If you play a SP match… private… by yourself… nobody else present except AI enemies… and you try to quickly crank out a bunch of Photon Men, you can (ahem) “flood the chat”. Why is this even a thing in a Single Player match? Are the AI robots planning to block me or ban me, or something?
Please look at AoE2 as a reference for what should happen.
In AoE2:
- Press Enter to open chat window
- Type “photon man” in the chat window then mouse-select the words and copy (CTRL+C) before hitting enter
- Press Enter
- Press Enter to open new chat window
- Paste (CTRL+V)
- Press Enter
- Press Enter
- Paste (CTRL+V)
- Press Enter
- Press Enter
- Paste (CTRL+V)
- Press Enter
I develop a rhythm. Once I have a chat box open in AoE2:DE, I do CTRL+V → Enter → Enter … CTRL+V → Enter → Enter but very fast, in a rhythm… easily cranking out 20, 30, 40+ Photo Men or Cobra Cars, etc. at a time. I even did this back in AoE2:HD days. I think HD was actually even better/easier/quicker than DE in this respect, iirc. I digress.
In AoE4, on the other hand…
… it is a nightmare and sluggish just to create a mere 2 or 3 photon men when using the same approach. I think I had to manually type “photon man”. It’s etiher very difficult, or impossible to trick the system into allowing you to copy and paste. And then after only like 4 photon men were created, I got the chat warning smack-down, as if I’m doing something morally improper and the algorithm is about to ban me – which isn’t appreciated.
- Or are AoE4’s chat systems so weak that they can’t keep up with a simple string of messages?
- Or is it worried I’m going to swear to myself or something, and so it’s needing to put cheats through the chat filter ####? If so, please fix your system, as, again, it’s private, unranked matches. And I’m an adult. And if it can’t keep up with some quick copy/pastes, then a new RAM chip needs to be added so it can keep up with the bits and bytes better.
- Chat filtration need not apply for me. In fact, it’s really annoying that two adult friends can’t have a conversation without big brother chat filter monitoring their conversation even outside of this issue. Put parental controls on the game itself if you’re worried; so I can disable them permanently since I’m an adult, and parents can permanently enable them.
The chat flooding throttle/limiter should not be a thing at all for unranked private matches. And especially not for SP matches vs. AI. Friends and I do this type of chat thing all the time in AoE2 when we want to just have fun with cheats, or if the AI enemies are just too good and need to be pushed back for a while so we can bounce back. The whole process is pretty archaic and cumbersome in AoE4. Cheats are to have fun, but AoE4’s chat box makes it a nightmare and I’m hoping it can be addressed
PS: I have no idea what I accidentally hit or clicked to make the chat window change to say “[Team Voice]” in the text entry box. Nothing intuitive in the UI would let me get it back to normal. I think it said “[All]” originally:
