2023 AoE 2 Nations Cup [$18,622 Prize Pool]

Dear AoE 2 community, this topic (Nations Cup Waiting Room) has hurt me a lot. In summer 2020, I already tried to give the community something similar with the 2020 AOElympics while waiting. Many of us believed the follow-up of the great 2017 Nations Cup would come soon, in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022... But it never came.

Therefore, I am offering you my approach. I will organise the 2023 4v4 Nations Cup, starting in around 5 weeks. Registration will be open until Saturday, January 28, 20 GMT. The qualification stage will begin in the following week.
This will be a tournament for fun and prestige. However, if anyone wants to contribute to a prize pool, you can do so via the tournament's Matcherino page: https://matcherino.com/t/nc23 where you also can see the current donation sum at all times.

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The exact rules and settings will follow soon, but some important key points are:

• The main event will consist of a group stage (8x4 teams) and a double-elimination knockout stage.
• Max. 4 teams from one nation can enter the main event.
• Teams consist of 4-10 players, substition and addition of backup players will be possible at certain stages of the tournament.
• When a team registers, they have to give list of up to 5 maps which they want to have in the tournament. The maps with the most points will be added to the map pool. So you decide a part of the map pool!
• How exactly the qualifying phase works will depend on the number of registered teams; more about that later.
• A Silver League for teams that don't qualify for the 32-team group stage will happen, if we have enough interested teams.

Staff currently are @Huehuecoyotl22, @enmipho, @paradox303, @welcometorapture and @Akkal.

Any questions and discussion, as well as the registration can start on the 2023 Nations Cup Discord now: https://discord.gg/5fBkzfqHhb

Everybody is welcome!

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Having to make a market to research cartography was one of the best parts of a TG. Is it worth spending the resources to get a boost that makes helping allies easier or not? Some teams would prefer to play more 1v1 style with "ping" and discord communication and others would slow themselves down to get carto earlier. Maybe others would disagree but I remember seeing a lot of examples (4 years ago tho) when making the market early payed off even when both teams were on discord. This was a really cool extra dimension to the game!

What on earth is happening to AOE 11.

 

What on earth is happening to AOE 11.

It's called Aoe2 DE not Aoe 11

Spoiler

Kappa

 

re: shared exploration

It wouldn't make a lot of sense to have ranked TGs part of the seeding process then having it turned off ultimately.

It's not clear to me why shared exploration is the only setting in question. There are other aspects of ranked TGs that will not be present in the tournament, including:

1. map pool
2. nomad treaty (vs nomad start rules)
3. unrestricted slinging

Players are subject to all of these in order to obtain their TG-based seed, yet won't experience them in the tournament. I feel like tournament settings should influence ranked settings, rather than the other way around.

 

The map pack mod for the qualifier has been uploaded:
https://www.ageofempires.com/mods/details/127899/ (maintained by @T-West).
Seeding can be seen here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16uflUWMkCoijfy07BC_20CV58Sa1kuHDSnAV-TMEfZ4/ (maintained by @Nerfox, updated roughly once every 24 h).

And with registrations continuing to fly in, we might very well approach the biggest AoE 2 TG event ever in terms of team and player numbers; at least in the last 10 years.

 

re: shared exploration


It's not clear to me why shared exploration is the only setting in question. There are other aspects of ranked TGs that will not be present in the tournament, including:

1. map pool
2. nomad treaty (vs nomad start rules)
3. unrestricted slinging

Players are subject to all of these in order to obtain their TG-based seed, yet won't experience them in the tournament. I feel like tournament settings should influence ranked settings, rather than the other way around.

We could have this conversation for many issues, but as much as people like/do not like it, this will likely become the norm and standard, shared exploration is likely to become the standard in both.

1. Map pool, something we have absolutely zero control over and map choices are limited and always rotating. If the DE standard maps were amazing it would be all we need to see in tournaments, yet when it comes to big tournaments we barely ever see them. That being said we still have six variants out of nine possible maps for the qualifiers, largely picking classic maps.

2. Treaty box isn't popular at all, it's terrible for competitive settings. There's a reason it's disabled in all major tournament settings, not just mine, but also in WWC or other tournaments that have used Nomad start maps. The treaty box is there to stop people being assholes in the first few minutes. In tournaments we don't need that and we can insert rules that everyone agrees to.

3. Again, with slinging something that has been long established and there is a standard set. We are looking at exploring some options in some show matches though to experiment if it's possible and what players would think. Slinging has been shown many times to be completely OP and why it's largely not in place to dominate games now.

Shared exploration is a new change, everything you've listed is fairly established in why it is or is not involved.

Edit: We at no point have said this is a good seeding method, quite the opposite in fact. But it seemed utterly stupid to seed a TG tournament on 1v1 seeding. We have very little input to what happens in game. If I had the choice I would have happily asked for devs to delay this choice until after, but we have to adapt to what we see. It would have been nice to be involved with some sort of conversation with the dev team, AFAIK no one was really aware of this and highlights the disconnect between the community and the devs.

