ESOCommunity

.

I wish off-topic was more active and interesting. Other than that it's great and growing, I think.

Doing well, though I agree with @Gendarme, off topic could be better. Less moderation, more inclusivity.
Why do you think the end is nigh @Imperial Noob?

yeah, so when was the last time off-topic itself was redacted?

Objectively speaking, very well. Of course, there will always be pessimists who think the game and ESOC are dead, but the numbers don't lie. If not for ESOC, the game would certainly be on life support.

[spoiler=Twitch stats]90 days



[/spoiler]

[spoiler=Youtube stats][/spoiler]

The social media channels keep growing each day. Even outside of seasonal tournaments, we gain a steady amount of followers/subscribers and views each day. The third graph shows that we peaked our monthly youtube views and subscribers this month. I would say ESOC is doing great!

.

That is exactly why Age of Empires 2 died.

Oh, wait...

It's winding down. We live our lives in phases I think. ESOC has been an incredibly rewarding and rejuvenating but ultimately finite phase like any other for us. I'm not saying it's going to disappear in a month but it probably will for me. It can only survive so many of these inactivities from primary members. It's not as if quality is being considerably increased or quantity for that matter. Viewership has stagnated with largely the same staff members as always. Top-player participation has stagnated, the driving force behind tournament turnout. The forums have become increasingly stale. Prize pools have seemed to stagnate. Aoe3 is just not a sustainable game (some might suggest the above are the definition of sustainable - they are not) as much as we would like to pretend otherwise, in terms of audience and the manpower behind the scenes. Lives progress. I mean, it's going to end at some point. It's lived a healthy life so far and still has a lot of life to it but it's by no means set in concrete to last any longer than the somewhat immediate future.

Although some of your concerns may sound reasonable, the others definitely don't — the staff has changed drastically over the last, let's say, year, Steam sales are pumping up our player-base, ESO activity peaks, it's all going well — at the very least!

Call it a hunch, nothing more. The website ESO-Community.net appears to be winding down. The primary staff administrating everything has remained largely the same since its inception - I have no problem with this btw. All it takes is a perfectly reasonable shake up in that department to throw it all off course. We'll see, I wouldn't mind being proven wrong. I think in the future it'll take more people to step up that I do not think will be able to step up :)

Well, I'm honestly unsure whether Callen's posts here are meant to be serious, but they definitely are in direct contradiction with reality.
You can see actual stats posted by Bramboy in this very thread, indicating a clearly rising activity.

It can only survive so many of these inactivities from primary members. It's not as if quality is being considerably increased or quantity for that matter.

Really if this isn't satire I guess I'd have to be offended. The team is working very hard to both uphold quality and increase quantity.

Viewership has stagnated with largely the same staff members as always.

Viewership is covered by Bramboy above. Staff team is changing so often I gave up on releasing newsposts about it.

Prize pools have seemed to stagnate.

Again, literally untrue. ESOC Spring 2017 had the biggest prizepool of all ESOC tourneys.

The differences are relative. I see them as relatively stagnant. $1500 vs $1000 I just don't see what the big deal is. We've never reached the same peak viewership as the first tourney we first hosted 2.5 years ago which was largely casted by the likes of Interjection, Zuta, H2o, and other high-quality streamers and casters. Purely from this metric we could argue both quality of content and quantity of viewers have stagnated or even regressed over time. Not saying two plot points are indicative of the general trend line but peak viewer data cannot necessarily be ignored. The effort of individuals does not necessarily translate directly to an improvement of such metrics. It's not a personal insult. I worked incessantly under stress to get a 480p stream of last year's 2nd chance finals at the last minute - objectively the quality and thus viewership was very poor. This was not because of my lack of effort.

I think most people are confusing "sustainability" with "our name is simply out there a little more now."

Tbh forum members and idle twitch viewers may show growth but that's not what drives things. It's a volunteer-based team working on an old rts game for an unresponsive community. It's simply not going to last forever. I simply see it and the peoples retiring before you do.

Nothing about what I said is satire. I've been around for a while now; you should open yourself up for a more give-and-take conversation about the website and its future even if I'm blatantly wrong.

