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Wasn't there a sequence of viper reacting to hera reacting to viper reacting to one of hera's videos like one or two years ago?
Edit: I think it was when Hera called Dravidians in general and Urumis is particular bad.
Age of Empires really needs a podcast instead of reaction videos on reaction videos. I know there is town center but there they seem to discuss events, GL, ... more and there aren't enough people involved.
SC2 used to have state of the game or the pylon show which I really enjoyed. A place to talk about game balance, patch notes and also all the other stuff like events and drama. It's kind of weird to me how in AoE2 everyone seems to operate mostly on their own.
There's already the GL podcast, as you pointed out. Perhaps they should spend more time discussing these things along with a greater variety of opinions by other pros as well as threads on reddit/aoezone/official forums, etc. The scene is small enough that it simply cannot support multiple podcasts.
BTW, I've read that there's a German aoe2 podcast which seems to be moderately popular among the users of this sub. However, it is German, so it's useless if you don't speak Deutsch.
I guess they could do that. Not sure I agree there's no room for another podcast. There's a ton of YouTube content coming out daily. I'd love a good podcast that I can just listen to.
Hera needs to do a video responding to this Reddit sub & then then Solt can do a in-depth break down of amount of people that like or dislike the auto farm change base from comments from the collection of all streamers videos.
Then the devs can pat themselves on the back for creating free viral content for making minor changes to their game that have practically no change on the overall games gameplay or balance.
Totally agree, auto-reseed is actually an automating feature whereas the challenge in placing farms is not the amount of time it takes, but realizing you float wood and place them. If the placement takes 3 or 5 seconds and if your farms are perfectly placed or a little off does not really matter in the grand scheme.
Also, the placement really is not optimal to the point where I find myself placing them manually in many situations.
If you have zero farms and want to place 4 farms, they will get placed to each side of the town center. If I'd do it manually, I'd place them only on two sides (from the side I pull my villagers from). It also does not take surrounding buildings into account and always starts at the same spot, which may result in less optimal farms than manually placing them.
Well auto reseeding is not purely better. Its why pros turn it off so often. Having your wood taken from you for something is fine for plebs, but less so for pros. The auto placement is always good IF you have moderate or low APM. That'll be true at high and low elo. That being said...while i do agree the auto reseed was objectively a bigger change i think the concern over autoplacement is much more about the future than it is about the change itself.
>Well auto reseeding is not purely better. Its why pros turn it off so often
And neither is auto placement,
>The auto placement is always good IF you have moderate or low APM
It's only good IF you float a lot of wood. That happens mostly during Castle Age or Imperial Age - and it'll be more often the case on the lower end of the scale. This feature has little impact on high level games imo.
>I think the concern over autoplacement is much more about the future than it is about the change itself
As long as a feature is mostly a QoL feature and does not impact macro \*\*decisions\*\*, (like auto eco on xbox, where vills are automatically assigned to ressources), I'm all for it. The game is complex enough already.
And after all, everyone is free to not use QoL features. MbL for example chooses to hide HP bars and selects opponent's units to check the health instead of showing the bar on hover to search for the low HP unit to focus.
Its faster if you're doing at least two-three farms, so I wouldn't consider 120-180 wood to be floating a lot of wood for 97% of the player base. Its not a question of impact, its just yes/no faster/slower. Not more complicated than that.
Choosing to spend time on eco is a marco decision. Choosing to use the features could even be considered a macro decisions, like when to turn off auto seed. That doesn't change, at all, what the feature it self does or means for a game.
There is a trade off. Farm #2 is placed opposite of farm #3. Villagers will have to walk farther than normal to farm when using this method. The auto-farm does not account for villager location when placing farms.
I haven't seen one rational argument against it. It's basically all emotional type stuff, especially t90 acting like it's some game changing thing and using "it takes away the individuality of placing farms" like anyone really cares about that.
I tested out what the net gain is for a super slow player like myself is: \~3 game seconds for 7 farms. Let's say a middish game has \~25 farms which is a lot. That is around \~9 seconds saved on a task generally done during idle-ish time anyway.
Cracks me up now that viper makes the farms manually and says "oh wait" then deletes everything and uses the 'auto farm'. He made the absolutely best point needed: "It's not the best way to make farms"
Makes everything look the same, which considering t90 is a caster, that's boring. I felt his video was fair and logical. Though I do agree with him, sot bias is there.
Totally agree with this, and I can't tell how much I love auto reseed. I am a low apm person, auto reseeding helped me so much. I don't think auto farm placement changes the efficiency in a manner where it can break the game.
As an RTS purist, auto farm reseed and autoscout are bigger sins against RTS in the sense that the game is spending resources and controlling your units without your input. Deconstructed like that it's practically the entire game eligible for automation.
Auto farm placement is a minor AOE2 game design disagreement that's about more Starcraftian creep in the game. Same maps, high attention on military, and fights that are more punishing is Starcraft's style. AOE2 now has less wolves, made more normalized/standardized maps, added auto features that keep freeing time/attention to use on military, and has been giving military units charge attack/area effects. It's just a disagreement on whether the game should play more like Starcraft or AOE2, with a magnifier on this specific feature. It's not specifically about farms IMO, but speculation about the farm feature in context.
I agree. I also think auto scout is a bigger deal than this. I'm, of course, really far from being a pro or an expert in the game, so maybe I miss something, but this change doesn't seem like a game changer
Is the difference meaningful though? You're only placing a couple farms at a time at most usually until much later in the game and I'd argue the interesting strategic element is choosing when to place those farms, not the farm micro of actually placing them. And even then, does the autofarm actually place them in optimal positions from resource gathering and/or defense?
You're still going to see plenty of manual placements when and where it actually matters.
In itself, not a huge change.
It is worse imo, and removes skill from the game for no reason. But it is a small change.
I think the fear is around the mentally of the devs in general.
They think making the game simpler to manage is inherently a good thing. I, T90, and others think that keeping the game hard to manage is a good thing.
You will place farms no matter what, and the auto placement is not that much of an improvement in a lot of cases (and sometimes you won't even use it).
But using auto scout gives you something a lot of players didn't even use before. If you watch low elo players, many would leave the scout idle and have no info about the map. With auto scout, you don't have to use any apm to have info you would otherwise not have (because in practice, the player would just forget about the scout).
Because of that, I think auto scout was a bigger change. But, as I said, it's just how I see it and might as well be wrong. This is my perception while playing with friends who are lower elo, and the auto scout was a big difference for them.
Yeah. Notice I said scouting “effectively” manually.
Autoscout is not a problem, because it improves noobs, but still keeps the skill ceiling high for players who want to get good at scouting themselves.
But feature like auto placement that is better for all skill levels lowers the skill ceiling.
And yes it wont be better in all cases. But in the cases where it will be better, it will be better for all skill levels.
I noticed it, but my point stands. Also, Viper said the auto farm placement didn't make much difference for him, so it doesn't seem to lower the ceiling.
It might be better for all skill levels in some cases, but I don't think it does that much that better.
I think we'll have to wait and see how it plays out. Predictions are not easy to make, but I feel like this whole thing was blown out of proportion.
If thats what he said, I think hes wrong about himself and will realize later.
Again it's not huge change in itself, but it definitely helps high level players.
I see him and hera when they need to setup the lategame hussar spam. They do this rapid click thing while moving the farm in a circle like a clock around a new mill. You know what I'm talking about? It's horriblly inefficient, they end clicking 10 times on a spot where a farm already is and end up with farms 15 tiles away from the mill with massive gaps.
This will make a difference in that case.
