Why is the game AGAIN so badly bugged?

[IYIyTh]

Their behavior in 1.0c is exactly how knights should behave, or do you think it makes more sense that charging horses get stopped by some archers?

Be careful, there will be some historical accuracy posters to follow the ones making false equivalencies of yesteryear functional pathing vs. the garbage that currently exists.

 

[EricDolphy]

I disagree there, both 1v1 and TGs are way more balanced than in the past regading civs. Sure, it's also due to having 42 civs instead of 18, so there are more options. But for any map, you can easily find 10 quite powerful civs for any position in TGs.
Say Arabia pocket civs - what we had in aoc? Huns, Franks (teoretically Persians). What we have now? Huns, Franks, Gurjaras, Hindustanis, Berbers, Burgundians, Cumans, Khmer, Lithuanians, Magyars, Poles, Sicilians, Slavs. Obviously depends on the map, but all civs are very strong pocket civs. Same goes for flanks.. Water is even better example - Vikings were a must, and then Japanese, Mayans, Saracens, Mongols were kinda the only good options left. Now you have Vikings not nearly as dominant as they used to be + byz, bengalis, dravidians, italians, japanese, koreans, lithuanians, malay, portuguese, saracens, mongols..
Regarding balance, I'd prefer xbow nerf to make them bit less powerful, although removing attack move micro was a very good step and I could name few more things, but I think 95% of top players would tell you the balance is the best we've ever had in AoE2.

Mayans were good on water ?
I agree aoc balance is abysmal but wk is ok. Anyway the balance issues with TG civs on DE comes more from picking and using fixed positions than the civs themselves.

 

[Nicov]

Balance in aoc was horrendous:

Arabia? azt
Water? vikings
Fortress? mayans

There are some things wrong with the balance nowadays (including some non sense like flemish revolution and first crusade) yet you have multiple strong options in every kind of map.

Same for TG. In aoc you had the very same 4 civs in each map in every tournament. Nowadays if you make it hidden civ no repeat you'll see different approaches by different teams (other than britons and franks)

 

[Influenza]

Balance in aoc was horrendous:

Arabia? azt
Water? vikings
Fortress? mayans

There are some things wrong with the balance nowadays (including some non sense like flemish revolution and first crusade) yet you have multiple strong options in every kind of map.

Same for TG. In aoc you had the very same 4 civs in each map in every tournament. Nowadays if you make it hidden civ no repeat you'll see different approaches by different teams (other than britons and franks)

The main reason you see so many civs in tg tournaments these days is because the settings force all the civs to be played while most older tournaments had free pick with repeat allowed (not enough civs otherwise)

You also have to take into account the lack of position picking back then which prevented some possible civs from ever being chosen.

I don't think it's really saying much to state that there are more viable civs in DE, there better be there are like 30 more civs lul

 

[sheeesh]

It is all part of the devs masterplan, instead of putting countless effort and resources in trying to make a 25 year old game perfect, with questionable results, they guarantee a vast space for future improvement. This way, the game shall never die.

 

[otw_Da]

It is all part of the devs masterplan, instead of putting countless effort and resources in trying to make a 25 year old game perfect, with questionable results, they guarantee a vast space for future improvement. This way, the game shall never die.

Then why so "half-assed"? If you want to secure that this game never dies why don't go full fortnite mode? remove all this stressful micro and macro, auto everything, give us skins (for money) and events full of marketing like in fortnite. money goes brrrrr
Ah nevermind you would scare away all the active player base (maybe some redditors will stay). Most of the new players are not interested in games like AoE. They prefer handygames, farming simulators, or softcore competetive. So player growth is hard.
What should you do then?
Correct, please the existing community. Because they keep the game alive, with all the passion and events happen lately and the years before.
Trying to make something good even better isn't countless effort.
Fixing things like you pause a game, and if you unlucky unpause won't continue for observers should be main goal.

 

[Umdeuter]

Intuitively it seems that these sort of mistakes are very, very difficult to avoid. It's (usually) not that they work on something and THAT THING THEY ARE WORKING ON is problematic in some way. But instead SOMETHING COMPLETELY UNRELATED BREAKS. Which tells me that (probably) the game is built in a way ("spaghetti code"? whatever that means) that if you change something, then basically anything can break. Which would make it super hard to avoid mistakes, because you just don't know where to look for them.

