the palisade scan mechanic, now you can delete enemy walls. Perhaps of the absolutely disfigured 25 year old genie engine? Perhaps also the reason why new Burgundian UUs have bugged charge? Or the broken relic attack stacking for Lithuanians? Could it be… limitations in the game engine?

This topic is brought up because it is still relevant. The general problems in the way new patches are released are still there. Everybody keeps asking things to be tested before released. It’s like those in charge read all this torrent of feedback and still do the exact opposite.

Again, new avatars, fireworks and all the other irrelevant to the gameplay stuff literally nobody asked for, all work perfectly. This game is being treated like a mobile game that you play casually while on the throne after your morning coffee. This has to stop. This is a slap into the face of the community.

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Really looking forward to getting those unlocks! Oh, wait… ranked is completely unplayable because of bugged units with over 90 attack? My opponent can delete my walls for some reason now? Cool. Cool and normal game, super worth the time investment. I’m glad the money we all spent supporting the game over the years is going toward making a pleasant, balanced player experience.

Sarcasm aside, if Microsoft doesn’t invest in some QA and moderation to root out the shocking number of bugs and smurfs in this game, which are both worse than they have been in years, all that PR money and tournament sponsorship is going down the drain. It makes me wish I never touched multiplayer in the first place. I put effort in to improve at the game, and now the game has pay-to-win units and a new ream of glitches every month.

The thing that is the most insulting to our intelligence is to read that something has been “fixed” in an update and then open the game and encounter the “fixed” bug within 30 minutes of playing. Ridiculous.

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In all fairness, I do not think people who exploit the bugs should be punished. They are not using any third-party software to gain advantage. Sure, what they do is scummy but they aren’t going out of their way to achieve it, as it all is within the game. Correct me if I am wrong, wasn’t such the case with the alleged “cheater” that got to number 1 position? Afaik, they did not use any cheats, they only exploited the game.

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That’s not what I mean by smurfs. I mean literal smurfs, secondary accounts from players that are rated lower, usually by quite a bit. It’s easier to do this on DE than it was on other platforms, and it has been a consistent issue for over a year.

Sometimes in 1v1 ranked MM I can play two or three games in a row against players who are 1500 on a brand new account - - or have a highest elo +300 above their current, and resign 2 minutes into the game to drop their ranking back to 1200. An adequately resourced and trained moderation team can easily interpret this behaviour when it’s flagged by a report, but the prevalence of the problem indicates to me that we don’t have one in this game.

The simplest method of doing this is to give the moderation team the ability to see all accounts with the same IP address. If there is an account with 500 ranked games and a rating of 1900, then 9 accounts with 20 games each, it’s pretty easy to guess that some of those are not family members playing in the same household. :thinking:

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@KanyeTWest , please make a video trying to overflow lithuanians attack to see what the absolute possible maximum is :joy: :joy: guessing it is going to be 2,147,483,647

I believe attack values are stored as floating point numbers, not ints.

There are always situations that occur that is difficult to imagine and or account for. Fixing after a new release isn’t something new. Removing the foundation scan is probably one of those things.

Lithuanians bug appearing is one of those too, will it be fixed ofc it will.

Now the burgundian UU is different as that is a balance issue and not blameable on the engine.

Bugs happen no matter what engine you choose to create a game. By many accounts the DE version is a huge improvement. Are the things to be fixed, ofcourse there is. But they are working on it and they spend a lot of soul and passion into the game. There are situations that are really difficult to find in tests and there are things that occur because of other factors.

Now lastly for the avatars and smaller event mods can still exist while improving and working on the game. You go hyperbole after hyperbole with nonsensical arguments and saying “EVERYONE” thinks like you which isn’t correct.

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I believe, He meant that Coustillier charge deals x2 damage to archer class. So for example 1 Coustillier kill with one hit Camel Archer.

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