I kinda agree with collen. ESOC has been the saving grace for aoe but ultimately it wont revive the game, it simply cant. If microsoft doesnt launch another expansion this game will die eventually. It might take years but its slowly declining, this may be sad, but its inevitable. Still I enjoy being here and ill probably be around for a few more years. Maybe not as active but Ill be around and once aoe 3 completly dies it will take another few years I think.

deleted_user wrote:We've never reached the same peak viewership as the first tourney we first hosted 2.5 years ago which was largely casted by the likes of Interjection, Zuta, H2o, and other high-quality streamers and casters.

I think part of the reason for this is because we started using ESOCTV instead of the official AoE twitch.

But yeah. I don't know. It's been literally impossible the last few months to find a game as a pr35+ player if you're not playing during the peak times in Europe.

Especially since cheaters have completely destroyed any sort of pr30+ quick search presence, it's difficult to see the game reaching the same level of activity that it had even one year ago any time soon.

Mitoe wrote:

deleted_user wrote:We've never reached the same peak viewership as the first tourney we first hosted 2.5 years ago which was largely casted by the likes of Interjection, Zuta, H2o, and other high-quality streamers and casters.

I think part of the reason for this is because we started using ESOCTV instead of the official AoE twitch.

Valid point I forgot about this. But yeah top player activity drives the activity of quite literally everyone else in some way or another.

Mitoe wrote:

deleted_user wrote:We've never reached the same peak viewership as the first tourney we first hosted 2.5 years ago which was largely casted by the likes of Interjection, Zuta, H2o, and other high-quality streamers and casters.

I think part of the reason for this is because we started using ESOCTV instead of the official AoE twitch.

But yeah. I don't know. It's been literally impossible the last few months to find a game as a pr35+ player if you're not playing during the peak times in Europe.

Especially since cheaters have completely destroyed any sort of pr30+ quick search presence, it's difficult to see the game reaching the same level of activity that it had even one year ago any time soon.

ye i think you almost cant overestimate the effect cheaters had and are still having on ESO. Yea the qs situation wasnt really good before the blatant cheating started, but it existed, nowadays the only decnet player that plays qs is dydd91 and he too plays only on smurf accounts.
Also the sad thing is that it seems like its at max 5 people that use the moesbar hack and camping on qs.

$1500 vs $1000 is a 50% increase, I just don't see how this can be called stagnant.

It is true we've not reached the same peak viewers of the first tournament, though we did have the same high-quality streamers cast in other events too. With this peak viewer data you need to consider one big factor — as Mitoe mentioned, the first ESOC tournament was the only ESOC tournament streamed on the official ageofempires channel. We're talking about a channel which currently has about ten times the number of followers as our ESOCTV channel. I'm confident we'd be able to break that peak today if we'd organize a tournament similarly.

Of course things don't always work out and organization has sometimes been less than ideal before, not going to deny that. Since it wasn't satire I'm sorry for the confusion.

Cheaters are definitely very bad for the game. I hope MS will be able to fix up their support systems for the game and step up the moderation, but who knows how long that will take.

What sorts of things can we do to help keep the community 'healthy'?

A chart of most active time periods, in a set time zone would be awesome. Im sure the dev team can come up with something like this!

First post on the forum here in a while.

I definitely think it's hard to ever reach a critical mass in a grassroots game that is done entirely online. The game also isn't conducive to picking up new viewers, or at least it's not as conducive as some games. The barrier for entry level understanding is fairly high, whereas a game like melee is instantly recognizable and understandable to most viewers.

Also you have to contend with the fact that most casuals who are picking up AoE from Steam for nostalgia value pick up AoE2 instead of AoE3. Even though I think AoE3 is a better game to play and that it deserves more of the spotlight, the fact is that most noobs love the nostalgia of having their castles with longbows and trebuchets and shit instead of large masses of muskets.