Would be interesting to have an example lined out by the devs to get an idea how all of that **** can happen. It seems sooo random most of the time.

 

[Potkeny]

Would be interesting to have an example lined out by the devs to get an idea how all of that **** can happen. It seems sooo random most of the time.

Sure, this bug is already from many years ago and is not present in any version of AoE2 currently out there, so no one is luckily affected by it this day.

Basically an addition was made to the Flare system, which meant each flare now stored a bit more information than before. Now each flare only had X amount of memory allocated to it. Because of the new information, we would write outside of the allocated memory space for a flare. This effectively meant that if you sent a flare, some memory was written to a place it shouldn't have been. In this case, it would write to the obstruction map which was responsible for where units can walk and where they can't. It would start writing this faulty memory starting in the top corner of the map. Now, the top corner of the map is barely visited by units and in a lot of maps even is covered by trees (a black forest player would for example almost never run into this desync).
However, in the rare case you would have a tree there at the beginning of the game and you would eventually cut it, now the obstruction properties of that tile change. From being obstructed by a tree, it is now an available tile.
Now imagine all of the sudden a gaia unit (like a deer) tries to walk on this tile in a multiplayer game. One player sees the tree as no longer obstructing the tile, while the other player has corrupted memory sitting here and has not properly registered this change. Bang, different state on both machines and a desync is born.

Source
Is this random enough for you?

 

[IvIaximus]

How is this random? You can clearly see chain of evetns: introduction of new feature (i guess its colored flares?) > unexpected consequence > bug that result in OOS.

 

[Potkeny]

How is this random? You can clearly see chain of evetns: introduction of new feature (i guess its colored flares?) > unexpected consequence > bug that result in OOS.

It is random from the players' pov.

"Small change to flares -> game being out of sync sometimes" will not be logical for most, and just like every other bug, when you know why it happens, it is logical (unless some race-condition edge-case or similar).

 

[Umdeuter]

yeah that's interesting. if you or someone would be able to judge that: is that rather a case of stupid coding (implementing the colors in that way) or is it just a kinda-necessary - and perhaps sub-optimally implemented - work around for a difficult problem (that you can't put the colors where they would belong to begin with)?

 

[Potkeny]

yeah that's interesting. if you or someone would be able to judge that: is that rather a case of stupid coding (implementing the colors in that way) or is it just a kinda-necessary - and perhaps sub-optimally implemented - work around for a difficult problem (that you can't put the colors where they would belong to begin with)?

My non-expert guess would be that the original game (and engine) was optimized for very different hardware-limits than what we have today (think about the amount of available ram/cache/etc.), and unless you truly understand every quirk of the engine, you can trip over these "hidden limits", working on someone else's code can be a nightmare, especially if its not just someone else's but "ancient" too.

Could they have make it in a way to not break the game? Probably yes, as they could fix the problem later. But unless someone knows the documentation they have on the code, I'm not sure one can tell how "easy" it is to find these limits (the other option being forgetting them when making the feature), especially after years of development of the "new team" (with more modern hardware-limits).

 

[salvadope]

Please also add the can't ungarrison my units from an allys castle/tc/tower, very frustrating.

 

[otw_Da]

Games always were buggy as hell. It's just that you've forgotten how bad they used to be. And part of that is communication - in the , you would only be aware of a bug if you or a friend of yours saw it, because you didn't have access to website like this one that will report and share detailed of every single bug that someone encounters.

Gamebreaking bugs in the big title games got fixed immediately because if not the outrage was enormous. If I look at Wc3 right now - there a maps in the mappool right now that end/crash games instanly and randomly. Back then people would have picked up torches and go wild in forums like inwarcraft. Today nobody cares/ there are no resources. Same goes for AoE there are not enough resources worth to invest in this small bubble. That why I prefer in small communities/ small bubble games that community do the work. Community patches saved and revived so many great titles in gaming history, examples like Gothic, Vampire The Massquarde Bloodlines or S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
Imagen game bracking bugs in Fortnite or LoL. They would get fixed in the same or next day because possible financial loses would be to damn high for the chinese owner.
Back then quality studios deliverd quality games/content. The amount of bugs didn't change - just the amount of games.