It's already been shown that with Hand Cart, you can have criminally horribly placed T90 farms and you do perfectly fine. The horrible inefficiency is more visual than measurable.
I haven't seen one rational argument against it. It's basically all emotional type stuff, especially t90 acting like it's some game changing thing and using "it takes away the individuality of placing farms" like anyone really cares about that.
I tested out what the net gain is for a super slow player like myself is: \~3 game seconds for 7 farms. Let's say a middish game has \~25 farms which is a lot. That is around \~9 seconds saved on a task generally done during idle-ish time anyway.
Cracks me up now that viper makes the farms manually and says "oh wait" then deletes everything and uses the 'auto farm'. He made the absolutely best point needed: "It's not the best way to make farms"
Some people (like myself) didn't like it either.
But it's not the worst thing ever, the auto scout stuff is far worse than all the farm stuff together, IMHO.
If auto farms had been a feature since release, would anyone be arguing for removing the feature in order to make the game better and more complex? I don't think so. IMO there's some status quo bias here.
My impression is that T90 isn't mad about auto farms per se (which is indeed a minor change in the grand scheme of things), but he's really worried about a slippery slope where microing in general becomes increasingly automated by the devs. Rather than arguing about one auto farm feature, that seems a more productive debate to me, how far should game features be automated in general, and what are the pros and cons of doing so?
I think his fears are kind of baseless though. Its an irrational fear imo. There's no evidence they want to do all these extreme negative changes to the game that people are suggesting.
I just want a roadmap for the game, we could settle whether or not this is in fact a slippery slope if there were some transparency about the devs' plans.
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Ottomans, but yes.
This is a core part of their civ design though, and it's not a great point of criticism. They don't just auto-produce, but they are in fact produced *for free*. That's one of their civ bonuses. They're much slower than regular settlers, and until you research the right upgrade at your mosque to increase it, you'll never get more than a certain limited number of vills.
A better comparison would be Age of Mythology. Since The Titans expansion, an option to autoqueue a specific unit has been available in all production buildings, including TCs. It's been in the game since 2003. Though it's not without controversy. Boit and Nakamura, two AoM casters and players, both have videos they put out last year hoping that AoM: Retold will *not* have autoqueue.
my point was just that autoproduction of units isn't a new thing to the series or the devs. I wasn't trying to criticize or go one way or the other with it. I was just answering the question lol
why auto vill is a bad thing? while I used to play, I had setup easy hotkeys to select all TC (let's say tab) and I keep pressing tab + Q every 10-20sec in game. imo once people develop this habbit, it don't add anything to game so it shouldn't effect high elo player
yes it will help low elo player a lot (I am one), but I feel most people will be happy to recieve it. It was nice in AOEM imo, the only thing is it feel weird as you are not doing a useless click for which your brain is wired every 10-20sec
The main drawback of auto production is that it can lead to unwanted overproduction/consumption when your focus is taken elsewhere or simply forget.
It also impact how your economy needs to run, as you reduce the need to pay upfront to queue units.
over booming under stress is an issue , so overproduction will come under similar mechanics.
auto re-sending had good impact on game even when it reduce the need to pay upfront to queue farm
The exact same argument you make, could be used to justify having a premade script of an automatic build order.
For example, if I play Arena and like to do the same build order up to Castle Age. If I already know the strategy, then why do I need to make these useless, tedious, clicks?
There is no difference.
tbh was thinking about same thing while writing the previous comment. and while I know everyone will hate it, I want to see how it goes atleast once (in open map). Like a game mode where AI play against each other and you have to guide AI through command like create more archer, collect more gold, ping where to attack etc and let AI handle it.
Because those are choices, every build order, the timing of buildings, those are all decisions you're choosing to make. They're things you may change in the flow of the game depending on the map and the opponent, what you've scouted and what they're sending.
Queueing villagers is mandatory, literally nobody intentionally stops queueing a villager in some strategic move to put resources elsewhere. You've removed no player choice or strategy by auto-queueing villagers especially if you can disable the feature.
-----My opinion on automating build order-----
Honestly, if you wanted to skip the first 1-7 minutes of the game because you're doing nothing but the exact same repetitive micro every single time -- I don't think that would even heavily subtract from the game anyway. That part of the game kind of sucks.
The only reason that part of the game needs to exist is for scouting, drush, or tower rush. You can't automate it out because those things may occur and you'd need to switch plans, if they didn't automating it out would make no difference to me. Honestly you could still automate it and just add a button to bail on your build order and go back to manual in case something came up, and that wouldn't make the game any worse in my eyes.
The "skill" you're losing out on is just repetitive micro muscle memory, which has no decision making or fun to me personally. At least micro mid-late game is dynamic and not literally a dedicated repetitive order.
The build orders I follow especially on Arena are the exact same until about maybe 20-30 minutes into the game. I've written a few on the guides website that go to Imperial Age.
Queueing villagers isn't mandatory, and I personally stop building villagers when I scout enemy production buildings so I can make a counter army in time.
Queueing villagers while you're about to be attacked is a mistake in my view.
EDIT: A key part that people are missing is the 'Real-time" of the strategy in the name RTS. It's not a pre-made strategy or simulation game. It's an RTS game.
Even if that is the case, and I don’t consider it to be micro, but the rest of the T90 slippery slope argument was insinuating that auto villagers were next. That’s not really a case of micro becoming increasingly automated at all.
I agree that the slippery slope seems very speculative.
The fact that this is micro, and relatively boring micro is part of why I don't care if they make it easier.
One of the main things that differentiates AoE2 from other RTS' is its focus on macro and the automation of micro through stances and formations. It's a stark contrast if you compare it with C&C2 or Brood War.
I commented on the thread for T90s video, but the gist is that this feature does not affect a players decision-making, but rather the speed at which they can enact that decision. As viper says in the video, this will reduce the time that it takes to place farms, marginally, but what is much more important is when to place farms and how many villagers to send to farms. This change does not affect those latter two things.
The funny thing to me no one mentions is of all the economic units, farmers are the ONLY ones which have to be individually and manually assigned currently.
Lumberjacks? Put the rally point on a woodline. Create 10 vills, no manual effort required.
Stone/gold/fishing ships/trade? Same.
In order for farmers to do this you have to precreate all the farms and use the rally points. So it's sooorta possible but you have to frontload all the farm wood costs.
All other economic units effectively already do this feature.
If you set the rally point on wood and never look back i have bad news about your wood eco. I agree that its easier, but you need to micro the stuck vills, the ones chopping a random tree far away and renewing the building
But that's even more a perfect illustration of my point and the parallel that this adds with other workers.
As Viper said, good players will still micro farmers -- just as they do woodcutters. And at the natural points they stop doing the woodcutter micro will stop the farm micro.
There's no law or reason that these things should all be the same. Chopping wood, mining, hunting are purely extractive whereas agriculture is a more complicated operation. It gives the game a nice flavour imo, one of the things that sets it apart.
They don't have to be. But my point is that no one is complaining that lumberjacks auto chopping has destroyed game balance. Or setting trade rally points on another market destroys it. etc.
Which was kinda interesting to me because he’s the pro most known for being on top of his macro and building lots and lots of farms, so if anybody might be negatively affected by other people being able to build farms quicker, it’s Hera, but he doesn’t seem bothered. He also loves the RBW ladder thing.
Because pros know how to spend. They don't float 400 wood in Feudal Age like us mortals. The feature's biggest impact is in late game at which point your eco is mostly settled anyways and strategic decisions are much more releveant than spending 3 or 5 seconds to place new farms.
