Why is AoE2 player base so low?

[HongeyKong]

Is 100k confirmed? I'm blown away if so. Last I checked it was ~40k players on de... though, granted, that may have been only the "serious" 1v1ers.

There were definitely 160k on the unranked ladder at some point, note that the number also includes 1v1s / vs AIs.

 

[Poxo]

I think, that is a symptom of the bigger problem, that picking civs and position became standard.

Ranked team games play out like tournament games, as if anything were at stake, and people sacrifice the fun of team games for the illusion of getting better at playing the game by optimizing some ridiculous, aggressive build order.

People play fast feudal in to full archers as flank even with civs like franks...

 

[HongeyKong]

Your comment makes no sense at all.

My comment was that as a BF only player it is harder and takes longer for me to get balanced games on the map I want to play in DE than it did in Voobly or HD. And your argument is that there's MORE people on DE so it should be harder and take longer????

Adding ranked lobbies (can be its own ladder) or letting me pick my map in matchmaking (and waiting as long as I have to) would make my experience infinitely better and at least on par with HD and would take nothing away from any one else.

God......... Is it really that hard to comprehend?


Ranked lobby system worked on Voobly (and maybe HD) becoz
(1) The playerbase was so small
(2) Players therefore knew each other well and could spot overrated (or underrated) players out easily.
(3) Most of the games were played on Arabia / BF.
(4) Most of the players play only one map, so elo is basically a map-specific elo.

In 2022
(1) There are way more players.
(2) Players dont know each other.
(3) Map preference is more diverse.
(4) People switch between maps quite often, elo doesnt reflect ones ability on a specific map.

So it wont wOrK LiKe tHe vOObLy dAyS, especially if theres no certain restrictions (like game speed / pop limit / starting age / etc).

 

[_Donatello_]

Its weird how they pick the maps we can vote from, like I said I dislike all the maps exept Arabia this pool, but for vote week 44 only Island and hillfort out of 13 maps i dont like for 1v1, so my 3 bans is enough.

Its weird how they totally change the option to what kinda mappool we can pick, would prefer they had it more stable

 

[ZaKkI]

God......... Is it really that hard to comprehend?


Ranked lobby system worked on Voobly (and maybe HD) becoz
(1) The playerbase was so small
(2) Players therefore knew each other well and could spot overrated (or underrated) players out easily.
(3) Most of the games were played on Arabia / BF.
(4) Most of the players play only one map, so elo is basically a map-specific elo.

Bad, poorly formed, arguments are not hard to comprehend they are, by their nature, incomprehensible.

It sounds like you must have been a Team Islands player or something because your experience does not align with mine whatsoever. We had new players playing in our lobbies all the time and we used ELO to detemine whether we'd let someone play and how we would split teams. Also players that previously were too low to play in our lobbies would keep playing in other lobbies, see their Elo rise, and then come to ours. That's how it worked at our level in the community and it worked fairly well. Maybe the Team Islands community was super small with no player turnover so you knew everyone but that is not how it worked for me in BF and that is why ELO was valuable.

In 2022
(1) There are way more players.
(2) Players dont know each other.
(3) Map preference is more diverse.
(4) People switch between maps quite often, elo doesnt reflect ones ability on a specific map.

If there are more players and they don't know each other that is the perfect reason to have a lobby ELO so people can balance those games...this is basic common sense. And to points 3 and 4 - you can't know that map preference is more diverse or that people want to switch maps more often because the new system forces this upon everyone. Even if it was true though that still doesn't say anything about the usefulness of having ELO in the lobby or whether people should be able to pick the map they want to play.

Again, rather than stating completely irrelevant stats about Voobly player size that actually refute the basis of your own argument. Why don't you explain how adding lobby ELO or letting people pick their map would hurt you? Show me where the damn map pickers hurt you.

The original question of this thread was "Why is the AoE2 (DE) player base so low"... This is my explanation of the problem and what it has done to my small portion of the community. I had about 24 BF only playing friends that were previously spread over both Voobly and HD. 6 haven't left HD and their reason is that its too hard to balance a lobby on DE. 8 still play on Voobly mostly for the same reason. 10 and myself made the move to DE. Of the 10 that made it to DE 3 stopped playing because it was too much of a pain to find good BF games. Of the 7 remaining barely any of us are playing at the moment, especially with aoe2.net down which was our last tool to help find and balance BF games.

You need to join the Rage Forest discord. You’ll get all the BF games you want there.

I joined the Rage Forest discord and I rarely but occasionally play in their lobbies, however, their hosted lobbies make up a very small percentage of the BF community. At the time of day I play, they have at most one lobby up and its usually only the best BF players online at that time which does little to help the problems I have mentioned that plague the rest of the BF community especially at lower and intermediate skill levels where players are more likely to not have a visible ranked ELO of any kind.

