So back before DE, this site ran a patch called the ESOC patch. The idea was to give players access to better maps, better laddering, better balance and there was also some anti-cheating mechanics put in there. The ESOC patch allowed for aoe3 to be played competitively at a high level and it did a lot for the community. ESOC hosted a bunch of great tournies on the ESOC patch.Synchro wrote: ↑26 Oct 2022, 22:00Sorry, many mention this zoi i don't know the story, can anyone tell me what happened to this zoi? I hear this mentioned by many people.iNcog wrote: ↑26 Oct 2022, 20:03Like I've been saying, they're doing the intelligent thing.
There's no money in providing for, or caring for, the competitive community. You can see even Redbull took one glance at AoE3 and noped the fuck out. There was an empire wars mode made and everything too, lol
There is much more money to be made by providing paid cosmetics and whacky DLC that offline and casual players will eat up. And there's nothing wrong with that. Commercially, it makes sense to push things that make you money. Forgotten Empire devs decided that making some extra cash with paid DLC was better than trying to cater towards the competitive scene of AOE3. So in that vein, they're going to push out as much shit as possible, as whacky as possible.
Quite sad. Competitive AoE3 must once again look towards a 3rd party patch for hope. Except that this time, it won't happen. No one will be willing to split the community again and no one could come to a consensus on how to make good changes anyway. When you look at the appalling bullying that Zoi went through when the EP was in our hands, it only makes sense that AOE3's competitive community doesn't really deserve to be taken care of.
the EP was initially spearheaded by @Goodspeed and there was a team that worked with him to find the best balance / design changes to make the game as engaging as possible for the highest level of play. When goodspeed decided to move on and do other things than balance aoe3 (remember this was all community driven), the successor was a gentleman named Zoi.
Zoi was an interesting character to say the least, who insisted on using proper grammar, punctuation and idiomatic English. His posts were truly the best to read because how well he wrote them. He had an avid interest in the game and did a lot of work when it came to coming up with changes that were, at the time, diverging from traditional AOE3 design. Off the top of my head, he made some changes to China's banner armies and I think tried to buff the crossbow out of being a borderline useless unit.
The community was outraged and opted to pretty much gang up on Zoi. There was a fair amount of flaming, vitriol and hate. Look at my posts when I hate on DE and imagine that, x10 but aimed at a single person instead of a company [Forgotten Empires]. Zoi was putting a lot of good faith work and even reached out to the likes of ME, in private channels, in order to ask about the quality of the changes. He did a lot of work asking for many different people what their opinion was on things. When one individual's opinion wasn't taken into account because Zoi had other ideas, then that individual would become anti-Zoi. Which ended up being like 80% of people on the forums? Zoi was treated horribly and unfairly by the reactionary AoE3 community, which led to massive flame wars.
Zoi ended up leaving the community and cutting ties with everyone. I haven't heard from him in a long time and I've known the guy since 2008 or so? He was genuinely friendly and a good person. People were salty because they didn't want to bother reading posts made with proper grammar, syntax and vocabulary.
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Today, we have Age of MEMEpires 3, CASH GRAB EDITION. It's funny in retrospect, because Zoi's changes were teeny, tiny and small. They were made in good faith and with a genuine interest in improving the game. Compare that to Forgotten Empires who doesn't give a fuck and is totally fine destroying the competitive scene of AoE3 in order to sell DLC to casuals. What can I say? All those fools probably wish Zoi were in charge of design changes for DE now. You reap what you sow.
^LMAO