Reviving ep

[callentournies]

The boys became men, and the men became tired.

[Goodspeed]

Maybe voobly or gameranger or something

[aaryngend]

Say what you want about EP development but it was much more cautious and grounded than what the DE developers came up with.

If EP wouldn't have halted development and continued I'm sure it would have had very similar changes to what we have with DE today. Apart from the extra civs of course.

we spent years debating whether uhlans should have 180, 181, 185 and 190hp and you think ep would implement a civ like mexico or retarded revolts that can get eco back with overpowered units? What planet are you on

That was in the early days where you were tip-toeing with every little change to get it nicely balanced. Towards the end of EP we had plenty of crazy changes as well, many players were complaining that it diverted too much from the base game. That was years ago. What makes you think that the changes for EP wouldn't have become crazier as time goes by as well?

I'm not saying that EP would have become identical to DE minus the DLC civs but I'm adamant they wouldn't be as far apart as some people might think.

[callentournies]

DE is DLC. What isn’t DLC was adopted from EP. There have some independent changes outside of DLC ofc but you can’t really talk about DE without talking about DLC. They’re inseparable.

[aaryngend]

Release DE is + 2 civs with a lot of changes adopted from EP and some new stuff. Most notable difference to early EP were the changes to the Revolt and Politician system. People liked it for the most part and it could serve as a good foundation for further development. Biggest issue were the huge amount of bugs rather than initial balance. Then they started with slowly redesigning pretty much all aspects of the game and introducing 8 entirely new civs.

There have some independent changes outside of DLC ofc but you can’t really talk about DE without talking about DLC. They’re inseparable.

You can seperate them in theory and speculate though. There is no way to know how EP would have changed over the last 4 years in an alternate reality but it's not farfetched to assume that it would look way different from the last EP before it ceased development. Mind you that towards the end of EP some people adovated to bring back older iterations of EP with less drastic changes.
It was the same with the Fan Patch. FP 1.0 was a quick patch that only fixed the most glaring issues. FP 1.1 strayed a bit further away from the base game but it was still recognizable. FP 1.2 went for crazy amount of changes.

Even if a continued EP wouldn't be too close to current DE (not counting new civs) it would be quite different to older EP patches anyway. But in the end it all depends on the ppl working on those patches and what direction they ultimately choose.

[Vinyanyérë]

Say what you want about EP development but it was much more cautious and grounded than what the DE developers came up with.

If EP wouldn't have halted development and continued I'm sure it would have had very similar changes to what we have with DE today. Apart from the extra civs of course.

we spent years debating whether uhlans should have 180, 181, 185 and 190hp and you think ep would implement a civ like mexico or retarded revolts that can get eco back with overpowered units? What planet are you on

That was in the early days where you were tip-toeing with every little change to get it nicely balanced. Towards the end of EP we had plenty of crazy changes as well, many players were complaining that it diverted too much from the base game. That was years ago. What makes you think that the changes for EP wouldn't have become crazier as time goes by as well?

I'm not saying that EP would have become identical to DE minus the DLC civs but I'm adamant they wouldn't be as far apart as some people might think.

I think there's a few things that would keep a hypothetical 2024 EP pretty far from DE.