Relying purely on discord will hurt map specific communities in the long run because they are not the best tool for recruiting or retaining new players. Even noob 300 pop fast speed giant map BF players need tools to balance their lobbies so that they stay with it and get good enough to someday play in the Rage Forest lobbies.

 

[MaSmOrRa]

Is 100k confirmed? I'm blown away if so. Last I checked it was ~40k players on de... though, granted, that may have been only the "serious" 1v1ers.

Yeah I think a lot of folks still don't really realize how many people play this game:

The last time we had a number for how many people played unranked games in a month, it was over 170k.
Then there are the ranked 1v1 and TG ladders - where there will certainly be overlap with all the other ladders - and Campaign players.

I don't think it's a stretch to say that ~250k people play at least 1 game of Age of Empires 2 in a month.

 

[YoungPanda95]

Yeah I think a lot of folks still don't really realize how many people play this game:

The last time we had a number for how many people played unranked games in a month, it was over 170k.
Then there are the ranked 1v1 and TG ladders - where there will certainly be overlap with all the other ladders - and Campaign players.

I don't think it's a stretch to say that ~250k people play at least 1 game of Age of Empires 2 in a month.

aoe2insights has an option to show an alltime ranking for all the ladders we have in AoE2:DE and I agree with you that there are definitely a lot of people that are playing and have played this awesome game over the last 3 years since its release.

Here it is for all those who don't know how to browse the interwebs:

Mode​	Current Players​	Alltime Players*​
RM 1v1	39327	191349
RM TGs	62919	267424
EW 1v1	2712	10510
EW TGs	2880	12243
DM 1v1	73	4645
DM TGs	134	4462
Unranked**	-	1480744

*Not sure if this shows players to have at least played their 10 placement games or just 1 game
**Unranked does not show any Current Player count on aoe2insights

The Alltime Player amounts actually increased since I looked this morning by 259 for RM 1v1; 346 for RM TGs; 33 for EW 1v1; and 50 for EW TGs.

 

[HongeyKong]

Also players that previously were too low to play in our lobbies would keep playing in other lobbies, see their Elo rise, and then come to ours. That's how it worked at our level in the community and it worked fairly well. Maybe the Team Islands community was super small with no player turnover so you knew everyone but that is not how it worked for me in BF and that is why ELO was valuable.

Cough cough

"Because there were only 3k-ish active TG players in Voobly MS, with maybe 1k solely playing arabia, and 1k solely playing BF. With ratings also taken into consideration, most of the time you only face couple hundred players."

You find a guy overrated? Just blacklist him (either in your mind or on the list).

If there are more players and they don't know each other that is the perfect reason to have a lobby ELO so people can balance those games...this is basic common sense. And to points 3 and 4 - you can't know that map preference is more diverse or that people want to switch maps more often because the new system forces this upon everyone. Even if it was true though that still doesn't say anything about the usefulness of having ELO in the lobby or whether people should be able to pick the map they want to play.

Proof of players diverse map preference:
(1) Voobly NPL lobbies before DE
(2) All Voobly lobbies (and stats on aocrecs.com) after DE
(3) HD lobbies
(4) DE unranked lobbies (and ongoing unranked matches on aoe2.net)

Proof of more frequent switching:
Well I dont have proof for this, but thats my experience from watching different streamers, their bans and favs changes from time to time.

Again, rather than stating completely irrelevant stats about Voobly player size that actually refute the basis of your own argument. Why don't you explain how adding lobby ELO or letting people pick their map would hurt you? Show me where the damn map pickers hurt you.

The original question of this thread was "Why is the AoE2 (DE) player base so low"... This is my explanation of the problem and what it has done to my small portion of the community. I had about 24 BF only playing friends that were previously spread over both Voobly and HD. 6 haven't left HD and their reason is that its too hard to balance a lobby on DE. 8 still play on Voobly mostly for the same reason. 10 and myself made the move to DE. Of the 10 that made it to DE 3 stopped playing because it was too much of a pain to find good BF games. Of the 7 remaining barely any of us are playing at the moment, especially with aoe2.net down which was our last tool to help find and balance BF games.

Q. How bad a ranked lobby system could be?
A. Simple, the unranked elo on DE was a mess (with flawed elo algorithm being considered).

 

[HongeyKong]

aoe2insights has an option to show an alltime ranking for all the ladders we have in AoE2:DE and I agree with you that there are definitely a lot of people that are playing and have played this awesome game over the last 3 years since its release.

