Criticism regarding EP

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Criticism regarding EP

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Post by momuuu »

The other day I played this game that made me realize some things about how this game works. It was a Dutch vs British game and the british player was manor booming so I tried to make some units and try to get value out of those. I made some hussars and did a few attempt raiding, had an effective trade against pikes and then added in some skirmishers to contest his pikes more and try to get even more value. I think it worked out really nicely and I did seem to get ahead a little. We then both aged to age 3 and I figured I'd try to hit a timing somewhere there. But I slowly realized that he would be on hunts for quite a while, so a timing kinda ended up being an impossibility. And then I started wondering, why did I make units, why did I try to interact with his army? You can't use an advantage in army yet because the safe resources aren't close to running out, so in the end it's just better to focus as much on eco as possible so that you're stronger at 12-15 minutes for that one big fight thats going to determine the outcome of the game. It made me realize how much maps change the game, how the natural resources are at the core of how the game is being played and how EP should take this into account.

The maps ended up adding a ton of resources and at first everybody liked them a lot (and still, they're much better than RE maps in general, especially in terms of consistency). The initial meta shifted was interesting - at least to me - and trying to figure out how it was shifting and how to play in certain match ups was a fun thing to do. But this meta has gotten stale and will always shift towards a stale meta. The defenders advantage in aoe3 is huge, with not only the general RTS advantages of being the defender (better vision through buildings to take a perfect engagement, closer to reinforcements), but also added defenders advantages in TC fire, shipments popping from the TC and minutemen. This has never been problematic, or too turtly so to speak, because hunts and mines are an essential thing to even remain competitive. The initial hunts run out pretty quickly on RE maps, most RE maps actually for example have just one! safe mine while most EP maps feature 1 mine superclose to the TC and at least 1 safe mine, with often a third mine in a pretty decent spot.

The resulting meta is stale in the sense that many civilizations actually literally exhaust all their economic options (France and Germany for example go for almost a maximal boom build order, and theres Dutch vs British games where Dutch makes 5 banks and gets market upgrades while brits VC booms). The scope of strategies become extremely limited because there are no actual eco options left. You maximize eco and then maximize army basically. Theres no "okay I think I have barely enough units now to squeeze in the age up", theres only "I'm booming, I hope my civ's boom will beat the other civs boom at 14 minutes". Okay, this is a bit of an exaggeration, there are still civs that do have the ability to put on early pressure, but I do think this is the dominant scenario of this meta. It's often referred to as a skirm goon meta, maybe indeed unfairly so, but the term no rush 10 meta is actually accurate, and I think it's clear how this can be experienced as boring. Theres no point in making many units and try to interact with the other player in order to create an advantage that you can maybe profit from because its not actually possible to take a serious fight in the early to early midgame, so you just end up sitting back and booming.

RE is the game we've at least all fallen in love with at first. As much as the balance is flawed, as much as mapscrews completely fuck people over, the patch excells at interactive gameplay. If you rush you might not actually be able to straight up win, but then at 10 minutes you'll have secured key positions on the map and theres a second phase where the rushed player will have to push out and get the hunts back. This doesn't happen on most EP maps, because the rushed player will just hold the rush and then continue to sit back while being ahead because he didn't rush. The RE patch tends to hit this balance just right, the timing at which hunts start running out (if you didnt get mapscrewed) is precisely so that the defending player will be able to actually do economic things but that that defending player will struggle to actually profit enough from his economic advantage to push out and reclaim the map at the critical timing. This is a really undervalued aspect of the RE patch. Interactive gameplay is interesting to begin with, nobody likes playing against the AI trying to maximize their army at 15 minutes, which is a standard EP game except that one big gamedeciding fight is missing. Interactive gameplay creates for versatile games. If you start out trading units early on, every game will be a bit different because battles will almost never be identical. I would conclude that the RE playstyle leads to interactive and non repetitive games, while the EP maps have eventually led to a meta of non interactive, repetitive games where the result is often determined by one battle. Again, its a bit of an exaggeration and one could go in some specifics where there are very interactive games, but it is clearly the trend of EP.

