The amount of frustration I feel towards the game and the way you released it to the public is building beyond what I can contain… so after wrestling for a month and a half with poor performance, crashes, games not showing up, and countless other issues, I decided it was time to speak up, because the state of your game is literally bankrupting me.
I’ve been streaming for almost 2 years, predominantly casting. For a long time my channel stalled with very little viewership, but I kept pushing as this is what I love doing. Finally, by november last year I started seeing some nice growth, doubling my viewership levels just before DE came out. Change was coming and I was extremely excited. Day 1 purchase.
The kind of change I got was certainly different from what I was expecting. Not only did multiplayer not work at all for hours upon launch, but when it started working, the spectating tab crashed the game… this stayed like this for a few days, until that got fixed, but then the games it displayed were old and you still couldn’t spectate anything. Then that got fixed, but now you can’t spectate games that started more than a few minutes ago.
Change after change, and with a lot of patience, I managed to start casting a few games again, but my channel’s growth literally vanished. I went from an average of over 20 people down to under 5 again due to all the times I tried to cast but the game was impossible to cast with, and I had to switch over to voobly (where no top players were playing, and no one was interested in watching anything that wasn’t DE).
While today’s spectating state is certainly better than at launch, the game is still so. far. behind. what we have had for a decade before DE (!). No watch list for players you like, or way to easily jump into live games being played by top players from the leaderboard, no recs repository, tons of issues with the lobby system, the spectating features being SO inferior to what we had with CaptureAge… and soooo. much. more.
I couldn’t cast today’s showmatch between Hera and Vivi, because the games didn’t show up in the spectate tab. Do you know who is casting them? the large casters… do you know why? Because either the games DO show up for them (because why have a level playing ground for everyone??), or because they’re friends with all the pro players on steam and they can spectate by using that friendship, even if the game is way past the early stages.
This is infuriating. Imagine if t90 had these issues during his early days of casting… the amount of neglect towards the people that literally made your game grow back in the recent years is astonishing. See how popular AoE2 would be today without guys like zero, resonance, t90, etc etc pumping content for your game daily for years and bringing a lot of people back to this franchise who otherwise would have forgotten about it.
It is unbelievable how bad the state of the game was upon launching, all because you didn’t want to miss a date (14/11)… seriously? SO many insiders told you to not release the game in the state it was while you were beta testing it, and you pushed it out anyway. One month and a half later, it’s still half broken, your poor devs have to work overtime because of it, and guys like me are taking a lot of real life damage because of missing basic features we literally had for a decade on voobly.
I am not a person to complain or hate on anyone, and anyone who knows me will attest to that, but frankly this has just surpassed my ability to keep waiting. I’m literally going bankrupt and now I’ll have to neglect my passion to do something else to get by, while I was doing just fine before DE’s release.
Please fix your game.