Age of Empires Online Heaven

In the 18 months that I've been in this role and on this project I've had a blast interacting with everyone as well as building up the best community team I could find. I've been with this project since before we publicly announced the title; and have watched this community grow through beta, through 3 civ wipes, through launch, to now - the 6 month anniversary of Age of Empires Online.

Saying goodbye is bittersweet, as I've been presented with an opportunity I can't turn down, but it means leaving my team and all of you. It pains me to write this and to leave a fun project and a great team, but I'm leaving you in incredibly capable hands. The future is bright for Age Online, and I'm excited for all the hard work we've been doing behind the scenes to be revealed, as well as what will happen in the future.

Quoted from BatsyBatsy:

This week we're incredibly excited to finally reveal our plans for our Season Pass holders. For months everyone has heard that we'll be taking care of our Season Pass subscribers, but we haven't been able to go into detail. Enough of that! Soon is now here and it's time to finally divulge our plans!

We're very pleased to announce that we will be extending the Season Pass offer to a total of 2 years from August 16th 2011. This means everyone who purchased a Season Pass when the offer was available, will receive ALL the Civilization and Booster releases for Age of Empires Online through August 15th 2013 at no additional cost. This is our way of showing our appreciation to those users who went out on a limb when we launched and purchased the Season Pass.

Quoted from BatsyBatsy:

Last week, we also mentioned we'd be announcing several changes that will be up and coming. Besides the extension of the Season Pass offer, we're also going to be changing our pricing structure. This is just the first of many changes and additions that will be coming in the future.

Effective Friday February 17th, on the Xbox.com Marketplace and the Empire Bazaar, Civilizations are priced at $9.99, Bundles are $9.99, Boosters are $4.99, and Vanity packs remain at $4.99. The prices will be similarly adjusted for other regions. These are not sale prices, these are the new prices going forward for current and future Civs and boosters. While we don't have any details on future bundles to announce in this week's update, one of our long-term goals is to accompany future content updates with fresh, attractive bundle packages.

Quoted from BatsyBatsy:

We're also glad to confirm that the LIVE team has issued a fix for the disconnect error that was related to the message that pops up when friends sign into LIVE. Users should no longer see disconnects from the LIVE service related to the friend notification. And if you've turned these notifications off, feel free to turn them back on again!

You've seen us mention many times over the last 6 months that we've learned many lessons with Age of Empires Online and Free to Play. We're eager to start applying some of what we've learned and continue to improve on everyone's experience. We're also very excited to be able to offer the extension of the Season Pass as well as this price drop. Again, thank you to everyone who's stuck with us and offered up suggestions. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised with what the future holds.

Quoted from BatsyBatsy:

The first thing we'd like to address is why we've been so quiet. Based on player feedback, we're going to be changing Age of Empires Online quite a bit, and we're now at a point where we feel comfortable talking about some of those changes. We always knew what we wanted to do, but we had to figure out when we could do it. We understand that it was frustrating for some players, and we appreciate everyone's patience.

The next few updates will feature a lot of information. This update will discuss changes to matchmaking. Next we'll unveil the plan for Season Pass holders, and subsequent updates will include Skirmish changes, core gameplay changes, patching changes, and more detailed and specific discussions of the contents of the "bugchilada" update.

Quoted from BatsyBatsy:

The next update for Age of Empires Online includes continued tweaking of the matchmaking experience and party systems. The end result should be an improved multiplayer experience for both PvPers and PvEers.

First up, the update will finally allow Party matchmaking in Sparta PvP. You will now be able to start matches with another player in your party for both Standard and Champion modes of PvP. You'll be matched with other fellow 2v2ers or random 2 player parties. Each player will also post to the leaderboards in Champion mode; currently there is no "team" entry. The Party 2v2 feature also allows Free players to experience Champion PvP and post to the leaderboards providing they've been invited to a party by a Premium player.

Work has also been done on the matchmaking algorithms used for Standard and Champion PvP to improve the quality of matches. This mostly involves increasing or decreasing the times for "expanding" searches outside of levels and TrueSkill ranks when searching for Standard PvP matches, and what happens when the LIVE system switches players from being a host or when joining.

Quoted from BatsyBatsy:

We'll be rolling out a new and improved Matchmaking UI with our next update. You can view a screenshot of the new UI here (Shown above). The differences that you'll notice are there's now a description shown for what type of match you're looking for, a timer to let you know how long you've been searching, and has icons to indicate when you've been matched with players. These icons are the red and green dots at the bottom of the screenshot. When a dot flips from red to green, that means you've been matched with someone. Once all the dots are green, that means your match is a go and about to start. If someone drops out of the queue, the dot flips back to red. Hopefully these changes help users searching for matches get a better idea of how long it'll take you to match and where they're at in the matching process.