1. The more experimental changes of the later EP iterations were made explicitly because of DE. There's a post by n0el or Mr_Bramboy somewhere (I can't find it at the moment) that talks about this. Once DE was known to be coming, EP had an opportunity to go beyond just balance changes and start tweaking or overhauling a lot of older designs. This was a change in the mandate for the team - going from "balance the game without altering the design" to "fix the design issues of the game while keeping it balanced"[digression 1]. If DE was never announced, it's possible that that mandate would have still changed, but there's no guarantee of it.
2. Community feedback to the EP team in response to changes was much more direct and public than it is now with the DE team. As best as I understand it, feedback to the DE team works like this (not based on any inside information):
   • A DE patch releases.
   • People post on the official AoE3 forums with their feedback, and the developers take or don't take this into account.
   • Some unknown group of competitive players with a shorter line to the developers gives their feedback, and the developers maybe take this into account?
   • At some point someone messages Interjection and says "Interjection please stop changing all the civs, I really want my legacy civs to play in a recognizable way, please please please". And then Interjection goes to his boss and says "hey maybe we should tone it down with all of these civ changes, a lot of the competitive players really don't like the older civ redesigns" and then his boss says "no".
   • Two more DLC civs drop
   By comparison, the EP team went like this:
   • Zoi messages a bunch of competitive players and gets their opinions (earlier, there was a full patch team that included Zoi that would discuss all the changes).
   • Based on the player feedback, Zoi/the patch team puts together a proposed change list and makes a PTR.
   • Everyone's unhappy and starts flaming Zoi/Goodspeed/Eaglemut. Public threads are made, everyone puts together their own perfect patch, and maybe the patch notes change in a way to make everyone a little less unhappy and maybe they don't.
   Clearly, the second approach has some room for improvement, but there are a number of advantages. The competitive players have a much more direct avenue to give their feedback to the patch team. It's publicly known who is and isn't working on the patch. Bad changes can be identified very quickly and reverted. Overall, the final patch notes are much more likely to look like what the competitive community wants, and if the competitive community is unhappy, they have a much easier way of expressing that unhappiness [digression 2].
3. Probably most importantly, EP aligns incentives in a way that DE doesn't. At a super high level, ESOC's business model is this (yes I'm going to do another nested list):
   • ESOC holds tournaments.
   • To get players to play in these tournaments, ESOC offers prize money to people who do well in these tournaments, and wants to make the game that's played in these tournaments fun to play.
   • To fund these prize pools, ESOC wants to get a lot of people watching these tournaments and wants to make these tournaments fun to watch so that they can maximize donations.
   • Hence, ESOC wants a game that's fun to play and fun to watch so that people watch the tournament and give ESOC money and people play in the tournament to make it worth watching.
   Naturally this creates a bunch of tensions that are difficult to resolve, e.g. you need the game to be fun for competitive players, but you also need it to be fun for casual players so that there's a healthy funnel from casual -> competitive, and it's hard to make a patch that caters to both groups. But since ESOC is in the business of running tournaments for the competitive AoE3 community, ESOC usually wants to please that section of the community first and make things work for everybody else second. The competitive players usually want balanced maps and a game that isn't too different from the base game, and the original goal of EP was to match that [digression 3]. As a result, ESOC and competitive players, broadly speaking, want the same patch.
   
   The DE developers, in contrast, have different incentives. They're primarily in the business of making money, which is done through sales of DE and sales of DLC. That in turn means acquiring new players and keeping existing players engaged (so that they buy DLC and so that new players can find matches when they play multiplayer). Competitive tournament viewership has nowhere near enough numbers to do meaningful ad revenue at Microsoft's scale, nor is it likely to drive many sales. So the best way to drive sales is to release new civs with cool mechanics and to keep the game fresh. Modifying old civs by changing or adding units/cards allows players to do more things and try new strategies keeps existing players engaged.
   
   To be clear, this isn't entirely bad for the competitive community - adding more players helps with the aforementioned casual -> competitive pipeline and helps with tournament viewership, among other things. But a patch designed for the broader player base is going to look different from one designed specifically with competitive play in mind [digression 4].

[digression 1] Not to say that changing this mandate was a good or bad thing! Both approaches have upsides and downsides.
[digression 2] That said, I want to mention again that this second approach has room for improvement, both from ESOC's side and from the community's side. The thousand posts we had flaming about 10 Uhlan (and Sepoy) hp probably could have gone better.
[digression 3] Not wanting the base game changed too much actually goes beyond a boomer "new thing bad" mindset, although expanding fully on this would take a while. I think that the DLC civs and changes to the legacy civs have exploded the complexity of the game without necessarily increasing the depth, which is dangerous for competitive players and also for the "competitive-aspiring" players. If there's too many things that your opponent can be doing and you can't scout or counter them all, it's a huge learning burden for someone who wants to improve at the game. It also incentivizes you to not bother with learning the more subtle techniques of the game and just execute your own lame all in.
[digression 4] And also to be clear, the developers aren't necessarily doing anything wrong by developing a patch for the casual players rather than the competitive ones. Nor is it a bad thing that they're trying to make money. I'm sympathetic to the idea that a business could try to have a primary goal that isn't making money, but this approach, historically speaking, has had mixed results.