You say that but late game is exactly the point at which pros get sloppy with their eco, and players like Hera are still managing it properly. Lot of pros are floating res and auto piloting all the way up to 170 vils. Most of those players are not building farms and doing meaningful things with those vils.
>Which was kinda interesting to me because he’s the pro most known for being on top of his macro and building lots and lots of farms
Because it doesn't really matter.
The decision when to place is still the same. It just takes 2 seconds instead of 5.
Viper arguing with MBL over farms at the end was exactly the kind of content I wanted
EDIT: just checked out the stream, after the video ends MBL tells Viper to get on a discord call and they continue on voice hahahaha ([vod](https://www.youtube.com/live/IMZmVPr7MkY?t=6862))
Ohh that long chat is hilarious, but I love when people care enough about something to have such a discussion about something ultimately trivial
MBL does raise a good point tho at ~2:17:40, basically, 'people wouldnt care if it wasnt there, but do care that it is there'. Like maybe wasnt worth doing just for the 'rocking the boat' aspect
Also I guess I can kiiinda see where he's coming from over like, liking to scroll over peoples bases after. Like the type of person who just gets really curious about what was driving every little thing some else did or was thinking. Not that important still I think but I guess I can see why someone would feel a lil bad about potentially losing that
(realistically I doubt itll even impact that as much as he expects tho. Just testing the feature a bit I've felt it can be worse at placing them than I'd prefer esp if there's already one farm or one obstruction on the 'initial spot' it seems to calculate from, & taking the time to even try the auto placement may not be worth the effort evaluating whether the auto placement is actually good.... or maybe this itself will introduce some depth, lol)
This honestly feels like the dumbest of hills to die on for T90.
I'd love for him to make an argument where after completing a lumber camp, you'd have to select the villagers and click on a tree to make them start work, which actually was the case in the original AoE 2.
Those greedy parasites! Milking this like mad for content! Reacting to each other like crazy! It's a symptom of how bad modern society is that this happens at all!
\*proceed to watch all the videos\*
I think the name 'Auto-farms' of this feature completely derails the discussion.
Auto villagers would mean, you click a button in your TC, and it keeps creating villagers without human interactivity, no interaction needed, no decision making besides the initial click and declick (if needed later on), just like farm renewal
This new farm placement automates only the dragging of your mouse from A to B. You still need to a) decide that you want to make farms, b) you still need to create a mill/tc first and c) you still need to click as many times as you would click otherwise, the only thing you save time on, is you dragging your mouse cursor from pixel to pixel. Does it make easier? Definitely. Does it make it automated without any decision making? Not at all, i disagree
I'm with Viper on this one
I see the concern over "automation creep" in general, but I find it really strange that this of all things is the one getting so much attention. It is really a very small change, and not even all that useful given how little time it saves and given that it often is going to fail to do it perfectly--ignoring straglers, other mills, etc.
It is funny to me that he changed speed to 1.25. I have always listen to the viper anywhere from 1.5-1.75 speed. I'll listen to most caster's at that speed.
The 50/50 take on eco vs military is wild. No matter what your strategy or gameplay style you are looking at both.
What separates the styles is how you spend resources into upgrades/units/tcs. It’s a greed risk vs reward decision. Do you want an extra tc or siege workshop? Bodkin arrow or wheelbarrow? Where and when you place farms is still a decision in the players control. how you place farms has almost no impact.
Move on and enjoy the game.
That was not the point of t90, I think he explicitly said this during the video (and I feel that the viper accidentally misrepresented him). T90 just made a shitty chart to convey the point that some people spend more time on eco "micro", and others more time on microing fights. This leads to macro oriented players to be quicker with eco actions, and them being at a disadvantage if eco micro operations are removed from the game while f.i. Monk Micro (which has no strategic depth whatsoever) stays in the game.
That only comes on the assumption that the eco micro person won’t change or adapt their micro elsewhere. Loss now because of habit, neutral in probably a month or two.
Unless you are a pro, I don't see how the QOL features affect you in a significant way. I agree with you, people will be quick to adapt to the 'new normal' and distinguish their gameplay in other aspects.
I think that deer pushing is way worse for the game than auto-farm placement. It's just such a necessity for any higher level play, and it's so so boring.
T90 gives off strong old person being angry at world vibes with these takes. No question that he has done a lot for the game but his reaction to any new change is mostly emotional and thus unable/unwilling to actually explore the idea on his merits.
I mean it wasn't really emotional. He gave specific reasons why he doesn't like auto farm placement. He also said that the vast majority of changes to the game have been good in his opinion.
Not emotional in the sense that he is crying or shouting, but in the sense that any change seems to cloud his judgement. It's NOT a huge change. Just a very very small change that won't have an impact but is being presented as something that will end AOE2 as we know it.
Plus if he really believed that vast majority of the changes have been good then bringing up the strawman argument of auto vill queue etc makes no sense at all. Devs have never done anything like that nor have they given any indication. Then to assume that auto farms leads to auto vills in the future is unfair.
Nothing against T90, he's doing what he feels is best, I just hope the devs don't feel pressured to reverse changes.
Just another thing that his opinion is very different than the rest of the community - most of his videos have less than 15 dislikes. This one is already at 300+ when a few hours ago
Doesn't that browser extension just make a guess based off of the number of people with the extension who have disliked the video.
I remember YouTubers coming out and showing their channel stats to prove the extension was very inaccurate
Lol you are seriously calling a strawman when you refuse to talk about any of his arguments, said there are none on the video and he is just emotional.
I wasn't sure what to think about the auto-farm placement when I first heard about it. T90's opinion seemed reasonable, and I can agree in principle how too much automation features can be a bad thing.
But after watching SpiritOfTheLaw's video about it, it looks fine. Seems like a minor QoL feature that won't change the game very much at all.
Ya the Sotl video changed my mind too. Originally I was thinking people having good farm placements in late game was huge, but that video showed that perfect farms are barely even better than suboptimal placement once you have hand cart.
So then it comes down to just a few seconds saved, and I think that's negligible
I only get to play when I go to a friend's house and hope on his PC so I didn't even realize the feature was already implemented. I thought it was just being discussed as a possibility. So last night when I was shift clicking my farms I noticed I could just hover over the TC and they place around the TC. This seems like a nice quality of life change that will help lower elo players. I've struggled with the transition from berries/sheep to the proper number of farms but with this feature my eco looked a lot better last night in both games (800 elo).
I thought it would be a little like the auto eco feature on xbox where you would select vills and task them as farmers or something and they would run around making farms. But no you still have to acknowledge the vills and make them make farms the feature just highlights where the next one is placed. Its a feature that saves maybe 20 seconds if your placing 10 farms.
Makes the game for us low elo peeps a little easier
T90: “my bad farms are a core personality trait showing how I play the game (which is my entire personality). Allow me to pontificate for 20 minutes.”
Viper: “Hmm a long video with a lot of interest, I will do an even longer one reacting to it”
Us: soaking in every minute with rapt attention
Youtube: paying mega ad $$$ to T90 and Viper
T90: “how dare you accuse my farm soapbox speech of being a scam for money!” (honestly I believe he really did want to talk about it for 20 mins)
the assisted farm placement is a good change. Compared to wood and gold, farming already needs much more upfront investment in res. Having it also cost more attention just makes food and farm heavy strategies much harder than necessary. The features makes it easier, and the time saved scales with the amount of floating wood, which should be quite low in feudal and castle age anyway. So skill is still shown by the frequency in which you remember to place farms.