Another new feature will be our new "Find Party" feature. This feature lets you do a simple search for other players who are also looking for a Party in your level range. The current implementation uses player level for matching up party members, starting with the same level and extending outwards up to five levels. Users will be able to access this feature via the "Party Invite" button in the Capital City UI. There's a new button, "Find", that starts a search for other players in your level range who are also interested in forming a Party. Once it finds another player also looking for a Party, it automatically sends an invite and, if accepted, you're in a Party! You can exit the Friends List UI, and the search will continue running in the background while you're doing other things in your city or in a region; it will also continue searching even when you switch regions.

If this feature is found to be useful, we will look to extend the functionality in future updates to allow specific searches such as "Find PvP Party," "Find Arena Party," "Find Co-op Party," "Find Skirmish Party," etc.

Again, I want to thank everyone for sticking with us for the past 6 months. We're very excited to show off all the hard work that we've been doing behind the scenes to Age of Empires Online.

Welcome to week 24!

This week is chock-full of Celtic goodness! Not only are we going to go into a little more detail on some of our favorite parts of the Celts civilization, but we also have a video! We felt just talking about these guys wouldn't do them justice, so in the video you'll see a couple Celt quests.
The arrival of the Celts is quickly approaching, and we hope to be able to give you a firm date in the near future on when you can expect them. Today we wanted to talk about a few of our favorite units, techs, and tips with this new civ.

A few favorite Celt units

Our friend, the Woad Raider, is an infantry unit that is known for his speed. If you're a player who favors a hit-and-run play style, this will be an instant go-to unit for you. You'll need to make sure you keep an eye on this unit, though, as he's not too durable.

The Ram is another of our staple units. They're quick and expendable, and they aren't a clunky siege unit—all while looking pretty cool. Their kryptonite is the fact that they operate best while in close range. They'll do damage while right up in your face, but they are hard to protect whilst dealing said damage.

Druids are a great Age 2 unit that are all about healing and empowering other units, but they also know how to fight when things are looking grim. While Druids are incredibly handy, they don't come without a cost. They require a separate building to build from (the Sacred Grove) and are also susceptible to focused attacks.

A few favorite Celt techs

Furor Celtica is an incredibly powerful charge attack that screams awesome and allows Woad Raiders to easily close in on ranged units.

Star Tech: Morrigan's Swiftness causes infantry to move faster than any other civ. And it's completely unique to the Celts!

Call to Arms will make your enemy think twice before picking a fight with your villagers.

The Celts play a little differently than any of the other three civs we've already released. Two of the more obvious differences are strategy options called Sacrifice and Sacred Deer. With Sacrifice, you can buff your units for a massive fight, giving you an extra edge to attain victory. The Augur can sacrifice animals to give your units or buildings a boost. Sacred Deer are pretty self-explanatory: You can breed your own little band of herdable animals. Feel free to use them for food or for sacrifices. Cheers for sustainable farming methods!

In addition, the quote button should be back on the forums next week. It was a little buggy when we rolled it out so we had to roll back. Things have been fixed and you should see it on Tuesday!

Happy weekend!

What can I earn for completing Skirmish Hall matches?

• Right now, each time you complete a match you earn XP, Coin and 2 chests. One of the chests uses a custom Skirmish Hall loot table, the other chest uses the existing loot table. Because of this, one chest is different than the others.
• Additionally, there are global quests which award additional chests (that use the Skirmish Hall loot table), Coin and XP. To unlock these quests, be sure to complete the quest, “You Never Forget Your First Ten” - and then accept the following quests:
  • "Taking Out the Trash" - Defeat any 10 Skirmish Hall opponents and earn a scaled bonus of XP and Coin + 4 Chests
  • "Cleaning House" - Defeat 10 fierce or stronger opponents and earn a scaled bonus of XP and Coin + 5 Chests
  • "Kicking Them to the Curb" - Defeat 10 unstoppable opponents and earn a scaled bonus of XP and Coin + 6 Chests
• There are over 20 unique pieces of level 40 skirmish gear in the loot tables. The chance to earn these is the same as the chance to earn any other level 40 piece of gear in the skirmish hall.
• Legendary gear is NOT currently available in the loot tables the Skirmish Hall uses.

I'm a level 40 player. How do I earn level 40 gear?