[EAGLEMUT]

Excellent analysis by the duck, as always.

I remember someone once saying that ESOC could make its own ESO. Where you at now boys

Maybe voobly or gameranger or something

Guys, ESO is working the same it always has, you can simply log in and play, don't need anything else.
A few weeks ago I also fixed our ESO ladder and statistics, so you can see how active it is currently.

Incredibly, two weeks ago ESO itself even got an update to significantly increase its homecity limit server-side:

[fightinfrenchman]

What's the status on the invite spammer

[harcha]

What's the status on the invite spammer

he is also considering reviving ep

[iNcog]

Excellent analysis by the duck, as always.

I remember someone once saying that ESOC could make its own ESO. Where you at now boys

Maybe voobly or gameranger or something

Guys, ESO is working the same it always has, you can simply log in and play, don't need anything else.
A few weeks ago I also fixed our ESO ladder and statistics, so you can see how active it is currently.

Incredibly, two weeks ago ESO itself even got an update to significantly increase its homecity limit server-side:

that's insane. who is like, hosting ESO still? how long has it been up? that's some crazy shit

[EAGLEMUT]

Excellent analysis by the duck, as always.

I remember someone once saying that ESOC could make its own ESO. Where you at now boys

Maybe voobly or gameranger or something

Guys, ESO is working the same it always has, you can simply log in and play, don't need anything else.
A few weeks ago I also fixed our ESO ladder and statistics, so you can see how active it is currently.

Incredibly, two weeks ago ESO itself even got an update to significantly increase its homecity limit server-side:

that's insane. who is like, hosting ESO still? how long has it been up? that's some crazy shit

Microsoft, since 2005. They didn't stop hosting it, though they made some players think that because of their poor communication.

[_H2O]

The goal with EP was to make a good RTS that you could play fairly and competitively. Everything from the map sets, anti cheat, and balance changes were carefully done. Even the changes I felt were incorrect or more radical which were pushed by Zoi/Godspeed were minor compared to what is happening now. We put in the work to come up with genuinely good ideas like Spanish gold. Then when we had good ideas we fine tweaked numbers. Like the changes on Spanish gold crate amounts bounced around a ton or making port vils cost a little less. You just aren’t going to get that from people who don’t know how to play the game or how to play competitive games in general. Sometimes more content isn’t better :)

[MCJim]

Show hidden quotes

Excellent analysis by the duck, as always.

I remember someone once saying that ESOC could make its own ESO. Where you at now boys

Maybe voobly or gameranger or something

Guys, ESO is working the same it always has, you can simply log in and play, don't need anything else.
A few weeks ago I also fixed our ESO ladder and statistics, so you can see how active it is currently.

Incredibly, two weeks ago ESO itself even got an update to significantly increase its homecity limit server-side:

that's insane. who is like, hosting ESO still? how long has it been up? that's some crazy shit

Microsoft, since 2005. They didn't stop hosting it, though they made some players think that because of their poor communication.

It must be very cheap for them to still host this. And indeed insane to know that it's been up for almost 20 years. We should celebrate this by all coming online at the exact moment ESO was launched.

[kevinitalien]

The goal with EP was to make a good RTS that you could play fairly and competitively. Everything from the map sets, anti cheat, and balance changes were carefully done. Even the changes I felt were incorrect or more radical which were pushed by Zoi/Godspeed were minor compared to what is happening now. We put in the work to come up with genuinely good ideas like Spanish gold. Then when we had good ideas we fine tweaked numbers. Like the changes on Spanish gold crate amounts bounced around a ton or making port vils cost a little less. You just aren’t going to get that from people who don’t know how to play the game or how to play competitive games in general. Sometimes more content isn’t better :)

but we can't ask age of empire 3 definitive edition with a company behind it that invested money just to make the graphics more beautiful and leave it as is, how do you want new players to stay without new contents, the EP community aka competitive players mostly only represents a tiny part of the community and that's what people don't understand, you can't ask a company to adapt the game for the competitive players only, that's just not possible, games must gain money, so DLC, so more civs, more contents so more units more maps new change new card etc etc, if you let the game as it was on ep the game would have 1000 players and honestly it would be boring as fuck at some point, i just can't play the game with the same meta for the next 15 years and idk how you guys played that

