Avast, friends!
Yes, I’m using Pirate vocabulary, largely because I’ve been attending several video conference calls each day wearing a Pirate hat (and looking ridiculous), all in an effort to make people laugh while we do our best to manage through a difficult moment in time. We know you’re experiencing this too, and we’re humbled that some of you are playing Age to help manage the anxiety we’re all feeling.
We’re glad you’re here 🙂
My role on the World’s Edge team is to manage all of our ongoing operations and planning for Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition, and let me just say – I’m pretty busy. Like, really, really busy, and it’s because we’ve got a lot planned for AoE2:DE. That planning, though, is pretty heavily influenced and in some cases outright driven by what YOU – the Community – tell us is important to you. When you hear terms like Games-as-a-Service, you might be tempted to associate that with popular Free-to-Play games, but they aren’t strictly related. Free-to-Play is really just one of many ways in which some products decide to charge for their experience. Subscriptions are another. A one-time purchase too. Po-tay-to, po-tot-o, right? But Games-as-a-Service is really more about how we work, and it involves staying more closely connected to YOU – the Community – and making sure we’re prioritizing the things YOU care about. When we shipped the game last November, it stopped being about us. Right now it’s all about you. You’re the rock stars. Each and every one of you. And we’re talking about Games-as-a-Service because that’s very much how we work with AoE2:DE.
Also, sorry for so much YOU – I’ll stop with the obnoxious emphasis now.
On to some examples. Let’s talk about how the bugs you’re finding get fixed.
You know Evan (Evangelos), right? He’s usually on forums or social channels asking you about bugs you’re reporting. Whenever you start a thread or surface a problem and others are adding their +1, it’s usually Evan that’s taking that information and putting it in our database. From there, we have a pretty hard-working group of Testers that investigate your problem and turn it into a complex set of information for our team. That bug record then goes to an Engineer or a Designer for a solution, and depending on the bug, it can take a few days or several months for us to find the right fix. But we stick with it because your voice is our North Star. Once that bug gets a fix, that fix then gets tested, incorporated into one of our Updates, and communicated back to you in patch notes.
The ciiiiiiiircle of liiiiiiiiiife…
Ok, sorry again. Back to useful information.
The process I’m describing is part of our daily routine. Our operating philosophy is that if it was important enough for you to make the effort and report it, then it’s important to us too, and we’re going to do everything we can to investigate and address the issues. This is the service bias in how we operate, and it means that your feedback (good and bad) shapes the way we make decisions and the areas where we put our focus. How has your feedback influenced AoE2:DE so far?
- Since launching the game in November, we’ve fixed over 700 bugs and we’re still going
- We’ve been delivering those fixes each month (Dec, Jan, Feb++) alongside new content and tasty upgrades, like…
- Improved pathfinding and AI
- Updated Lobby search capabilities
- Ongoing game balancing and changes
- The Auto-Scout feature developed to help those new to Age of Empires get a head start
- Giving non-Host players the ability to browse maps while in the Lobby
- Improvements to memory usage and disc space requirements
- Continuous performance improvements to make the game run smoother and help more of you play
- The addition of new Challenge Missions to help grow the influx of players that are completely new to Age
- We got to be a part of Nili’s Apartment Cup in January
- Throughout February and March we joined T90 in bringing you Hidden Cup 3
- And along the way, we’ve been cooking up those AoE2:DE Events to give you fun and engaging activities – there’s so much room for activities!
Oh… and we’re not done yet. Not even a little. We genuinely hope to surprise and delight you with what’s coming in the months ahead. I know that’s a vague tease but trust us, we’ll be sharing details as soon as we can. We’ll be listening to every bit of feedback you give, and we’ll be looking to do more of what you love as well as less of what you don’t. We’ll be fixing more of the bugs you find, and probably also introducing some new ones (we’re sorry – we promise we’ll fix it – this just happens when you’re adding new stuff). So please never stop telling us what you think! No, really, like, never stop being you. You’re perfect and we dig you.
Thank you for spending your time with us and giving us a chance to be a part of this experience with you. Every day we sit here in awe of the Community we get to service and just how much you love Age of Empires.
We do too, fam. We do too.