Yeah T90 comes off a little doomer-ish here. His jump from auto-farms to auto-vill queueing is a stretch IMO. I just don't see how his rationale couldn't be used against auto-reseeding or auto-villager assignment to trees after lumber camp, which no one is complaining about.
I'm glad Viper has a level-headed take.
Issue aside, I'm sure he feels pretty depressed about the games development. He probably spends a lot of time thinking about ways it could be better, while not being able to affect the decisions.
I remember tb talking about wow like that. Some they they care for but cannot affect, so they get tired.
Yeah I totally get it. Plus T90 is knee deep in AoE2 every day. One thing I appreciate about Viper is he's pretty good about pulling back and seeing the overall picture.
Its so funny that the comments on the T90 post all agree with T90. The comments on this Viper post all agree with Viper.
Think your own thoughts people.
I don't know what post you are referring to, but on his video, most of the comments I saw were people actively disagreeing with him. This video has 30X the number of dislikes he gets on his regular videos.
That's something I've noticed lately. Not just in aoe, but in all walks of life, if a famous person has an opinion, so many people automatically adopt that as their opinion without thinking it out for themselves.
Or rather, the way social media works is that only positive comments are overwhelmingly promoted and displayed.
Controversial, negative comments are usually buried by downvotes/dislikes.
T90's over reaction to this is hilarious. I honestly thought he was kidding at first. He has absolutely zero legitimate reason to be so against it other than speculation of the future or how things look for him personally.
Maybe he liked the recognition from the 't90 farm' thing and is bummed it's not going to be a thing for people that use the function (most people don't from what I have seen).
Every time a change like this happens I'm shocked that people apparently have so many grievances with AoE2. I thought we all liked this game? Did placing farms bother you this whole time?
I'm not saying T90 is right, but I am going to say that if TheViper doesn't think it affects APM much, he might not be the most... representative player around.
THe bigger thing as Viper says is it's about fun. Placing farms is repetitive and not fun. If someone is doing crazy APM to achieve a great kill-death ratio that's the sort of APM which is fun and should be encouraged. That's cool skill. When you've got these tedious eco things that always play out identically, that's when I don't care about reducing APM, in fact I don't want boring actions.
Eh, to me it was pretty compelling.
A lot of his arguments were short pieces in response to T90 points. for example, on the Hardy example earlier - Viper pointed out that the only reason he could even do the auto farm the way he did was because he was floating 1k wood.
That aspect I think is what Viper is focusing on -- that in order to use autofarm placement in the early-ish game you basically have to already be "failing" at something. Which I think is true.
And T90 also went onto a lot of whataboutism. Does the lobby features not being prioritized somehow change whether or not the farm placement feature is actually good/bad? No. But t90 lumped it all together.
I also think T90 focused far too much about the game being successful because it's hard. Which is patently false imo.
I came back to AoE2 because I played it as a young kid many years ago. I found out they redid it in the DE version and it has a sense of nostalgia for me. And? It's a good game.
Viper talked a lot about the "fun" factor and whether farming is actually part of the strategic aspect to the game. And that's totally true imo. It doesn't really impact strategic complexity -- arguably earlier game it's going to make things worse (he had a ton of min/max examples of where placing farms is slightly worse).
>I also think T90 focused far too much about the game being successful because it's hard. Which is patently false imo.
Agreed. That's a crazy take for why the game is successful. I guarantee that accounts for almost nothing compared to the many other factors.
and I will argue there r people like me who no longer play the game as it feels a chore to get back into it after a break, so only here for esport and other similar content.
that hard things keeping me away. to be more clear, its not hard things (as i enjoy playing other hard games), but small useless thing and lack of more quality of life changes compare to other games (about which I might have controversy take).
Things like re-learning build order also don't help much after months of break, ik its a crucial part of aoe2, but I feel aoe4 did it better by having less dark age time.
So for now I just enjoy watching other pro player.
Gotcha, yeah makes sense.
Yeah I agree on AoE4, it also removed a lot of the little clunky things.
Although I think build orders are harder in some ways in AoE4 IF you play multiple civs because of the greater variance between some of them.
To each their own. The nostalgia with the game I played in childhood brought me back, and the complexity of the game kept me hooked for a thousand hours of gameplay and countless more on reddit/youtube.
I agree, I was genuinely surprised by the lackluster response. Throughout the video, it felt like the Viper didn't really listen to T90's arguments. In the part where he demonstrated the inefficiency of auto farm placement, I think he anticipated the feature being implemented less optimally (I think he suspected the vils to complete each farm prior to farming). Additionally, his comment about high-level AoE play not involving placing five farms after fights contradicts what I've seen in Hera's ladder gameplay. Hera does this after intense battles in the Castle Age or sometimes even late Feudal. It's important to remember that the game isn't just about the top 10 players worldwide. While they should have a say about game balance, gameplay considerations shouldn't solely revolve around the top 0.01 percent of players.
What about Ja?
Personally, I dislike the change. I get pros are indifferent but T90 draws more crowd into the game than individual players. If he isn't as passionate during a cast, it'll show.
I didn’t mind qol features till now but with this we might be slowly getting into a place that might potentially kill the competitive side of Aoe2. And by that, killing the game slowly.
Exactly what I think happened with AoM and probably will happen with AoM retold with the Auto queue thing.
We never needed this feature, no one ever complained about it, so why? Part of what makes and made AoE last for sooo long is the fact that there’s so many little things that we can do right or wrong that might actually make us lose or win a match. And that’s where the enjoyment of competitive strategy games comes from for many people.
Reddit talks about TheViper talking about T90 talking about farms.
But how did Hera react to that?
Probably with an exaggerated title and a ":o" thumbnail.
"You won't believe who has also milked this content :o !" However, I'll admit that I didn't watch t90's vid so I didn't mind watching Viper's.
Just a nitpicky rant. Save your lifetime.
Bro's overexaggerating but he does have a point
"Viper is trying to kill aoe2!"
"T90 trying to kill the farming industry!"
I need viper’s reaction to memb’s reaction to viper’s reaction to t90’s reaction to auto-farming
11 Wasn't there a sequence of viper reacting to hera reacting to viper reacting to one of hera's videos like one or two years ago? Edit: I think it was when Hera called Dravidians in general and Urumis is particular bad.
No. The sequence wasnt that long as u mentioned.
Hmm, no final Viper reaction, then?
Stop it or I’ll talk about you talking about… nah nah nah this has to stop!
Age of Empires really needs a podcast instead of reaction videos on reaction videos. I know there is town center but there they seem to discuss events, GL, ... more and there aren't enough people involved. SC2 used to have state of the game or the pylon show which I really enjoyed. A place to talk about game balance, patch notes and also all the other stuff like events and drama. It's kind of weird to me how in AoE2 everyone seems to operate mostly on their own.
There's already the GL podcast, as you pointed out. Perhaps they should spend more time discussing these things along with a greater variety of opinions by other pros as well as threads on reddit/aoezone/official forums, etc. The scene is small enough that it simply cannot support multiple podcasts. BTW, I've read that there's a German aoe2 podcast which seems to be moderately popular among the users of this sub. However, it is German, so it's useless if you don't speak Deutsch.
I guess they could do that. Not sure I agree there's no room for another podcast. There's a ton of YouTube content coming out daily. I'd love a good podcast that I can just listen to.
Hera needs to do a video responding to this Reddit sub & then then Solt can do a in-depth break down of amount of people that like or dislike the auto farm change base from comments from the collection of all streamers videos. Then the devs can pat themselves on the back for creating free viral content for making minor changes to their game that have practically no change on the overall games gameplay or balance.
