A message to the devs (Balance team)

[Kellar]

You all suck.

 

[Sticky Ice Cream]

You all suck.

Worse than releasing broken content is releasing broken content which would've fit into the game just fine with a rework that could keep the same themes. But I suppose the marketing analytics show meme content is more valuable than competitive content.

 

[T-West]

But I suppose the marketing analytics show meme content is more valuable than competitive content.

That would explain Battle Royale mode.

 

[Chainsaw]

You all suck.

Thank you. Clickbait is sometimes worth it.

 

[Paint]

It's great that we finally have 2 cavalry civs that beat camels to restore proper balance.

 

[Lord_patito]

so that's how you make a balance suggestion ? I see... maybe I can get to 2k 1v1 elo that way

 

[RobChang]

That would explain Battle Royale mode.

Remember cysion interview with PCGamesN. One of their things they are proud on the most in 2020 is the implementation of the Flaming Camel. The meme videos on yt really boosted seo. And besides that weird event challenges for weird rewards and BR. QED

Age of Empires 2 DE: “If there’s appetite for more civs, why not?”

"The Age of Empires II community has been as alive as it has ever been"

www.pcgamesn.com

 

[Sticky Ice Cream]

"But it's free content!"
Then I got what I paid for.
I'm also curious as to how much of this "demand" is from people who "Play the game on YouTube/Twitch." and so are people who won't actually buy the product despite having an interest in it.

 

[SouFire]

"But it's free content!"
Then I got what I paid for.
I'm also curious as to how much of this "demand" is from people who "Play the game on YouTube/Twitch." and so are people who won't actually buy the product despite having an interest in it.

After reading the clowns on aoeforums i have got the conclusion that not even them ask for such things, same like the autoscout those changes comes merely from FE or their superiors.

 

[teutonic_tanks]

flaming camels are really cool though, especially the animation that only burns when they move, love it.

 

[Black Adder]

You actually probably have no idea about the real extent of things Kellar.

As someone who is deeply into Age of Mythology community, has through it experience with game balancing via community patches, it is all the more amusing... no, entertaining... no, sorry, dumbfounding... I don't know, I probably don't have the right word combining the emotions and thoughts involved how utterly absurd the whole situation is (or absurd, well, depends how much thought you put into thinking about their aims).

Let me tell you a story. It begins in year of the Lord 2003, when datadisc to Age of Mythology, The Titans, is released. This datadisc includes a slew of new features and a civilisation awash with them - the Atlanteans, with their master and main god Oranos.

Within a very short time, several key new features, and the Atlanteans, completely change the landscape of the original game, with the new civilisation, and mainly their chief god, becoming a powerhouse to be reckoned with, firmly embedding himself amongst the top gods of the game to play. Ever since then, players experience the might and power of the new features, and over years understand what they mean within the game's design, and why they are strong. In time, imbued with that knowledge, the community starts stepping up and creating balance patches for the game to improve upon it and tackle the imbalances.

Now let's have a look at what features characterise Oranos, the top god, lending him his power:
- Speed bonus to military units.
- No-drop-off-point economy.
- Ability to hide villagers in houses.
- Automatically gains vision on all Town Centres across the map.
- Über villagers, basically about 2.5 villagers in one (with appropriately different stats - longer to make, more expensive, tankier, but slower).

The 2nd, 3rd and last points are a general Atlantean ability, however, on their own, they do not really serve the other two gods, Kronos and Gaia, as well with the specific bonuses as opposed to Oranos.

Another significant change to the game in general were Classical (second-age instead of third-age) Town Centres, which completely changed the gameplay and strategies and strengths of gods. Atlanteans can actually build them in the first age, earlier than others - in some circumstances, in boomy maps/god-set-ups, a strong possible play.

Through the community balancing efforts, and understanding of the game over the years, it has been proven cornerstone that the unit speed increase is the most problematic part making Oranos so strong even above other Atlanteans, because it has multiple very important advantages such as dodging projectiles, or facilitating raiding and overall military manoeuvres.

Further key advantage making Atlanteans strong overall is the no-drop-off economy, which results in very high efficiency and therefore much more fluent gameplay, which combines with über villagers and their further advantages (hard to raid due to hiding in Manors) into very easy economy management, especially in the early action-packed times, where you can spend a lot of time on your army control.

With that roughly described, we can now move to the time new expansions start coming for Age of Empires II.

Incorporating the same features. Do they sound familiar to you, Age of Empires II players? Do you see some similarities? In design? In their effect on the game?