I would propose a couple of things for a patch team: First of the mappool needs to be treated with extreme care. Not only in the individual maps but also in the distribution of different types of maps. It would be at least great if there would be a large pool of maps that were a prototype mapstyle for the balance. Right now we're balancing off Arkansas basically (or are we balancing according to Kamchatka style TP line?) but almost over half of the maps are very different from Arkansas with 5 TP maps, tons of no TP maps, maps with lots of livestock, maps that are very low resource or low on hunts, water maps and other non standard maps. I've said this before and I do understand how the map makers want to make interesting maps too, but it's quite extreme at the moment. Right now I do not believe the patch team and the map team truly work together in creating a specific style of maps. That's actually really odd, because aoe is a game that revolves around the natural resources and maps are a determining factor when it comes to maps. Balance and maps go hand in hand. I'd say that from this point onward maps need to be examined with utter care. A map type should be picked as the standard map that balance is based on, and a mappool should be created that has a large percentage of similair maps (I'd personally say at least 70%). The other option is that you balance for all types of maps, but that seems impossible (how can a civ like otto actually become viable on no TP maps, or germany for that sake).

Secondly, I think it'd be important to actually keep the core of RE intact: Interactive gameplay, where investing in army early on to try to use that army and get something done is viable. If you were to keep these sorts of maps, maybe nerf the things that make passive gameplay so strong; There has always been a correlation between civs being able to get a quick TP and civs being OP (Otto, Iro, France, Germany), and TPs in general offer absolutely insane value if you're doing a semi FF. If you slow down the meta with the maps, you could try to compensate and speed up the meta a bit by nerfing slow styles in general. One could for example also look at banks, manor booming, Japan's booming, the age up time (especially fast age up), and even more extreme things like minutemen or TC fire. I think it'd be best to lower the safe resources on maps while preserving the map consistency and overall hunt count that makes RE so great, but if one elects to not do this (right now for example it would be impossible because it's not actually possible to negotiate with garja about this I fear) then it'd make sense to compensate for the slowing down of the meta through balance changes.

Instead what EP has done is quite the opposite and that has consistently led to criticism. EP did start out with the idea of not changing the way RE is played but instead making a balanced RE. The problem is that it has always focused on the civ strength (and honestly, maybe we've all done this) and never on the huge effect that the maps have had on the meta. But that is not where it ends. After the initial patch, which actually nerfed aggressive civs (iro, otto) and did buff passive civs (Dutch ports) - which probably were fair nerfs tbh - the latest patch is way too extreme. Sepoys nerfed, Jans nerfed, Bow riders nerfed, a reluctance to buff russia; one can say the changes don't actually promote the style of RE at all. The patch team is doing the opposite of compensating for the effect of EP maps. And then instead of fixing the cause of civs not having enough eco options (because all civs just exhaust all eco options due to the map layout), the patch team is trying to deal with that symptom: Dutch got an extra bank so that they have more eco options, spain gets an eco option because they have too few apperantly, Otto has been given extra eco options (church techs), Sioux has been given more eco options, India is being pushed in the economic direction, and even now town centers are buffed. If you continue to treat this symptoms instead of fixing the caused you'll end up in an endless loop of trying to give civs more economic options to then realize they're still exhausting all of their economic options to then give civs more economic options again. It's not the right direction, and it'll never become as fun and interactive as RE is.

So in conclusion, Ive argued that maps are one of the most important factors in gameplay and balance, that EP maps lead to a no rush 10 playstyle, that the EP team is actually not compensating for the EP maps at all and that they're treating symptoms of the maps instead of treating the cause. I suggested the map pool should be monitored more closely, that the patch team should actually direct the style of the maps and what maps actually end up in a balanced mappool, and I suggested that the patch team should compensate for the increased passiveness caused by EP maps by nerfing the better passive styles.