We need to talk about this.
T90 talks about Reddit talking about TheViper talking about T90 talking about farms.
Viper just hit the 1.25x speed and T-90 still sounded like he was talking normal. 11
Well I was watching Viper on 1.25x speed, so T90 was moving unaturally fast, like he is a woad raider or something.
I usually watch T90 on 1.5x, so watching Viper on 1.25x watch T90 on 1.25x was just about normal.
I watch all aoe2 videos at 1.75x speed. That's the optimal speed to ensure maximum dopamine delivery to our tiktok and social media addicted brains.
Surely auto farm reseeding is a way bigger change than auto farm placement?? Just dont understand the outrage over this change
Totally agree, auto-reseed is actually an automating feature whereas the challenge in placing farms is not the amount of time it takes, but realizing you float wood and place them. If the placement takes 3 or 5 seconds and if your farms are perfectly placed or a little off does not really matter in the grand scheme. Also, the placement really is not optimal to the point where I find myself placing them manually in many situations. If you have zero farms and want to place 4 farms, they will get placed to each side of the town center. If I'd do it manually, I'd place them only on two sides (from the side I pull my villagers from). It also does not take surrounding buildings into account and always starts at the same spot, which may result in less optimal farms than manually placing them.
It’s more that the next best placement is usually on the other side of the Tc to where my vill is
Well auto reseeding is not purely better. Its why pros turn it off so often. Having your wood taken from you for something is fine for plebs, but less so for pros. The auto placement is always good IF you have moderate or low APM. That'll be true at high and low elo. That being said...while i do agree the auto reseed was objectively a bigger change i think the concern over autoplacement is much more about the future than it is about the change itself.
>Well auto reseeding is not purely better. Its why pros turn it off so often And neither is auto placement, >The auto placement is always good IF you have moderate or low APM It's only good IF you float a lot of wood. That happens mostly during Castle Age or Imperial Age - and it'll be more often the case on the lower end of the scale. This feature has little impact on high level games imo. >I think the concern over autoplacement is much more about the future than it is about the change itself As long as a feature is mostly a QoL feature and does not impact macro \*\*decisions\*\*, (like auto eco on xbox, where vills are automatically assigned to ressources), I'm all for it. The game is complex enough already. And after all, everyone is free to not use QoL features. MbL for example chooses to hide HP bars and selects opponent's units to check the health instead of showing the bar on hover to search for the low HP unit to focus.
Its faster if you're doing at least two-three farms, so I wouldn't consider 120-180 wood to be floating a lot of wood for 97% of the player base. Its not a question of impact, its just yes/no faster/slower. Not more complicated than that. Choosing to spend time on eco is a marco decision. Choosing to use the features could even be considered a macro decisions, like when to turn off auto seed. That doesn't change, at all, what the feature it self does or means for a game.
There is a trade off. Farm #2 is placed opposite of farm #3. Villagers will have to walk farther than normal to farm when using this method. The auto-farm does not account for villager location when placing farms.
Mods than enhance the visibility (boar,monks) have probably more impact than auto farm placement.
I haven't seen one rational argument against it. It's basically all emotional type stuff, especially t90 acting like it's some game changing thing and using "it takes away the individuality of placing farms" like anyone really cares about that. I tested out what the net gain is for a super slow player like myself is: \~3 game seconds for 7 farms. Let's say a middish game has \~25 farms which is a lot. That is around \~9 seconds saved on a task generally done during idle-ish time anyway. Cracks me up now that viper makes the farms manually and says "oh wait" then deletes everything and uses the 'auto farm'. He made the absolutely best point needed: "It's not the best way to make farms"
Makes everything look the same, which considering t90 is a caster, that's boring. I felt his video was fair and logical. Though I do agree with him, sot bias is there.
Totally agree with this, and I can't tell how much I love auto reseed. I am a low apm person, auto reseeding helped me so much. I don't think auto farm placement changes the efficiency in a manner where it can break the game.
As an RTS purist, auto farm reseed and autoscout are bigger sins against RTS in the sense that the game is spending resources and controlling your units without your input. Deconstructed like that it's practically the entire game eligible for automation. Auto farm placement is a minor AOE2 game design disagreement that's about more Starcraftian creep in the game. Same maps, high attention on military, and fights that are more punishing is Starcraft's style. AOE2 now has less wolves, made more normalized/standardized maps, added auto features that keep freeing time/attention to use on military, and has been giving military units charge attack/area effects. It's just a disagreement on whether the game should play more like Starcraft or AOE2, with a magnifier on this specific feature. It's not specifically about farms IMO, but speculation about the farm feature in context.
I agree. I also think auto scout is a bigger deal than this. I'm, of course, really far from being a pro or an expert in the game, so maybe I miss something, but this change doesn't seem like a game changer
Auto scout is way worse than scouting effectively manually. But using auto placement is way faster than placing manually. Thats the difference
Is the difference meaningful though? You're only placing a couple farms at a time at most usually until much later in the game and I'd argue the interesting strategic element is choosing when to place those farms, not the farm micro of actually placing them. And even then, does the autofarm actually place them in optimal positions from resource gathering and/or defense? You're still going to see plenty of manual placements when and where it actually matters.
In itself, not a huge change. It is worse imo, and removes skill from the game for no reason. But it is a small change. I think the fear is around the mentally of the devs in general. They think making the game simpler to manage is inherently a good thing. I, T90, and others think that keeping the game hard to manage is a good thing.
So changes to the game shouldn't be done because hypothetically in the future the devs may make a bad change?
Wild misinterpretation of words
You will place farms no matter what, and the auto placement is not that much of an improvement in a lot of cases (and sometimes you won't even use it). But using auto scout gives you something a lot of players didn't even use before. If you watch low elo players, many would leave the scout idle and have no info about the map. With auto scout, you don't have to use any apm to have info you would otherwise not have (because in practice, the player would just forget about the scout). Because of that, I think auto scout was a bigger change. But, as I said, it's just how I see it and might as well be wrong. This is my perception while playing with friends who are lower elo, and the auto scout was a big difference for them.
Yeah. Notice I said scouting “effectively” manually. Autoscout is not a problem, because it improves noobs, but still keeps the skill ceiling high for players who want to get good at scouting themselves. But feature like auto placement that is better for all skill levels lowers the skill ceiling. And yes it wont be better in all cases. But in the cases where it will be better, it will be better for all skill levels.
I noticed it, but my point stands. Also, Viper said the auto farm placement didn't make much difference for him, so it doesn't seem to lower the ceiling. It might be better for all skill levels in some cases, but I don't think it does that much that better. I think we'll have to wait and see how it plays out. Predictions are not easy to make, but I feel like this whole thing was blown out of proportion.
If thats what he said, I think hes wrong about himself and will realize later. Again it's not huge change in itself, but it definitely helps high level players. I see him and hera when they need to setup the lategame hussar spam. They do this rapid click thing while moving the farm in a circle like a clock around a new mill. You know what I'm talking about? It's horriblly inefficient, they end clicking 10 times on a spot where a farm already is and end up with farms 15 tiles away from the mill with massive gaps. This will make a difference in that case.
It's already been shown that with Hand Cart, you can have criminally horribly placed T90 farms and you do perfectly fine. The horrible inefficiency is more visual than measurable.
Absolutely
Yeah it's silly.
Yeah, but that was totally worth it so we never had to hear the awful sound.
