Is making money your goal? Is playing in tournaments your goal? Is it earning money by playing in tournaments your goal specifically?As said never played aoe2 competitively before, but played it almost everyday in highschool. Started playing again recently and would like to take it to the next level.
If you want to make money, the time needed to do that from this game is a lot less efficient than studying something and doing something else. Having said that, if you're really up to do it then there's 2 main ways to get money from AoE
- Content creation
* Streaming or youtube content takes time and a lot of work, but if you go viral with something unique this could turn your endavor profitable overnight. This is very unlikely to happen and the most likely outcome would be streaming a lot for a very small audience making a few hundred dollars a year. It is not impossible, just very, very unlikely.
- Tournaments
* Getting good at this game isn't hard with a good approach. Getting to the level where you can start participating in tournaments is very time consuming, and even with the most efficient approach this would be a multi-year process.
Things to keep in mind. For the last few years, if you live in a first world country, you wouldn't be able to afford living out of tournament money alone, even if you won 1st place all the time (which is unlikely, at least while theviper is around). If you get to a 2.3k+ level to begin with (achievable in around 2 years of efficient training) you might just make more money streaming your POVs than from tournaments.
Regarding your question "how hard is the gameplay"... well, it isn't a hard game to start playing. But to get to a tournament-level you need world class gameplay, which means you need to play AoE2 better than 99.9% of all the players in the world. This also includes near-pros that have been playing for years and the current top dogs who keep getting better by the minute. The player pool, and the amount of motivated players, will also increase with the release of DE.
This is an extremely tall order. And while I believe anyone can get to 2.2 to 2.3k, unfortunately, no matter how hard you train, some level of natural talent is required to reach the top 15 in a sensible amount of time. Unless you're certain you got that (by having gotten extremely good at some other game similar to AoE in the past without much effort), you're basically gambling.
So all in all, it is doable, but extremely hard and time consuming.