Why aren't newer tournaments hosted in an official ageofempires channel, if that helped the cause?
Were we kicked out, or is it some sort of nationalism on the behalf of the Team?
At least semi-finals and finals could be hosted there, with ESOCTV just sharing live.
?
profit

deleted_user wrote:The differences are relative. I see them as relatively stagnant. $1500 vs $1000 I just don't see what the big deal is. We've never reached the same peak viewership as the first tourney we first hosted 2.5 years ago which was largely casted by the likes of Interjection, Zuta, H2o, and other high-quality streamers and casters. Purely from this metric we could argue both quality of content and quantity of viewers have stagnated or even regressed over time. Not saying two plot points are indicative of the general trend line but peak viewer data cannot necessarily be ignored. The effort of individuals does not necessarily translate directly to an improvement of such metrics. It's not a personal insult. I worked incessantly under stress to get a 480p stream of last year's 2nd chance finals at the last minute - objectively the quality and thus viewership was very poor. This was not because of my lack of effort.

I think most people are confusing "sustainability" with "our name is simply out there a little more now."

Tbh forum members and idle twitch viewers may show growth but that's not what drives things. It's a volunteer-based team working on an old rts game for an unresponsive community. It's simply not going to last forever. I simply see it and the peoples retiring before you do.

Nothing about what I said is satire. I've been around for a while now; you should open yourself up for a more give-and-take conversation about the website and its future even if I'm blatantly wrong.

I never claimed it was going to last forever, and I'm fully aware that it won't. However, instead of looking at what we don't have, look at what we do have: a healthy community, driven by enthusiastic staff members and a handful of top players. The diehard top players and primary staff members won't simply disappear as time goes on. I'm talking about a period of 3-4 years here. Let's enjoy the situation we're in right now and ignore the inevitable future!

Your claims about viewership are false. In Spring 2015, we peaked at 847 viewers, while in Winter 2016, we peaked at 836 viewers. The average amount of viewers was higher in Winter 2016 than in Spring 2015. For a channel that has more than ten times fewer followers, I'd say we're doing pretty good. FYI: The first screenshot is from the official ageofempires channel, the second screenshot is from the official ESOCTV channel.

[spoiler=Spring 2015][/spoiler]

[spoiler=Winter 2016][/spoiler]

Imperial Noob wrote:Why aren't newer tournaments hosted in an official ageofempires channel, if that helped the cause?
Were we kicked out, or is it some sort of nationalism on the behalf of the Team?
At least semi-finals and finals could be hosted there, with ESOCTV just sharing live.

We moved to ESOCTV in order to have more control over our channel. We were limited by strict Microsoft rules and their schedule. For example, we weren't allowed to swear on stream, play music (this included aoe3 music), or stream outside of Saturdays and Sundays. With ESOCTV, we can do a lot more cool things, such as nightbot, the discord live bot, Twinge, and most importantly: streamlabs!

We already host the later rounds on the ageofempires channel. We've done this since Summer 2015.

EDIT: 4000th post

Timba wrote:What sorts of things can we do to help keep the community 'healthy'?

#freethebashment

I loved the time when you'd open offtopic section and there were lots of trolly topics

I feel sadness in callen's post, like you expected something greater. Right know, community is blessed with devs and staff who organize tournaments, maps patchs, why number of viewers are so important? Honestly i wouldnt start in aoe3 if this forum didnt exit. There are many retro games only few has something like that. As long as there are passionate people who play there is no problem for me.
Edit: Also it is good to have limited people i think i dont want this game to be popular, you know who you play with mostly. I feel like i am in a friendly town.

I don't really get to point of this melancholia — we're all gonna die one day, are we?

[spoiler=hehe][/spoiler]

EAGLEMUT wrote:Staff team is changing so often I gave up on releasing newsposts about it.

No problem — I've got you covered, buddy!
1/4/2017 — SirCallen joins the Media Team
2/4/2017 — SirCallen leaves the Media Team
1/5/2017 — SirCallen joins the Media Team
2/5/2017 — SirCallen leaves the Media Team
1/6/2017 — SirCallen joins the Media Team
2/6/2017 — SirCallen leaves the Media Team
1/7/2017 — SirCallen joins the Media Team
2/7/2017 — SirCallen leaves the Media Team

**

Listen to this Brambonnie guy, he plays one game every half a year and yet he's so enthusiastic!