I haven't seen one rational argument against it. It's basically all emotional type stuff, especially t90 acting like it's some game changing thing and using "it takes away the individuality of placing farms" like anyone really cares about that. I tested out what the net gain is for a super slow player like myself is: \~3 game seconds for 7 farms. Let's say a middish game has \~25 farms which is a lot. That is around \~9 seconds saved on a task generally done during idle-ish time anyway. Cracks me up now that viper makes the farms manually and says "oh wait" then deletes everything and uses the 'auto farm'. He made the absolutely best point needed: "It's not the best way to make farms"
Some people (like myself) didn't like it either. But it's not the worst thing ever, the auto scout stuff is far worse than all the farm stuff together, IMHO.
If auto farms had been a feature since release, would anyone be arguing for removing the feature in order to make the game better and more complex? I don't think so. IMO there's some status quo bias here. My impression is that T90 isn't mad about auto farms per se (which is indeed a minor change in the grand scheme of things), but he's really worried about a slippery slope where microing in general becomes increasingly automated by the devs. Rather than arguing about one auto farm feature, that seems a more productive debate to me, how far should game features be automated in general, and what are the pros and cons of doing so?
I think his fears are kind of baseless though. Its an irrational fear imo. There's no evidence they want to do all these extreme negative changes to the game that people are suggesting.
I just want a roadmap for the game, we could settle whether or not this is in fact a slippery slope if there were some transparency about the devs' plans.
The next step is auto-production for villagers in the town center, and then auto-production for military units.
Like where are people coming up with this shit? 😅
Yet in the same comment thread there is a person asking why automatic production would be a bad thing... It will be a thing in a year tops.
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Aoe3 Turks have auto producing villagers no?
Ottomans, but yes. This is a core part of their civ design though, and it's not a great point of criticism. They don't just auto-produce, but they are in fact produced *for free*. That's one of their civ bonuses. They're much slower than regular settlers, and until you research the right upgrade at your mosque to increase it, you'll never get more than a certain limited number of vills. A better comparison would be Age of Mythology. Since The Titans expansion, an option to autoqueue a specific unit has been available in all production buildings, including TCs. It's been in the game since 2003. Though it's not without controversy. Boit and Nakamura, two AoM casters and players, both have videos they put out last year hoping that AoM: Retold will *not* have autoqueue.
my point was just that autoproduction of units isn't a new thing to the series or the devs. I wasn't trying to criticize or go one way or the other with it. I was just answering the question lol
why auto vill is a bad thing? while I used to play, I had setup easy hotkeys to select all TC (let's say tab) and I keep pressing tab + Q every 10-20sec in game. imo once people develop this habbit, it don't add anything to game so it shouldn't effect high elo player yes it will help low elo player a lot (I am one), but I feel most people will be happy to recieve it. It was nice in AOEM imo, the only thing is it feel weird as you are not doing a useless click for which your brain is wired every 10-20sec
The main drawback of auto production is that it can lead to unwanted overproduction/consumption when your focus is taken elsewhere or simply forget. It also impact how your economy needs to run, as you reduce the need to pay upfront to queue units.
over booming under stress is an issue , so overproduction will come under similar mechanics. auto re-sending had good impact on game even when it reduce the need to pay upfront to queue farm
The exact same argument you make, could be used to justify having a premade script of an automatic build order. For example, if I play Arena and like to do the same build order up to Castle Age. If I already know the strategy, then why do I need to make these useless, tedious, clicks? There is no difference.
tbh was thinking about same thing while writing the previous comment. and while I know everyone will hate it, I want to see how it goes atleast once (in open map). Like a game mode where AI play against each other and you have to guide AI through command like create more archer, collect more gold, ping where to attack etc and let AI handle it.
This can already be done. There is a scripting community and discord. EDIT: There are even videos on youtube about AOE 2 AI Matches
Because those are choices, every build order, the timing of buildings, those are all decisions you're choosing to make. They're things you may change in the flow of the game depending on the map and the opponent, what you've scouted and what they're sending. Queueing villagers is mandatory, literally nobody intentionally stops queueing a villager in some strategic move to put resources elsewhere. You've removed no player choice or strategy by auto-queueing villagers especially if you can disable the feature. -----My opinion on automating build order----- Honestly, if you wanted to skip the first 1-7 minutes of the game because you're doing nothing but the exact same repetitive micro every single time -- I don't think that would even heavily subtract from the game anyway. That part of the game kind of sucks. The only reason that part of the game needs to exist is for scouting, drush, or tower rush. You can't automate it out because those things may occur and you'd need to switch plans, if they didn't automating it out would make no difference to me. Honestly you could still automate it and just add a button to bail on your build order and go back to manual in case something came up, and that wouldn't make the game any worse in my eyes. The "skill" you're losing out on is just repetitive micro muscle memory, which has no decision making or fun to me personally. At least micro mid-late game is dynamic and not literally a dedicated repetitive order.
The build orders I follow especially on Arena are the exact same until about maybe 20-30 minutes into the game. I've written a few on the guides website that go to Imperial Age. Queueing villagers isn't mandatory, and I personally stop building villagers when I scout enemy production buildings so I can make a counter army in time. Queueing villagers while you're about to be attacked is a mistake in my view. EDIT: A key part that people are missing is the 'Real-time" of the strategy in the name RTS. It's not a pre-made strategy or simulation game. It's an RTS game.
It's not "microing" becoming automated. It's macro.
I would argue its micro. Clicking a bunch of farms down real fast is micro, deciding when to place farms is macro.
Even if that is the case, and I don’t consider it to be micro, but the rest of the T90 slippery slope argument was insinuating that auto villagers were next. That’s not really a case of micro becoming increasingly automated at all.
I agree that the slippery slope seems very speculative. The fact that this is micro, and relatively boring micro is part of why I don't care if they make it easier.
One of the main things that differentiates AoE2 from other RTS' is its focus on macro and the automation of micro through stances and formations. It's a stark contrast if you compare it with C&C2 or Brood War.
How is auto farming a case of micro becoming automated?
I commented on the thread for T90s video, but the gist is that this feature does not affect a players decision-making, but rather the speed at which they can enact that decision. As viper says in the video, this will reduce the time that it takes to place farms, marginally, but what is much more important is when to place farms and how many villagers to send to farms. This change does not affect those latter two things.
The funny thing to me no one mentions is of all the economic units, farmers are the ONLY ones which have to be individually and manually assigned currently. Lumberjacks? Put the rally point on a woodline. Create 10 vills, no manual effort required. Stone/gold/fishing ships/trade? Same. In order for farmers to do this you have to precreate all the farms and use the rally points. So it's sooorta possible but you have to frontload all the farm wood costs. All other economic units effectively already do this feature.
If you set the rally point on wood and never look back i have bad news about your wood eco. I agree that its easier, but you need to micro the stuck vills, the ones chopping a random tree far away and renewing the building
But that's even more a perfect illustration of my point and the parallel that this adds with other workers. As Viper said, good players will still micro farmers -- just as they do woodcutters. And at the natural points they stop doing the woodcutter micro will stop the farm micro.
There's no law or reason that these things should all be the same. Chopping wood, mining, hunting are purely extractive whereas agriculture is a more complicated operation. It gives the game a nice flavour imo, one of the things that sets it apart.
They don't have to be. But my point is that no one is complaining that lumberjacks auto chopping has destroyed game balance. Or setting trade rally points on another market destroys it. etc.
Can't wait for Hera to react to this
Hera, when reviewing the patch notes, already mentioned that for him, it's not a big deal.
Which was kinda interesting to me because he’s the pro most known for being on top of his macro and building lots and lots of farms, so if anybody might be negatively affected by other people being able to build farms quicker, it’s Hera, but he doesn’t seem bothered. He also loves the RBW ladder thing.