If only there was a source of information about the strength of the features and their effect on gameplay, of a similar-minded game. From the same original devs. Where the current ones took the features from.

 

[Dasso]

"But it's free content!"
Then I got what I paid for.
I'm also curious as to how much of this "demand" is from people who "Play the game on YouTube/Twitch." and so are people who won't actually buy the product despite having an interest in it.

Reddit and the official forum are just plenty of threads about "we don't care about balance, bring us new civs we will pay". Unluckily they represent the majority of the players and devs know it well...

 

[SiegeEngine]

Tbf, kellar is not wrong. This game is getting skewed badly in the wrong direction and Microsoft is just looking for ways to profit and their target audience is the streamers, not the actual players themselves. Their report system sucks, their game has been broken since release, so many exploits and so many countless cheaters that ruin the game, list goes on and on... Game is getting dry, top players getting away with being toxic and able to join tournaments with clear evidence and their viewers defending them saying it's not their fault. This game is getting dry and boring to watch really and doesn't really feel fun to play anymore. This is just my opinion though mixed with some facts, most likely I will be bashed or criticized for it and I will gladly accept it.

 

[Sticky Ice Cream]

Reddit and the official forum are just plenty of threads about "we don't care about balance, bring us new civs we will pay". Unluckily they represent the majority of the players and devs know it well...

I suppose the questions I am trying to ask are (not that I expect answers), Out of all of the people who say they will pay, how many of them will actually pay? How many of them are just saying they will pay to be a part of a trend they participate in for free through streaming? And out of those who will pay, how many of them will be long-term customers that can reliably buy whatever Microsoft is shilling, instead of just one day immediately abandoning Microsoft for the latest trend, like trendies are wont to do, while Microsoft still has bills to pay according to the numbers Microsoft expected to receive from the trendies Microsoft no longer has?

I'm genuinely curious as to how Microsoft expects to pull this off given AoE II is not a newbie friendly game. I remember the AoE/CS:GO/LoL crossover Gamer Legion for-charity showmatch. The differences between how fast the AoE players picked up CS:GO/LoL and how fast the CS:GO/LoL players picked up AoE is like night and day. This is also with a community that can never be completely free of icky and scary toxicity due to the highly competitive nature of it. Yes, AoE II is suddenly growing faster than ever before. But all has-beens start out like that. Yes, Starcraft exists. Though to me Starcraft is an exception in the otherwise niche genre of Real Time Strategy.

The likely answer will probably turn out to be "They don't expect to pull this off." Rather they're using the new DLC model to groom their top streamers and Reddit player base for AoE IV, which I'm sure will have DLC many times worse than what there is now. And that's too bad. Because I honestly would've been impressed if Microsoft laid a sound foundation for another two decades of AoE II using volatile customers like Reddit of all places, no matter how much they would change AoE II to do so.

 

[Shed_]

did they nerf britons?

 

[Kellar]

did they nerf britons?

Actually if they did, i'd respect them more. But this is just ridiculous atm.

 

[Moonspring]

If they need money, I'd happily pay to have the new DLC removed.

 

[Deathcounter]

At this point I dont know why you specified it on the balance team.

I mean look. The ? Is actually the player color and not their civ as its suppose to be (The "?" turn into numbers and the designated color before the game starting loading screen)
Which basically is something you don't miss if you would play-test your upgrade and play ONE Quickplay Teamgame

And I think "Random" civ can still give you a Civ an Ally of you picked - for 9+ month now according to the first bugreport

And the fact that they don't show the % at the win and playrate in the stats of the official forum (including not even adding Burgundians and Sicilians yet - but the civ "Spectator") is just pathetic

 

[Catiaphract]

I think is not only devs fault, as much as i hate so many desicions of how this game is going, i like some others, and you have to consider that if a dev has all the time in the world they would probably make a better product, but i bet they are under a lot of pressure, and it seems like quality is not the first of the concerns of microsoft, i feel is more like a sandbox for testing things for aoe 4

 

[lecracheursagacite]

As much as one could say this was obvious from the moment Khmer signed their farming equipment supply deal with Aperture Science (or rediscovered the lost mystical secrets of their Atlantean forebears? I didn't know even that regrettable change was lifted from another game in the franchise - that is what I get for never trying AoM ty for the enlightenment @Black Adder) it is good to highlight here: with new content always comes the added layer of dev/publisher greed. In the case of this DLC the problems introduced are so ridiculous it is hard to find an explanation that satisfies even the slightest bit.