 

I remember when faceit turned friendly fire off in csgo, then all the tournament organizers had no choice but to turn it off in all the high level tournaments too, thereby noobifying the game even at the highest levels but simultaneously increasing high level team play!

(for anyone who doesn't know, this never happened, cuz what might be better for matchmaking settings should have no bearing on what takes place in tournaments in games that have been well established for decades)

 

Well Age 3 and Age 4 both were made easier to play than old and complicated Age 2. Look at where they are now.

Shared exploration could be good in match making team games, but maybe not in high level tournaments.

 

We could have this conversation for many issues, but as much as people like/do not like it, this will likely become the norm and standard, shared exploration is likely to become the standard in both.

Based on what? The fact that you guys decided to introduce it in your tournament? Sounds like the ultimate self-fulfilling prophecy. I think you're jumping to conclusions here.

 

It doesn't matter, the decision is already made. Allied vision will be in this tournament. You got Paradox writing paragraphs of nothingness. Don’t expect much from him based on how he ran his previous tournament. Dude wrote a blueprint for 6 months and broke all of his rules like a Joker.

 

It doesn't matter, the decision is already made. Allied vision will be in this tournament. You got Paradox writing paragraphs of nothingness. Don’t expect much from him based on how he ran his previous tournament. Dude wrote a blueprint for 6 months and broke all of his rules like a Joker.

Why so serious?

 

Wait, is allied vision really going to be the setting? Cmon, do not ruin the tournament with silly rules.

 

Having to make a market to research cartography was one of the best parts of a TG.

you mean looking at your brother's pov next to you was the best part of a TG 11

 

you mean looking at your brother's pov next to you was the best part of a TG 11

allied vision is a legacy setting confirmed

 

you mean looking at your brother's pov next to you was the best part of a TG 11

The best part was me telling him to research cartography and THEN looking at his screen.

 

It doesn't matter, the decision is already made. Allied vision will be in this tournament. You got Paradox writing paragraphs of nothingness. Don’t expect much from him based on how he ran his previous tournament. Dude wrote a blueprint for 6 months and broke all of his rules like a Joker.

To me it seems you mad at paradox for something specific not even this carto rule

 

Having to make a market to research cartography was one of the best parts of a TG. Is it worth spending the resources to get a boost that makes helping allies easier or not? Some teams would prefer to play more 1v1 style with "ping" and discord communication and others would slow themselves down to get carto earlier. Maybe others would disagree but I remember seeing a lot of examples (4 years ago tho) when making the market early payed off even when both teams were on discord. This was a really cool extra dimension to the game!

What on earth is happening to AOE 11.

brothers comeback when

 

There have been 3 Rage Forest tournaments with shared exploration so far - with increasing success and there is a good chance that we will have another one - so the claim that every TG tournament was played without shared exploration is wrong.

BF (RF) had always been played on explored map, that's what was used in tournaments too.

Explorer map is different from Shared exploration!!

 

BF (RF) had always been played on explored map, that's what was used in tournaments too.

Explorer map is different from Shared exploration!!

Bf has been played on allied vision since years.

How can anyone say that it’s a bad new feature when everyone builds a market by minute 12 to get the vision and buy ress to go up. This is a indirect market nerf since now it only has one benefit instead of two.

 

The map pack has received updates after the first tests and feedback.
As you can see on the calendar side bar, we will have more show matches (5 in total) to test maps and promote the event. Meanwhile team captains are voting for maps and for/against shared exploration.

86 teams registered.
Spain (multiple teams), China B, Austria A, Indonesia, Portugal, Pakistan, South Africa and more almost certainly still coming.

 

It's kinda weird South Korea has no team or notable players considering how many top top players they had in the earlier days.

 

It's kinda weird South Korea has no team or notable players considering how many top top players they had in the earlier days.

I agree. And it's true that they have no top players, but they still have more than 100 active players, so they could definitely field a team which might be above 1k8 on average.

 

It's kinda weird South Korea has no team or notable players considering how many top top players they had in the earlier days.

Before AOE4 and During COVID, South Korea had 2-3 2k's, with a few 1800s that all mainly played TG. They were shaping up to theoretically have a pretty good team, but some moved to AOE4 and the rest kind of stopped playing. They all were pretty much DE players and had insane mechanics and a pretty high ceiling if they kept at it. I'm pretty sad we will not get to see them play

 

It's kinda weird South Korea has no team or notable players considering how many top top players they had in the earlier days.

If I remember correctly AoE2 is officially regionally banned in South Korea. I'm not sure if they changed it but it certainly was when I last checked ~2 years ago, wondering why no South Koreans are playing this game.

 

Has grunt played aoe4?

 

What about the Return of Rome DLC? Will Romes be banned if it arrives