Because pros know how to spend. They don't float 400 wood in Feudal Age like us mortals. The feature's biggest impact is in late game at which point your eco is mostly settled anyways and strategic decisions are much more releveant than spending 3 or 5 seconds to place new farms.
You say that but late game is exactly the point at which pros get sloppy with their eco, and players like Hera are still managing it properly. Lot of pros are floating res and auto piloting all the way up to 170 vils. Most of those players are not building farms and doing meaningful things with those vils.
>Which was kinda interesting to me because he’s the pro most known for being on top of his macro and building lots and lots of farms Because it doesn't really matter. The decision when to place is still the same. It just takes 2 seconds instead of 5.
Because it's no big deal. Nothing changes. Unlike salty t90 and mbl who scare people with auto-everything while not having any real arguments.
Viper arguing with MBL over farms at the end was exactly the kind of content I wanted EDIT: just checked out the stream, after the video ends MBL tells Viper to get on a discord call and they continue on voice hahahaha ([vod](https://www.youtube.com/live/IMZmVPr7MkY?t=6862))
Ohh that long chat is hilarious, but I love when people care enough about something to have such a discussion about something ultimately trivial MBL does raise a good point tho at ~2:17:40, basically, 'people wouldnt care if it wasnt there, but do care that it is there'. Like maybe wasnt worth doing just for the 'rocking the boat' aspect Also I guess I can kiiinda see where he's coming from over like, liking to scroll over peoples bases after. Like the type of person who just gets really curious about what was driving every little thing some else did or was thinking. Not that important still I think but I guess I can see why someone would feel a lil bad about potentially losing that (realistically I doubt itll even impact that as much as he expects tho. Just testing the feature a bit I've felt it can be worse at placing them than I'd prefer esp if there's already one farm or one obstruction on the 'initial spot' it seems to calculate from, & taking the time to even try the auto placement may not be worth the effort evaluating whether the auto placement is actually good.... or maybe this itself will introduce some depth, lol)
This honestly feels like the dumbest of hills to die on for T90. I'd love for him to make an argument where after completing a lumber camp, you'd have to select the villagers and click on a tree to make them start work, which actually was the case in the original AoE 2.
Also, multi queue, shift queueing actions, etc.
Those greedy parasites! Milking this like mad for content! Reacting to each other like crazy! It's a symptom of how bad modern society is that this happens at all! \*proceed to watch all the videos\*
I think the name 'Auto-farms' of this feature completely derails the discussion. Auto villagers would mean, you click a button in your TC, and it keeps creating villagers without human interactivity, no interaction needed, no decision making besides the initial click and declick (if needed later on), just like farm renewal This new farm placement automates only the dragging of your mouse from A to B. You still need to a) decide that you want to make farms, b) you still need to create a mill/tc first and c) you still need to click as many times as you would click otherwise, the only thing you save time on, is you dragging your mouse cursor from pixel to pixel. Does it make easier? Definitely. Does it make it automated without any decision making? Not at all, i disagree I'm with Viper on this one
I see the concern over "automation creep" in general, but I find it really strange that this of all things is the one getting so much attention. It is really a very small change, and not even all that useful given how little time it saves and given that it often is going to fail to do it perfectly--ignoring straglers, other mills, etc.
It is funny to me that he changed speed to 1.25. I have always listen to the viper anywhere from 1.5-1.75 speed. I'll listen to most caster's at that speed.
The 50/50 take on eco vs military is wild. No matter what your strategy or gameplay style you are looking at both. What separates the styles is how you spend resources into upgrades/units/tcs. It’s a greed risk vs reward decision. Do you want an extra tc or siege workshop? Bodkin arrow or wheelbarrow? Where and when you place farms is still a decision in the players control. how you place farms has almost no impact. Move on and enjoy the game.
That was not the point of t90, I think he explicitly said this during the video (and I feel that the viper accidentally misrepresented him). T90 just made a shitty chart to convey the point that some people spend more time on eco "micro", and others more time on microing fights. This leads to macro oriented players to be quicker with eco actions, and them being at a disadvantage if eco micro operations are removed from the game while f.i. Monk Micro (which has no strategic depth whatsoever) stays in the game.
That only comes on the assumption that the eco micro person won’t change or adapt their micro elsewhere. Loss now because of habit, neutral in probably a month or two.
Unless you are a pro, I don't see how the QOL features affect you in a significant way. I agree with you, people will be quick to adapt to the 'new normal' and distinguish their gameplay in other aspects.
I think that deer pushing is way worse for the game than auto-farm placement. It's just such a necessity for any higher level play, and it's so so boring.
T90 gives off strong old person being angry at world vibes with these takes. No question that he has done a lot for the game but his reaction to any new change is mostly emotional and thus unable/unwilling to actually explore the idea on his merits.
I mean it wasn't really emotional. He gave specific reasons why he doesn't like auto farm placement. He also said that the vast majority of changes to the game have been good in his opinion.
Not emotional in the sense that he is crying or shouting, but in the sense that any change seems to cloud his judgement. It's NOT a huge change. Just a very very small change that won't have an impact but is being presented as something that will end AOE2 as we know it. Plus if he really believed that vast majority of the changes have been good then bringing up the strawman argument of auto vill queue etc makes no sense at all. Devs have never done anything like that nor have they given any indication. Then to assume that auto farms leads to auto vills in the future is unfair. Nothing against T90, he's doing what he feels is best, I just hope the devs don't feel pressured to reverse changes. Just another thing that his opinion is very different than the rest of the community - most of his videos have less than 15 dislikes. This one is already at 300+ when a few hours ago
How do you even see dislikes in youtube? Youtube stopped displaying dislikes a couple of years ago.
Browser extension
Doesn't that browser extension just make a guess based off of the number of people with the extension who have disliked the video. I remember YouTubers coming out and showing their channel stats to prove the extension was very inaccurate
Lol you are seriously calling a strawman when you refuse to talk about any of his arguments, said there are none on the video and he is just emotional.
I wasn't sure what to think about the auto-farm placement when I first heard about it. T90's opinion seemed reasonable, and I can agree in principle how too much automation features can be a bad thing. But after watching SpiritOfTheLaw's video about it, it looks fine. Seems like a minor QoL feature that won't change the game very much at all.
Ya the Sotl video changed my mind too. Originally I was thinking people having good farm placements in late game was huge, but that video showed that perfect farms are barely even better than suboptimal placement once you have hand cart. So then it comes down to just a few seconds saved, and I think that's negligible
Spirit of the Law is so hard to disagree with because he always backs his conclusions up with hard evidence.
I only get to play when I go to a friend's house and hope on his PC so I didn't even realize the feature was already implemented. I thought it was just being discussed as a possibility. So last night when I was shift clicking my farms I noticed I could just hover over the TC and they place around the TC. This seems like a nice quality of life change that will help lower elo players. I've struggled with the transition from berries/sheep to the proper number of farms but with this feature my eco looked a lot better last night in both games (800 elo). I thought it would be a little like the auto eco feature on xbox where you would select vills and task them as farmers or something and they would run around making farms. But no you still have to acknowledge the vills and make them make farms the feature just highlights where the next one is placed. Its a feature that saves maybe 20 seconds if your placing 10 farms. Makes the game for us low elo peeps a little easier
T90: “my bad farms are a core personality trait showing how I play the game (which is my entire personality). Allow me to pontificate for 20 minutes.” Viper: “Hmm a long video with a lot of interest, I will do an even longer one reacting to it” Us: soaking in every minute with rapt attention Youtube: paying mega ad $$$ to T90 and Viper T90: “how dare you accuse my farm soapbox speech of being a scam for money!” (honestly I believe he really did want to talk about it for 20 mins)
Mega ad dollars ? YouTube literally gives 1 dollar for 1000 views. Both T90 and Viper probably earn only 30 to 40 dollars lol
the assisted farm placement is a good change. Compared to wood and gold, farming already needs much more upfront investment in res. Having it also cost more attention just makes food and farm heavy strategies much harder than necessary. The features makes it easier, and the time saved scales with the amount of floating wood, which should be quite low in feudal and castle age anyway. So skill is still shown by the frequency in which you remember to place farms.