PS: This is meant to be constructive. It's not constructive to always be positive of anything, its much more constructive to speak up when theres something that you don't like or think should and can be done better.
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Re: Criticism regarding EP

Post by deleted_user0 »

Ye, euro civs Brit-Fre-Germ-Dutch are just op

That was proved in the warchiefs tournament but nothing changed. Also I played brit-india MU with erik and brit always won, no matter what lol.
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Re: Criticism regarding EP

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Post by Hazza54321 »

cool another hate ep thread, cant get enough :D
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Re: Criticism regarding EP

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Post by momuuu »

I wanted to make it as a post but I thought it was slightly derailing that topic as this is much more in general. Also its an analysis not a hate thread.
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Re: Criticism regarding EP

Post by Rikikipu »

I'll just let some arguments (those are quotes that you can find on the forum) expressed by the community (moreover great names in the community) about maps :

musketjr wrote:seems, garja, that you stubbornly stick by low hunt maps because h2o likes them, [...], good luck being brit vs an indian agra on these maps you made

zoom wrote:It is definitely the case that high-resource maps promote strategic diversity more than low-resource maps do. With this in mind, it would be good if the average ESOC map had more resources than it currently does

Darwin_ wrote:Interesting to see how low-hunt kamchatka actually is

GoodSpeed wrote:there are 2 types of maps in the pool: low-res ones (eg cascade) and standard ones (eg arkansas). I'm missing high-res maps

Diarouga wrote:Like seriously, all the maps (esoc maps involved in the tourney) were low resources

Diarouga wrote:(About Manchac) I would add one hunt I think and it'd be a great map! As far as I'm concerned 20 animals aren't enough

Diarouga wrote:(About Tassili)Again, I'd add 1 more hunt, in my opinion, 2 hunts aren't enough, as pointed out previously. High res maps add diversity and better balance

Diarouga wrote:2000c isn't enough for most civs
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Re: Criticism regarding EP

Post by momuuu »

That doesn't invalidate my point. It just confirms that you're not a shitty map maker but I already knew that.

Like I said, the patch team needs to guide the mapmakers so that maps help out in balance, that was my main criticism. Not that the maps are shittily made, its just that there needs to be vision in terms of what the right map is.
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Re: Criticism regarding EP

Post by fei123456 »

1. EP maps have more resources than RE maps, but it's far from "infinite resource". if you do a timing push with vet hussar+skirm you may have won the game.
Generally if british does a VC boom, it's impossible for him to stay at home after 10:00 on ANY map (ignore water).

2. Some euro civs are strong because "exalted prince" is too cost-effective. This bring us 3 bad news:
a. other age-up choices, such as 6 skirm/4 hussar, are totally useless in current meta.
b. many interesting BOs, such as native units, are useless in this semi-FF meta. You can never stop a french/german/dutch eco semiff with some native units, and then the game is over.
c. everyone is aging up. there're only 2 types of BO: going age 3, or all-in rush (otto 2rax jan, india full sepoy) from some certain civs.

Nerfing exalted prince/messenger age up is a necessary now. Even adding 10 secs to fast age up may not change the semiFF meta too much, but it's at least a good one.
Using poor RE maps can bring us more age 2 games too, but I think it will not be welcome.
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Re: Criticism regarding EP

Post by momuuu »

The thing is, you can also make good maps in the spirit of RE maps.
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Re: Criticism regarding EP

Post by Rikikipu »

It wasn't for invalidating your point, I actually think the same as you, that there are too many resources on esoc maps. It's just that he community has been pressuring the map team for 2 years to make maps with always more resources. Sorry to say, but now you pay the price for it.
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Re: Criticism regarding EP

Post by dave_12 »

Maybe it's not so much about the amount of hunts and mines, but more about the safety of those.
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Re: Criticism regarding EP

Post by dave_12 »

Hazza54321 wrote:cool another hate ep thread, cant get enough :D

It isn't a hate ep thread.
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Re: Criticism regarding EP

Post by momuuu »

dave_12 wrote:Maybe it's not so much about the amount of hunts and mines, but more about the safety of those.