Here it is for all those who don't know how to browse the interwebs:

Mode​	Current Players​	Alltime Players*​
RM 1v1	39327	191349
RM TGs	62919	267424
EW 1v1	2712	10510
EW TGs	2880	12243
DM 1v1	73	4645
DM TGs	134	4462
Unranked**	-	1480744

*Not sure if this shows players to have at least played their 10 placement games or just 1 game
**Unranked does not show any Current Player count on aoe2insights

The Alltime Player amounts actually increased since I looked this morning by 259 for RM 1v1; 346 for RM TGs; 33 for EW 1v1; and 50 for EW TGs.

In comparison, Vooblys numbers in like 10 years
RM - 1v1: 106k
RM - TG: 124k
RM - Beginners: 367k

 

[TopperHarley]

I don't think it's a stretch to say that ~250k people play at least 1 game of Age of Empires 2 in a month.

Funnily, Lierrey plays less than that and still wins most tournaments

 

[IYIyTh]

Oh, a thread about how there aren't four variations of arabia in the map pool for a change. I am absolutely shocked.

 

[Lokalo]

Oh, a thread about how there aren't four variations of arabia in the map pool for a change. I am absolutely shocked.

Somehow you aren't shocked by having hideout all the time which is semi arena, amazon tunnel which in my opinion plays out quite similar as arena. I still love how people like you trying to use sarcasm about arabia players wanting more open maps, while in map pool we have mostly clown maps when majority of players are arabia players. Yeah, let's wonder why there are many unhappy players, really.

 

[LowEloNobody]

Somehow you aren't shocked by having hideout all the time which is semi arena, amazon tunnel which in my opinion plays out quite similar as arena. I still love how people like you trying to use sarcasm about arabia players wanting more open maps, while in map pool we have mostly clown maps when majority of players are arabia players. Yeah, let's wonder why there are many unhappy players, really.

Amazon tunnel is more aggressive than Arabia in TG - scouts / archers / forward castles almost every game

 

[IYIyTh]

Somehow you aren't shocked by having hideout all the time which is semi arena, amazon tunnel which in my opinion plays out quite similar as arena. I still love how people like you trying to use sarcasm about arabia players wanting more open maps, while in map pool we have mostly clown maps when majority of players are arabia players. Yeah, let's wonder why there are many unhappy players, really.

Arabia players don't want more open maps -- just watch any game -- they just prefer to make their own walls out of wood and buildings.

I truly think an ideal solution is starting with 2 militia on your opponents only one forward woodline and/or berries. This after all is peak aoe 2 play, dancing with a couple of units and baiting villagers to turn around. We can improve further with a trigger that creates and sends skirmishers and archers forward automatically. This way everyone who plays the map can learn so much and have fun after having the burden of a few steps removed.

More time for RNG of missed shots from skirms/archers to hit by accident while the opponent dodges and snowballing the game from these small tiny events can happen sooner rather than later.

 

[Nicov]

Mimimimimi

 

[Lokalo]

Amazon tunnel is more aggressive than Arabia in TG - scouts / archers / forward castles almost every game

Possibly, although I very rarely play TGs, so I mainly was talking about 1v1, in TG I also care less about maps, they are more chill, like even if you try hard TGs you always can blame someone 11 Idk, TGs just arent as stressful so I dont mind maps that much, although sadly nomad style maps are dropping castle fests nowdays, so on paper a good map became quite meh, at least to me.

Arabia players don't want more open maps -- just watch any game -- they just prefer to make their own walls out of wood and buildings.

Great, so arena players shouldn't mind playing arabia then.

 

[HongeyKong]

Seems like Nicov has a love-hate relationship with Americans

 

[bruanitos]

I'm a casual aoe2 player with zero interest in 1v1 (even watching my fav tourneys were nationscup, BoA or WiC). I've played for last 10+ years semi regularly because it was fun. With DE casual ranked TGs are way less fun and as a result I play way less.

1) we used to play as a mix of different people with wide ELO variety, 1-8 people would gather and fill the missing gap with randos and try to create balanced teams -> this is not possible anymore, max 4 and ideally similar elo. It's huge as the whole mixed community gaming doesn't exist anymore.

2) I loved lower paced maps as they were less about APM and more about decision making, I even liked HD's lower speed (I know I know). But today the meta is hyper aggression, trushes even on arena and masterpieces. Looks good on twitch and it's not fun to play against. The new civs only add more masterpiece combos.

3) before I could play tg's solo by joining mixed lobby, this is impossible now as stacked teams have more map choices, massive advantage of voice + playing together, last time I tried I got matched against stray dog and his team of two sub 1000 elo smurfs. Great fun.

4) almost everyone from my community now has multiple accounts, it's actually super stupid, I wish there was something like PRIME in csgo to avoid this.

5) match making sucks, I got matched against pro's with my shitty elo, once I was against sitaux on the same flank, me who never plays 1v1 with ~1400tg elo against then top 10 player. Great fun. I have zero ambitions to be pro or streamer. I'd love to play casual fun balanced TG's on maps I choose.