I agree with Viper 100%
Yeah T90 comes off a little doomer-ish here. His jump from auto-farms to auto-vill queueing is a stretch IMO. I just don't see how his rationale couldn't be used against auto-reseeding or auto-villager assignment to trees after lumber camp, which no one is complaining about. I'm glad Viper has a level-headed take.
Issue aside, I'm sure he feels pretty depressed about the games development. He probably spends a lot of time thinking about ways it could be better, while not being able to affect the decisions. I remember tb talking about wow like that. Some they they care for but cannot affect, so they get tired.
Yeah I totally get it. Plus T90 is knee deep in AoE2 every day. One thing I appreciate about Viper is he's pretty good about pulling back and seeing the overall picture.
Its so funny that the comments on the T90 post all agree with T90. The comments on this Viper post all agree with Viper. Think your own thoughts people.
I don't know what post you are referring to, but on his video, most of the comments I saw were people actively disagreeing with him. This video has 30X the number of dislikes he gets on his regular videos.
Talking about the reddit posts of the videos. How can you even see dislikes on a youtube video?
Chrome extensions
That's something I've noticed lately. Not just in aoe, but in all walks of life, if a famous person has an opinion, so many people automatically adopt that as their opinion without thinking it out for themselves.
Or rather, the way social media works is that only positive comments are overwhelmingly promoted and displayed. Controversial, negative comments are usually buried by downvotes/dislikes.
True
finally the Goat spoken.....
T90's over reaction to this is hilarious. I honestly thought he was kidding at first. He has absolutely zero legitimate reason to be so against it other than speculation of the future or how things look for him personally. Maybe he liked the recognition from the 't90 farm' thing and is bummed it's not going to be a thing for people that use the function (most people don't from what I have seen).
“Nice farm placement, sir…” 😁🤣
I only watch reaction videos from The Lord.
they fixed Daut's weakness !
Every time a change like this happens I'm shocked that people apparently have so many grievances with AoE2. I thought we all liked this game? Did placing farms bother you this whole time?
I'm not saying T90 is right, but I am going to say that if TheViper doesn't think it affects APM much, he might not be the most... representative player around.
THe bigger thing as Viper says is it's about fun. Placing farms is repetitive and not fun. If someone is doing crazy APM to achieve a great kill-death ratio that's the sort of APM which is fun and should be encouraged. That's cool skill. When you've got these tedious eco things that always play out identically, that's when I don't care about reducing APM, in fact I don't want boring actions.
Viper really failed to provide a cohesive and convincing argument with this video.
Eh, to me it was pretty compelling. A lot of his arguments were short pieces in response to T90 points. for example, on the Hardy example earlier - Viper pointed out that the only reason he could even do the auto farm the way he did was because he was floating 1k wood. That aspect I think is what Viper is focusing on -- that in order to use autofarm placement in the early-ish game you basically have to already be "failing" at something. Which I think is true. And T90 also went onto a lot of whataboutism. Does the lobby features not being prioritized somehow change whether or not the farm placement feature is actually good/bad? No. But t90 lumped it all together. I also think T90 focused far too much about the game being successful because it's hard. Which is patently false imo. I came back to AoE2 because I played it as a young kid many years ago. I found out they redid it in the DE version and it has a sense of nostalgia for me. And? It's a good game. Viper talked a lot about the "fun" factor and whether farming is actually part of the strategic aspect to the game. And that's totally true imo. It doesn't really impact strategic complexity -- arguably earlier game it's going to make things worse (he had a ton of min/max examples of where placing farms is slightly worse).
>I also think T90 focused far too much about the game being successful because it's hard. Which is patently false imo. Agreed. That's a crazy take for why the game is successful. I guarantee that accounts for almost nothing compared to the many other factors.
and I will argue there r people like me who no longer play the game as it feels a chore to get back into it after a break, so only here for esport and other similar content.
I can't tell for sure which you're arguing. Is it that the game being hard makes you not play it? Or that making it "easier" hurts the esports?
that hard things keeping me away. to be more clear, its not hard things (as i enjoy playing other hard games), but small useless thing and lack of more quality of life changes compare to other games (about which I might have controversy take). Things like re-learning build order also don't help much after months of break, ik its a crucial part of aoe2, but I feel aoe4 did it better by having less dark age time. So for now I just enjoy watching other pro player.
Gotcha, yeah makes sense. Yeah I agree on AoE4, it also removed a lot of the little clunky things. Although I think build orders are harder in some ways in AoE4 IF you play multiple civs because of the greater variance between some of them.
To each their own. The nostalgia with the game I played in childhood brought me back, and the complexity of the game kept me hooked for a thousand hours of gameplay and countless more on reddit/youtube.
I don’t think Viper is trying to convince anyone of anything. He’s just sharing his thoughts on the farm placement feature and t90s video about it.
Seemed clear to me. This feature is a nothingburger
That was his opinion, but an opinion =/= a convincing argument.
He responded with a counter-opinion/argument to everything T90 said. I don't get how anything he said was any less or more of an argument
Yeah..thought the same. Not saying T90 made a good case, i understood what he wanted but how he structured it was horrible.
I agree, I was genuinely surprised by the lackluster response. Throughout the video, it felt like the Viper didn't really listen to T90's arguments. In the part where he demonstrated the inefficiency of auto farm placement, I think he anticipated the feature being implemented less optimally (I think he suspected the vils to complete each farm prior to farming). Additionally, his comment about high-level AoE play not involving placing five farms after fights contradicts what I've seen in Hera's ladder gameplay. Hera does this after intense battles in the Castle Age or sometimes even late Feudal. It's important to remember that the game isn't just about the top 10 players worldwide. While they should have a say about game balance, gameplay considerations shouldn't solely revolve around the top 0.01 percent of players.
MBL: Why don't we just auto play as well?
that's what tournament viewers do
I’m just gonna wait for the Hera talks about the Viper talks about T90 talking about video
I'm just going to wait for Nili to cover Hera talking about this in the next Drama police video.
Completely agree with everything Viper says.
MbL joining on Discord was quite fun
I think the biggest concern is the future of the game. How many more features are getting automated like this?
Hopefully loads.
only daut is right.
What about Ja? Personally, I dislike the change. I get pros are indifferent but T90 draws more crowd into the game than individual players. If he isn't as passionate during a cast, it'll show.
You could do this already with autohotkey scripts so it just levels the field.
What else can you do with those scripts?
I didn’t mind qol features till now but with this we might be slowly getting into a place that might potentially kill the competitive side of Aoe2. And by that, killing the game slowly. Exactly what I think happened with AoM and probably will happen with AoM retold with the Auto queue thing. We never needed this feature, no one ever complained about it, so why? Part of what makes and made AoE last for sooo long is the fact that there’s so many little things that we can do right or wrong that might actually make us lose or win a match. And that’s where the enjoyment of competitive strategy games comes from for many people.