DE was a big upgrade from Voobly. Latest patch was a disaster. I hope the devs can quickly fix the issues.
Maybe I am very new to the community (joined a year ago or so). First I started playing HD. It's kinda convenient but both the game performance and player base are total disaster. Sometimes took 20 minutes to get the setting I feel like playing. Then heard that voobly/WK gives much better competition/gamplay. I tried to install voobly, took me quite a while and WK still didn't work. Fine, tried a few games. The delay, unit response time are simply unacceptable to any modern gamer, even it's better than HD. It's DE that made me switched my main game from league and keep playing almost everyday.
DE has some horrible bugs but the experience is still way better than any p2p platform. Also I think rotating map pool is a much better way to assess the skill of a player and introduce variety. Serengeti, acropolis are open land map but they are not played the same way as arabia. It also taught me to appreciate hybrid map (but water map is still **** 11).
But I totally understand that most of the people play this game for nostalgia, especially on this site. This game and community can totally sustain without a considerable influx of new players. Just wanna tell how outdated and unfriendly to new player the models of HD/voobly are from the perspective of newcomers. I really wonder how the same question is responded in a "noobier" site 24
Did you play with 1.5 patch on Voobly? I also think Voobly decreased its quality in the last years rather than improve.
EDIT: Grammar.
Things that DE is better than Voobly
-Almost no lag at all
-Matchmaking actually works (I dont have to wait 10min in a voobly room so when the game starts the other guy lag/crashes and the wait was for nothing). Also you actually get paired with people of your same skill level. In voobly there was people with +18-19 elo who only played bf or arena, and when playing arabia they were +15. In DE the ELO you have actually shows your real skill, rather how specialized you are in a certain map.
-Map variety. Yes, im sick of Arabia players. In voobly the rooms are: 4vs4 bf 40%, 1vs1 arabia 40%, 5% 1vs1 arena, 5% nomad 1vs1 or 4vs4. And sometimes a guy that has a lobby running 6hrs just to play Islands. This has been the theme in voobly for over 12 years since i joined in 2008 (sadly i lost my original account since i stopped using it when in 2012 they reset all ratings). People have been without 1vs1 arabia for 5 months (i dont count december because that month there wasnt multiplayer at all) and people are crying like its the end of the world. And sadly the only way to enforce people to play something besides arabia is having a map pool with bans. Get some variety guys.
-Civ balance. People complaning about Malay being broken is fair. But for gods sake, i prefer having a civ broken for a month, and then know its going to be fixed the next, rather than play the same balance for over 10 years. How many balance changes we got from the Forgotten to the African kingdoms? Like 7-8 tops. Not to mention we had the conquerors balance for over 10 years till wololo kingdoms was available on voobly. In this 5 months, at least half of the civs have been rebalanced in DE, and the civ pool is actually fun, because now most civs are viable in any map. I remember when arabia was nothing but meso-huns wars and everybody was sick of it, except pros. And people forget that over 85% of the player base are +16 voobly or less elo, and these people want to try new civs rather than play the meta that has been used since forever.
-Things like easy farm reseeding, warning when deleting a TC/Castle, queuing actions, etc.
Things Voobly is better than DE:
-Having proper player profiles, spec and ignore/ban system
-Being able to see what civ your opponent picks, because you can know if its a fun game (going random) , or is a tryhard player (picks mongols all the time on megarandom/serengeti)
-Stop cheaters, because you can easily point in their profile with their recorded games when someone is cheating. In DE it seems devs are too busy fixing other things, that hackers doesnt seem any priority at all, which is quite bad specially for pros, because if they cant play properly, they cant stream and they dont have income, which clearly ruins the scene for the game.
-Well and of course pathfinding. But i want to stop here because some people are being really unfair with the devs about this. In voobly, to get to the level of pathfinding we had, it was a work of over 10 years on userpatches, and even then it wasnt perfect. If you followed any stream you would know that even players like The Viper would sometimes lose a boar or fail a quickwall because the vills sometimes would make dumb movements in voobly. In DE the pathfinding had greatly increased since launch. Of course its not perfect, but it will be if you let the devs keep working on it. Is just people expect to the code be perfected from one month to another. Specially to those people who wanted DE to be a copy-paste of AOE2 Voobly code into prettier graphics.
Overall i pick DE over Voobly just simply because at some point DE will be as good as Voobly without having to deal with the drawbacks of the old lobby system and the lack of variety. I dont care if i have to wait 6 months for it, i have time. I have been playing AOE2 since the conquerors, so it doesnt bother me. Not to mention, you can always go play on Voobly whenever you want.
Unlimited accounts => unlimited smurfs; there would probably be more noob bashing if there wasnt NPL. That said, there are still many drawbacks apart from the skill gap you mentioned. Returning rusty players who barely had 14+ elo years before cant join NPL, and are forced to get destroyed by the "real" 14+ in MS. Lacking a TG ladder is also a problem, a 14+ BF TG only player is probably a 11+ in 1v1 arabia, yet they will have hard times in MS finding opponents when they decide to give arabia a try.I fully agree with this. On DE it is so much easier to get a good game against an equally skilled opponent. The skill gap seems much closer and the waiting time between games is also much smaller. So getting a quality game on DE is much, much more easy. Together with some QoL features (i like farm queue, the ability to queue units and techs in the same queue, the ability to give units multiple tasks in a row, ...). I think i cant go back to Voobly any more. I also like the ability to play more than one map (but i do want a bit more controll about the maps i play).
I also want to add DE is much more noob friendly. Voobly was full of noob bashing. This already started with the design of MS and NPL. Why not just one ladder? Now you start in NPL as newby, you become better and hit 1400 in NPL and you dont have any way to go. You cant play in NPL (because you will be banned), but you also cant play in MS (because you are not good enough). All of this because having two different ladders. DE also fixed this problem. There is just one ladder. That is much better.
I hope they add the pros of Voobly to DE.
Only thing I saw was "walls walls no balls"
Not really. Any game plus voobly AoC is 100 times more stable and bug free than age2de. I'll grant you that the lowest amount of lag is better in de than voobly but the average lag for me is actually quite a bit worse on dePeople are comparing fiction with realty here and fiction is always free of bugs and lag.
Even today it is forbidden to say things about DE, that is why there are no complaints from TOP people in Twich, about what obviously works so badly that it is not a playable game today.
I have many moments that I just wanna drop an OK boomer meme to this community 11People are comparing fiction with realty here and fiction is always free of bugs and lag.
For me, there are way more drops / lag / FP on voobly than DE; even tho Ive been complaining about the lag from being assigned to the brazil server for weeks. Yes occasionally there are some fast forward time travel ****, but its nothing compared to some 6-second delay slide show in the past.Not really. Any game plus voobly AoC is 100 times more stable and bug free than age2de. I'll grant you that the lowest amount of lag is better in de than voobly but the average lag for me is actually quite a bit worse on de
Are you Soufire? I am asking because you two are the only ones that in several years have been complaining about some 6 second delay that didnt even happened in 4v4 vs Chineses when we used modems at 56 kbp.For me, there are way more drops / lag / FP on voobly than DE; even tho Ive been complaining about the lag from being assigned to the brazil server for weeks. Yes occasionally there are some fast forward time travel ****, but its nothing compared to some 6-second delay slide show in the past.