Heres my guess: Back then you were either playing classic AOC on MSN zone (or Voobly) or AOE2HD which lacked match making and relied on the lobby system. AOE2DE has a ranked match making system which queue time generally lasts 3 to 5 minutes. Note that you cant freely pick the map on ranked tho.

Originally posted by TheDiaper:

Heres my guess: Back then you were either playing classic AOC on MSN zone (or Voobly) or AOE2HD which lacked match making and relied on the lobby system. AOE2DE has a ranked match making system which queue time generally lasts 3 to 5 minutes. Note that you cant freely pick the map on ranked tho.

yeah I noticed you cant pick maps :( Ranked play will need to wait a while for me as I try and remember the game. I tried the quick match system and it seemed to be less populated. And yes I played on MSN zone. We actually ran some pretty fun leagues back in the day. Michi was kinda my favorite

Unfortunately you're going have to get to grips with playing ranked. While lobbies exist for custom games do exist, most people are I think in single player or ranked. A few in quick play or lobbies. It can also depend on time of day and your region. Peak hours tend to shift between Europe and the Americas and Asia. If you play between those gaps then you'll have less people to populate lobbies.

Also while team match making is not perfect and you still end up with some mismatched teams in ranked at times. But lobbies are terrible at times for skill levels. Unless you use people's ranked ELO to determine teams and balance it's otherwise a Wild West.

was your game updated?

Player counts are lower now than they were then. They passed off player reporting to an AI that doesn't ban anyone for anything except for blatant abuse like dropping slurs. Other than slurs the AI doesn't care at all. You can literally queue over and over for games and instantly resign or tell people they're terrible and laugh at them and abuse them all game and the AI doesn't care as long as you don't say a few specific words. It's atrocious and it's one of the main reasons the player count for this game is dropping to record low levels. The devs have noticed too which is why they've stopped dropping regular patches. The last one being nearly 4 months ago now whereas before that it was every 2-4 weeks.

Originally posted by 4th:

Player counts are lower now than they were then. They passed off player reporting to an AI that doesn't ban anyone for anything except for blatant abuse like dropping slurs. Other than slurs the AI doesn't care at all. You can literally queue over and over for games and instantly resign or tell people they're terrible and laugh at them and abuse them all game and the AI doesn't care as long as you don't say a few specific words. It's atrocious and it's one of the main reasons the player count for this game is dropping to record low levels. The devs have noticed too which is why they've stopped dropping regular patches. The last one being nearly 4 months ago now whereas before that it was every 2-4 weeks.

Player count is up.

2024 had a total of 195,398.4 from adding up average each month or an average player count of 16,283.2 per month.

2023 had a total of 177,142.2 from adding up the average each month or an average player count of 14,761.85 per month.

2022 had a total of 158,295.6 from adding up the average each month or an average player count of 13,191.3 per month.

I don't want to do every year I think 2022 was the lowest player count from glancing over the numbers.

Source: https://steamcharts.com/app/813780#All

I might need to bookmark this next time somebody says game is dying/dead.

The devs have maybe better data than we publically have access too. So no, they've not noticed a downward trend, in fact it's upward. With the recent DLC being arguably one of the best yet. Interest in the game is probably at a high point at the moment. Of course things can change.

Also the reason for no patch, is well we don't really need one this minute. They're working on the pathfinding, they don't want to make it worse. So if and when a patch does come it will probably contain fixes for that and hopefully some balance changes too. We'll see. They recent dev blog also stated they'll be something announced soon. So be it new DLC or otherwise we don't know yet. Only concern is what happened to AoE3:DE but considering our numbers are up and the recent DLC being the best selling one. I think we're safe for the moment.

You can take off your doomsayer hat for now.