[look]

im happy the current version of this game
and I think new DLCs are important to maintain the game and players still alive
if they just stop doesnt matter how balanced the game will be, will just decline and straight way to deeath!

Age 3 will never be a high-standard competitive game, but it's still a game where the best will always win somehow.

[_H2O]

I havnt really put a lot of thought into what new civ ideas I would make but I do know it would take a lot of effort and care to set a high bar. Something new and interesting without being a cheap / gimmicky that is only superficially new. I wish I had better answers but I also am not tasked with solving that problem. There are real constraints that have to be respected when trying to design good games. It’s not easy to keep something interesting for casual and competitive players without causing harm. Usually casual players aren’t looking for fair they are looking for achievable challenges, seasons, cosmetics, etc. since they won’t ever climb high on the skill based ladder.

Plus not all new things need to be just making civilizations. Even adding things like observation mode would be a huge step forward. EP also did the treaty patch thing which made a new game mode much more playable. DE has done some of this by removing the peer to peer lag problems.

[iNcog]

i just can't play the game with the same meta for the next 15 years and idk how you guys played that

I mean I don't think that's entirely true. There was a gap of a 5 (is that right?) years between the last official patch and the first ESOC patch. The meta was Iroquois/Ottoman for that amount of time, with other civs being playable if both players agreed not to lame. Then after the release of first EP and especially the Garja maps, it was far, far from stale. Meta evolved slowly but it was there. There were some absolutely fantastic tournaments hosted and the ladder was quite agreeable to play on.

Today the DE ladder is absolute dogwash and even trying it a little bit made me quit the game. I don't want to play tower defense, I want to play with actual units and micro, like it was done back in the day.

You're right that DE makes sense from a financial stand point and if anything we have a bigger playerbase for it. But it's basically unplayable (if you play for fun) in a competitive setting.

[aaryngend]

1. The more experimental changes of the later EP iterations were made explicitly because of DE. There's a post by n0el or Mr_Bramboy somewhere (I can't find it at the moment) that talks about this. Once DE was known to be coming, EP had an opportunity to go beyond just balance changes and start tweaking or overhauling a lot of older designs. This was a change in the mandate for the team - going from "balance the game without altering the design" to "fix the design issues of the game while keeping it balanced"[digression 1]. If DE was never announced, it's possible that that mandate would have still changed, but there's no guarantee of it.

Wait for real? Lots of ppl blamed Zoe for the drastic changes because they thought it was mostly his idea. I bet people who weren't really deep behind the scenes (like me) don't know about the fact that the announcement of DE lead to these changes.

[*] Community feedback to the EP team in response to changes was much more direct and public than it is now with the DE team. As best as I understand it, feedback to the DE team works like this (not based on any inside information):

Yes and that is the reason why ppl voiced their opinion so openly and publically. We knew that there was the council who discussed changes in private but since they're ppl from our community many felt that enough complaints or suggestions could end up with the council reconsidering certain changes.

By comparison, the EP team went like this:

• Zoi messages a bunch of competitive players and gets their opinions (earlier, there was a full patch team that included Zoi that would discuss all the changes).
• Based on the player feedback, Zoi/the patch team puts together a proposed change list and makes a PTR.
• Everyone's unhappy and starts flaming Zoi/Goodspeed/Eaglemut. Public threads are made, everyone puts together their own perfect patch, and maybe the patch notes change in a way to make everyone a little less unhappy and maybe they don't.

In the beginning of EP the process seemed slower and needed to jump through more hoops. Later down the road I think Zoe could push changes without the OK from many other members? I think this is what irked diarouga and caused community outrage.

Thanks for all the insight and clarification