• You do NOT have to play a 1v4 against unstoppable AI to earn level 40 gear.
• Level 40 gear can be earned by changing team sizes, AI difficulty, map size, starting resources, victory condition, and ally difficulty. Experiment with all the settings to find the best rewards. Generally speaking, the longer you think the match might take given a collection of settings, the better the rewards.
• If you want more chances at level 40 gear, be sure to complete the global quests. They will always roll level appropriate gear, which also makes them worth pursuing if you are still working your way up to level 40.
• Keep in mind that even if you follow these guidelines, you are never guaranteed to get level 40 items, you will only be guaranteed a level 40 chest, which may or may not yield level 40 items.

Will the rewards for Skirmish Hall ever improve?

• Rewards for the game will always be something we tweak and improve. We will keep an eye on how people play the quests and adjust rewards accordingly in future patches. If a change is merited, we will not hesitate to make it.
• Skirmish Hall is an end game of sorts for some players and we consider it an alternative to the campaign quests. We have found that many people who complete the main campaign of an RTS will continue to play skirmish as an extension of that experience for a very long time. While it would be ideal to have rewards for all modes of the game perfectly balanced, the goal of Skirmish Hall has always been first and foremost to allow configuration in a way that you find challenging.

The AI is so hard/predictable/easy/not what I want/etc. Why did you make it this way?

• Skirmish Hall is meant to provide a user configurable challenge appropriate for players of all skill levels and types. It has gone through extensive difficulty testing with many groups of people, ranging from casual RTS players all the way up to our best balance team players.
• The reason you can configure so many options is to give you a means to practice and experiment with a wide variety of offensive and defensive strategies on every available PvP map.
• The choice to make an AI predictable - having the infantry focused hero primarily create infantry, even if you build counters, or choose a naval map, is intentional. This is a means for you to practice how to counter specific strategies. Specific counter builds should be effective against an AI in the early game, but as time goes on in the match, every AI should adjust its strategy to counter your units.
• If you want more strategy variety and less sandboxing from opponents, fight against the randomized tactics hero.

Quoted from Ian Vogel:

The fully configurable Skirmish Booster Pack allows you to choose every element of PvE gameplay, from resources, teams, and victory conditions to opponent civilizations, difficulty, and strategy.

Speaking of rewards, the greater the challenge, the bigger they get. In addition to being rewarded at the end of each successful match, there will be several global quests that allow you to earn unique advisors, vanity trophies, and additional experience, coin, and chests.

Key Features:

• Fight on more than 20 different battlegrounds.
• All units are automatically unlocked and battle-ready
• Supports 2-player co-op against up to 4 computer-controlled enemies.
• Battle 9 unique computer opponents.
• Configure maps, teams, victory conditions, and resources.
• Customize AI ally and opponent civilizations, difficulty, and strategy.
• Earn new advisors, vanity trophies, and custom gear.
• Countless hours of gameplay await!

Quoted from Ian Vogel:

Skirmish AI Improvements and adjustments:

• Computer-controlled allies and opponents gather resources much more efficiently and more intelligently seek out new sources of resources when a source is depleted.
• They also defend storehouses placed throughout the map.
• Enemy opponents will start with a small group of units that patrol their Town Center. The number of units scales with difficulty.
• Enemy town centers do drastically increased damage to villagers to prevent villager rushes.
• Computer-controlled allies and opponents get Advisor cards. The rarity of these increases with difficulty
• Enemy opponents aggressively research upgrades for units most commonly used in their strategy.
• When starting with a lot of resources, computer opponents will age up faster and build lots of military factories early on.
• Computer-controlled allies and enemies will send the herdables (cows, goats, etc) back to its base and the villagers will gather from them.
• When computer controlled allies and opponents are under attack, they will garrison villagers and then put them back to work when the threat is gone.
• Computer-controlled villagers will repair damaged buildings.
• Computer-controlled allies and opponents will increase attack sizes with each attack.
• Computer-controlled players will build Wonders if the Wonder victory condition is set.
• Computer-controlled tower placement has been significantly improved and AI will build towers at storehouses that are far enough from their Town Center. If the computer-controlled strategy is not turtle focused, they will still have a random chance to build some towers around their Town Center.
• Egyptian computer-controlled allies and opponents will use their starting Priestess of Ra to empower their Town Center.
• Computer-controlled allies and enemies build caravans and ramp up the number they use as they age up.
• Computer-controlled allies and enemies make more effective use of docks, transport ships, and the different flavors of naval units on water heavy maps.
• Computer-controlled allies and enemies use priest abilities much more effectively