If this is directed at me, thats exactly what I meant!
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Re: Criticism regarding EP

Post by Hazza54321 »

dave_12 wrote:
Hazza54321 wrote:cool another hate ep thread, cant get enough :D

It isn't a hate ep thread.

it is if you believe
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Re: Criticism regarding EP

Post by HUMMAN »

Jerom i kinda agree with your post, there should be also low resource maps: appreantly players dont prefer it. I believe high res maps actually have more diversity in general. While your scenario(first u pressure than you invest eco while your oppenent have to push) maybe true in some cases, i dont think it is a RE sprit you mentioned. In agressive plays styles one side mostly pushes with all military power/all in. I believe its more effective if you dont gamble to invest in eco while your opponent is already better in eco, you would just keep massing to hold its push. So, It is a subjective topic, and my opinion may be less accurate than you. Still i believe also your opinion cannot be proven. Also adding eco options to civs are not bad in idea, since civs get viable in both eco and contain maps. Just eco option should be worse rhan agressive one in order to keep civ.sprit same, rather a situational answer. In this sense i think bad cards should be reworked to be situational. But i think it is wrong to release a patch before tested since we dont know the outcome.(wakina lol)
Why i think no rush 10 is not the case: when i watch high level games, raiding is actually so much effective and game looks up to which player has the better game sense. Most games are actually favored on one side until 10 min(unless there are throws which is fun) what i mean is you can have a favaroble poisition if you are the agressor. One thing could not be punished was wall+water lame and EP actually nerfed it.
I think uyou are bored of the same meta (semi ff) in games and you want to discover new styles which is fun. You can play in low hunt maps if you want but maybe in other maps you blame map instead of your lack of skill in agression -i preasume this since your best is dutch/turtle style game play-. And yes in twitch chat you mentioned about low hunts in base/higher in middle which is insteresting may be applied but expect that i think there are good amount of low hunt maps: it's just aoe3 commumity is too radical, like that -10 hp in sepoy.
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Re: Criticism regarding EP

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Post by lordraphael »

people always want what they dont have. When there was no EP and everyone was sick of RE shittyness they cried for higher ressource maps to promote eco heavier playstyles and more diversity. Now we have exactly that ( you can still rush and play agressively btw ) and people want what they dont have (again). Only this time its the low ressource maps to get rid of the eco heavy playstyle and promote agressive play.

I agree with you that whats considered as high res low res maps should be better defined.
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Re: Criticism regarding EP

Post by fei123456 »

I really don't think EP maps are "too" rich
you'll likely have 1 start hunt, and 2 herdable hunt, but they're barely a 3rd one. and there're already some poor EP maps: cascade range, indonesia (ignore water), corolado, etc

it's the semiFF meta: TP, boom, fast age up, that makes the game a bit boring.
In this meta, if you use poor maps, then you can only use lame rush civs; while on EP "good" maps, semiFF dominates most of the games.
Some interesting long-term colonial play becomes less viable. Colonial timing? Native army? If you can't push before 7:30 you'll never beat a semiFF.
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Re: Criticism regarding EP

Post by momuuu »

lordraphael wrote:people always want what they dont have. When there was no EP and everyone was sick of RE shittyness they cried for higher ressource maps to promote eco heavier playstyles and more diversity. Now we have exactly that ( you can still rush and play agressively btw ) and people want what they dont have (again). Only this time its the low ressource maps to get rid of the eco heavy playstyle and promote agressive play.

I agree with you that whats considered as high res low res maps should be better defined.