7) DE lobby games are useless. All the love for tg's we got from devs was tg elo adjustment and the not working rematch feature.

 

[ltm]

I don't think any change to TG elo, map pools etc would hugely increase the number of players. These seem more like things already dedicated players will complain about (while continue playing), sure some people may have quit because of that but i have a hard time believing it's really a significant number.

Imo the players not really matching the popularity on twitch/YT (assuming this is true, i have no idea how it looks with other games) is more down to the demographic and the type of game. I personally enjoy watching more than playing if i just want to relax, and on top of that i can always watch while i'm on the train, or during lunch break etc what makes up most of my "sit on my lazy ass for an hour" time.

 

[SouFire]

I don't think any change to TG elo, map pools etc would hugely increase the number of players. These seem more like things already dedicated players will complain about (while continue playing), sure some people may have quit because of that but i have a hard time believing it's really a significant number.

Imo the players not really matching the popularity on twitch/YT (assuming this is true, i have no idea how it looks with other games) is more down to the demographic and the type of game. I personally enjoy watching more than playing if i just want to relax, and on top of that i can always watch while i'm on the train, or during lunch break etc what makes up most of my "sit on my lazy ass for an hour" time.

But of course it would help to keep the numbers growing and steady, the experience needs to be better to the point that you would queue up again and play more and more, with more actives players we all win.

Lets say that you have 3 hours to play and you queue with the current system with apparently no map preference, the first game you get your allies 200 or 400 points lower than you, but you are optimist and believe that the other team will have the same elo difference but in reality you are being matched vs a team full stacked 400 elo higher than you and 800 points higher than your team mates on arabia, the game is over before it starts by min 11 both flanks are somehow dead, you lose badly that one but you don't lose the spirit and queue up again, this time the map is arena you have got a 2k ally in ur team and two 1100, you may think that this time the 2k player will carry, then this time you are facing a bunch of 2.2k players with one low dude on their team, the 1100 on your team never had a chance, they would die vs trush or because there was a bird on their thrones. You queue up one last time, this time the map is nomad and all your allies are around your elo, so you think yes this time it's gonna be gud, you see a bunch of chinese letters in all the enemies, this time is vivi, straydog, thislove and one lady with low elo, you decide to play it without knowing their ranks, by min 17 you already have 3 castles on your face, the water is lost and two of ur allies have left the game =(

From those 3 hours you had to play you just spent 1.5 hours getting rekt without any chance to win, the rest of the time you spend it watching a streams, youtube or a movie, the next days you do any other activity before even attempting to experience until maybe the next week.

For new players the experience is almost the same, the match making for team games is one of the biggest mistakes by microsoft/worldedges, FE, all they had to do was to repeat the same formula that worked before and improve it not remaking it without even considering all the factors, it is unforgivable that they have done nothing to improve team games experience so far, despite having more players on that game mode and having lots of complains every week.

 

[I_Sniper_]

Things went crazy. Sorry for this, I didnt expect that.

My question was simple : Is SoloQ a good idea for AoE2 (And AoE4)?

I play all maps (Open, semi-open and closed ones) So I underestimated how much the community was split about this.

I Do think that SoloQ is what age of empires games needs to explode in term of playerbase. I have this in mind since 2019 and the launch of aoe2de.
Also i think that the potential of AoE2 (and AoE4) is extremely high in term of playerbase.

This can seem crazy but I think that Just one country (Germany or France could have the numbers that we have now in the -entire- world)

Just that there is no game mod that feet the expectations of the average player. SoloQ TG is the solution in my mind.

 

[HongeyKong]

This can seem crazy but I think that Just one country (Germany or France could have the numbers that we have now in the -entire- world)

https://steamcharts.com/app/570
https://steamcharts.com/app/730

 

[I_Sniper_]

https://steamcharts.com/app/570
https://steamcharts.com/app/730

I do not undestand what you are trying to say

 

[HongeyKong]

I do not undestand what you are trying to say

Germany / France alone having todays entire playerbase number would almost be equivalent to DOTA level, which is impossible.

 

[I_Sniper_]

Germany / France alone having todays entire playerbase number would almost be equivalent to DOTA level, which is impossible.

My point is that the potential of age of empires games is big. And we do not reach 10% of that because there is no game mod that speaks to the average player.

About Voobly and the "small amount of players" : I do not agree.

Voobly was working for random team games because we had some sort of matchmaking that was done by the Host of the lobby. (Spliting top players, refusing pre-mades etc..)

SoloQ directely into the game, will work better than Voobly, more players makes it easier to match players with the same ELO by the matchmaking algorythm.