Think about the general options for Cysion's awareness of what he was adding to the game and in turn what they say:

a. "Genuinely didn't know they were a problem" - If this is the case, it is plain he is not suitable for his current role: literally anyone marginally competent at game design could have foreseen what the OP here is alluding to from looking at the changes outlined on paper, let alone from the results of internal playtesting.

b. "Knew they were an issue but not quite to this degree" - This mean he intended to release them in a problematic state, just not to the extent they elicited angry threads from typically easygoing community icons like Kellar. Not only does this indicate the same incompetency described in the previous option (he still should have known he missed the mark), it also means we must consider the possibility that they were intended to be this way for reasoning along the lines of what is actually meant by the "you have to release things op so people play them before they are nerfed" nonsense one always sees, namely, "you have to release things op so players with poor spending habits/impulse control will buy them." We could have a long discussion about whether or not this practice should be illegal; it more than speaks for itself on an ethical level.

c. "Knew they were this bad" - In this instance he actually wanted to release them extremely broken, which naturally leads to us asking "why?", as there is not really any good reason to have certain civs so problematic they elicit angry threads from typically easygoing community icons like Kellar. The answers here range widely, of course, but since this post already runs the risk of derisive comments about its length, I will refrain from going into the details. It suffices for our purposes here to say that none of them say good things about FE or how MS is overseeing them.

I don't want to speak for everyone, but I personally would not be inclined to suggest any of these explanations justify continued support for the current approach to managing AoE2.

 

[Ayase_Chihaya]

I think is not only devs fault, as much as i hate so many desicions of how this game is going, i like some others, and you have to consider that if a dev has all the time in the world they would probably make a better product, but i bet they are under a lot of pressure, and it seems like quality is not the first of the concerns of microsoft, i feel is more like a sandbox for testing things for aoe 4

This. The structure of software development companies, specially big ones, is a traditional one: there is a person on the top that makes arbitrary decisions, and they can be something as vague and unrelated to the product as "I expect our revenue from sales to be above X and our total costs to be below Y". Then his managers need to assemble the different teams that will develop the product and make it happen. The bulk of developers, artists, marketing professionals and etc have little autonomy, they do what they are told. They report to their team leader, who reports to a manager, who reports to someone higher up...

 

[HungryHungryHussars]

Less worried about the balance than I am the design philosophy. Removing scanning and nerfing Dark Age walling in the patch are huge improvements. Not a fan of the arambai change, but that's probably a result of all the Western pros whining about it to them after getting clapped by the Chinese TG strat.

My problem is that a good portion of this expansion seems way too gimmicky for AoE2. I can and do play AoM when the fancy strikes me, don't need it here as well.

 

[lecracheursagacite]

My problem is that a good portion of this expansion seems way too gimmicky for AoE2.

Gimmicky is what happens when you overstuff a game with unnecessary content because you feel pressure to make each new thing unique to justify its existence.

A brief history lesson:

AoE2 had 13 civs in the original release and 18 civs ~14 years later when HD was released in spring 2013. In early 2021, it now has 37. In other words, more civs have been added in the past ~7 years than existed during the first 2/3s of the time AoE2 was a game.

This is truly absurd. There is no other way to put it.

 

[Biz]

they should have moved beyond 'all bonuses must be unique' after they got to 25 civs, at least for the economy stuff

'we ran out of early eco bonuses, so let's hand out random free ****' doesn't scale fairly to multiple maps the same way 'lumberjacks work 10% faster' would

 

[Sticky Ice Cream]

Came across this linked Reddit thread where scripter, one of the developers for UserPatch, shares a few of his predictions about DE before its release, and a little bit of what it was like working with Microsoft to implement UserPatch features in HD:

r/aoe2 - Any word on the Definitive Edition?

6 votes and 25 comments so far on Reddit

www.reddit.com

This part stands out to me:
"As was once said about HD, 2DE needs to be either nearly perfect or absolutely terrible. If it's nearly perfect, the community can confidently move there from the HD and CD versions without issue and the UP project can come to an end. If it's absolutely terrible, the community can carry on as if nothing even happened.

The worst case scenario is that it's somewhere in the middle and causes an awkward 3-way split in the community between 2DE, HD, and CD, while those with influence and money attempt to force the change regardless."

Sound familiar to today? Hopefully scripter's words will help guide future purchasing decisions of Microsoft products, where choice is possible, for at least a few people.