I think I made it pretty clear that this is a cry for having something we've never had before: balanced maps in the style of RE. A fair RE spawn is actually lovely but RE maps just sometimes spawn in extremely inbalanced fashion and with bugged hunts and shit. People were happy about having maps where you always have a second hunt, but to me this happiness has sort of worn of now that Im starting to realize the majority of my games have no battles till 15 minutes and then one big and deciding battle while on qs I get faster paced and more diverse games (although unfortunately also bad balance and hispanolia and sonora without first hunt). But the norm for an RE map has always been a second hunt of the size that you can do a basic semi ff bo with safe resources but that at ten minutes you have no mine or hunts left at all. There are actually few standardish ep maps that come to mind.
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Re: Criticism regarding EP

Post by momuuu »

HUMMAN wrote:Jerom i kinda agree with your post, there should be also low resource maps: appreantly players dont prefer it. I believe high res maps actually have more diversity in general. While your scenario(first u pressure than you invest eco while your oppenent have to push) maybe true in some cases, i dont think it is a RE sprit you mentioned. In agressive plays styles one side mostly pushes with all military power/all in. I believe its more effective if you dont gamble to invest in eco while your opponent is already better in eco, you would just keep massing to hold its push. So, It is a subjective topic, and my opinion may be less accurate than you. Still i believe also your opinion cannot be proven. Also adding eco options to civs are not bad in idea, since civs get viable in both eco and contain maps. Just eco option should be worse rhan agressive one in order to keep civ.sprit same, rather a situational answer. In this sense i think bad cards should be reworked to be situational. But i think it is wrong to release a patch before tested since we dont know the outcome.(wakina lol)
Why i think no rush 10 is not the case: when i watch high level games, raiding is actually so much effective and game looks up to which player has the better game sense. Most games are actually favored on one side until 10 min(unless there are throws which is fun) what i mean is you can have a favaroble poisition if you are the agressor. One thing could not be punished was wall+water lame and EP actually nerfed it.
I think uyou are bored of the same meta (semi ff) in games and you want to discover new styles which is fun. You can play in low hunt maps if you want but maybe in other maps you blame map instead of your lack of skill in agression -i preasume this since your best is dutch/turtle style game play-. And yes in twitch chat you mentioned about low hunts in base/higher in middle which is insteresting may be applied but expect that i think there are good amount of low hunt maps: it's just aoe3 commumity is too radical, like that -10 hp in sepoy.

In the end its indeed just an opinion, maybe some people like the pace of re much more, maybe some prefer ep right now, maybe some would like an even slower meta. My point is that the game worked nicely for RE maps, that the balance betweem agression and eco was good, that civs are depleting literally all eco options right now which implies that were booming more than the game might have been designed for. Most importantly though Im saying that in the end we all loved RE and that making a balanced RE is probably the best way to make EP a succes, and then I explain how the maps have caused the game to not be like RE anymore. So my point is: either balance around these new maps to promote RE like aggressive options or make the maps more like RE maps.
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Re: Criticism regarding EP

Post by momuuu »

Rikikipu wrote:It wasn't for invalidating your point, I actually think the same as you, that there are too many resources on esoc maps. It's just that he community has been pressuring the map team for 2 years to make maps with always more resources. Sorry to say, but now you pay the price for it.

Its interesting indeed. I feel like there are a few things that could contribute towards the negative opinion on low resource maps;

At first peoplebwere simply happy to have the garja maps with consistent spawns and many didnt actually give it much thought beyond that. Slowly the meta shifted and people got used to that, at which point playing low res maps was annoying to some. After all, the strats you learned dont work anymore then. At the same time the balance was made with high res maps in mind so a low res map feels imbalanced and honestly might actually ne imbalanced on ep.

