Interview with 7up

[clam_chowdah]

Hey folks,

I did an interview with 7up where we discussed the strength of China on EE and the general direction Age of Mythology is going in.  I thought I should post it here in case anyone had any thoughts on what we talked about.

[Azarath]

Thx for this!

There are really a bunch of problems to face as a community and on top of it we're all divided on all of the opinions.

But also there are a lot of "the future of our community" discussions popping up, so maybe we'll get somewhere. At least it feels a bit like we're developing policies atm.

> Broken game & inaccessibility of fan patches: This is why I like Voobly. The old game runs smoother, looks less weird on the light settings, and you can write your own balance patch and everyone who joins your room automatically downloads it. I did a bunch of crazy stuff with the Diversity-Mixup-Mod. And random people were able to just join and play.

Bad however is that Voobly still never got around to get a quickmatch feature, even though years ago developers offered to program it on their own for them if they'd be given access. X_X .. w/e on those old stories, just be aware that this community has a lot of scripting and programming people.

On EE solving the inaccessibility of fan patches with technology we could start modding some game changes into a RMS package (maybe sth. like the old RLM, multiple maps in one file), though it could be really messy. Also the patch could only affect the units, not the technologies this way. (You can still just download a RMS you don't have by joining a room, right?)

> Entry barrier: Yeah, on the getting-the-game part you wouldn't want to compete vs. steam. Though the guides on how to get the old game are getting better and after asking it doesn't take long to find people to take you by the hand and guide you through all it. Still meh.

By german law downloading the game isn't illegal, providing it for other people however is. So using normal downloads instead of uploading sth. yourself (torrenting) works here.. dunno how other countries handle the copyright though.

> Toxicity debate: That is actually a big discussion again atm in the old forum (xD) at "The future of the game and our community". There is this idea of light-hearted trolling, but also one of sparking competition to generate activity making mean memes of people and stuff. However this community is quite old and a lot of people have phone numbers of each other and stuff. So after knowing each other quite well for them it may be fun what scares others off.

I don't think we can truly evaluate on which path leads to the most community growth. And if you have both kinds of people, the mean behaving ones can spoil this game for the others. I for my part just quit watching another (unrelated) twitch stream because the guy was too toxic for me and I don't have fun with that kind of fuss. People talking down on others are loud and activity you can headcount, the others may complain like some did in that thread with "it's too toxic" or they just leave quietly. If 5 people randomly get to your twitch stream and 1 stays, you cannot say if the others left because of toxicity or disinterest.

> Divided Communities: Yeah, we got that going too.

 

Sry for the wall of text. I hope this recurring discussion helps to lead us to the promised land or maybe spark some projects.