Right now I personally experience but also see others express similair feelings towards the ep maps, shifted feelings that make me want RE style maps but balanced. Would it not be a possibility to design (or adjust current maps) to that style and then release that as a seperate mappool, so that people can actually try and see how 'balanced' RE maps would play out? I get that right now my suggestions would be too extreme, but maybe we could try to show the community what it implies, that a truly balanced RE could be better. If I could make maps Id be doing this, I really wish I could, but right now I can only ask for it.
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Re: Criticism regarding EP

Post by Darwin_ »

I would love to see what would happen if Garja and Riki just deleted every third hunt on the "high resource" maps. I'd imagine it would make for more diverse playstyles (that are balanced).
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Re: Criticism regarding EP

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Post by musketeer925 »

I have to admit I didn't read any post in this thread longer than a few lines, because I don't have time for that, nor am I invested enough in things to do so.

However, seems like if it's a problem if maps are always too resource-rich or resource-poor, you write maps such that they have more variable amounts of resources. I am not an expert map maker, but I think it should be reasonably doable to e.g., make map maps that sometimes have three hunts, sometimes two (iirc I did these sorts of "random-fair" placements in the TR patch I made years ago). This forces more scouting and makes it harder to pick what civ to play on a particular map, promoting map/match-up variety, etc.

In short, I think making maps have higher amounts of chance in them, as long as that can be done while maintaining fairness (e.g., make sure the example above always does two hunts for both players or three hunts for both, never two for P1 and three for P2) would make things more interesting and help keep the meta from stagnating or oversaturating in a particular direction (which seems to the complaint).

Also, @Rikikipu may just tell me that our maps already do this :biggrin: I have no clue.
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Re: Criticism regarding EP

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Re: Criticism regarding EP

Post by rickytickitembo »

Where is the tl;dr?
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Re: Criticism regarding EP

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Post by Mitoe »

This is what I've been saying about maps for well over a year now. If you want to promote Colonial or aggressive play then you need to play on maps that don't give you enough resources to stay in base for 10+ minutes, but whenever we include these maps in tournaments—or even try to play them casually—people just complain about the lack of resources and how bad it is.

It's hard to be motivated to produce more aggressive/low-resource maps when everyone hates you for it.


However, I do think that people overestimate how "meta" Fortress or greedy-style play really is. Last tournament saw a really balanced variety of Colonial and Fortress play, actually. I posted this in another thread, but in the majority of games from the RO16 onward, at least one player chose to stay Colonial for longer than 10-12 minutes.


As for the changes... I think the changes for this patch were mostly fine, actually. The problem was that there were a lot of changes that were missing. A lot of the problems that have been around since last patch (or longer) were not really addressed.

e.g. Dutch scaling slightly too well into the midgame because of the extra bank, or Japan still being complete garbage, or Iroquois having very low success rates in all types of games.
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Re: Criticism regarding EP

Post by JakeyBoyTH »

From a more realistic point of view, EP is always in development. With its larger use in the tournament we will see its effectiveness in balance and the EP Team can take from that and build upon the recent changed that have been made. As Mitoe points out, there is needing to be a clear distinction between maps that simply favour the semi-ff meta hard boom etc and whether this is simply due to players used to that style of play. It is very hard, especially on this forum, to take an objective view on such matters unless there is solid data to take from, such as the invaluable resources given to the community by Ryan and Pezet. Its all very well to say that the maps favour the semi-ff style but there are clearly better build orders. The majority of games where I have seen BSOP play were very short games - not semi-ff at all. He won the tournament. Surely, that proves at the very least that we can infer the semi-ff is dominant but may not be the best strategy to consider.

Where the problem lies is in the patch team itself. From what I hear (albeit from slightly bias sources) the people who control the patch changes are a small group (Zoi and Goodspeed). More EP Team members are surely needed to provide a better debate over future changes to the patch. I would say at least around 5 however I don't know how many people there really are controlling these changes. Now, i'm not saying any of these changes are good and bad but simply need more consideration. Everyone should remember that it is very hard to please everyone. I'm sure the team didn't enjoy the many people crapping on their changes these past few days - a lot of thought has still gone into this patch.
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