Seamless experience \o/

[ByFstugan]

This suggestion I know it's not only me that really wanna see, since the game was first created in a not so smooth and user-friendly way.

The idea is that the online-experience should be a constant joy of presence in the game that's not interupted buy loosing contact with the community you're logged into. When you become a part of it and need to log out/in to switch civ your chats get cleared and you miss all that's said during logged out time. Also if you got much to move back and forth you get pretty much disconnected from what others talk about or if something you looking for is for sale.

Also there is a stupid mechanic that binds item with a civ and not your account, this should change (suggestion #2).

So, in short, my suggestions is this:
1) You should log in your account, not one of your civs.
- Hence you should be able to switch between the civs in similar manner as you move between cities.
- Also, very important - you should NOT be logged out from the chat-channels when changing civs, as you're not when you move between cities.

2) All items found on one civ should be able to use on any civ ON THAT ACCOUNT, so the Empire vault should be opened to transfer this kind of item within the account. Also make the Empire Vault sort stuff according to some item list and not put everything in some random order.
- So you don't have to sell your nice Hammer of Kaveh when you switch to the new Divine Hammer of Contruction i.e, but instead can move that to another lev 40 civ that got crap hammer. This way we don't have to vendor ALOT of things we might have good use for in 5 other civs.
- Atm it's a real mess to open a fully expanded Empire Vault and search for your things. For example, if you look for a material you can filter materials, but then there is a total mess. Here they should be ordered in order of where they are production as prio #1 and in order of quality as prio #2, so they would appear in the order on this page i.e: http://ageofempiresonline.wikia.com/wiki/Material
- Also, make Empire vault stack all stackable things, it's very tedious to put a new material in the vault when you find on quest or empty your workshops. You now need to Open vault -> Sort by material -> Find the right material(s) in the mess in front of you -> Remove it from the vault -> Stack the new with the old -> Put back in vault. This could be changed to -> Put in vault, done.


3) Make coin-salde shared between all civs in same manner as the Emipre points is.
- It's a brutally non-user-friendly enviroment atm if you need to buy something but your coins is spread over your accounts or on one of them only.

4) Remove the "logged out due to inactivty"
- The game is "Age of Empires ONLINE", not "Age of Empires we kick you out if you sit still". The online community experience you might wanna be a part of even if you get stuck on toilet or need to go to the store. I think this function is in conflict with the whole game idea, are there any real reason you should not be able to idle online.

 

[Kevsoft]

Thanks for the suggestions. Here are some quick responses to all those points:
1.) Could be possible, but that's probably a technical challenge. That you get logged out of the chat server should not be the case though.
2.) We know that. Should be possible, we'll see how we can handle it.
3.) That's something we might optimize once we get to a stable state.
4.) We won't remove it, but we can increase the timeout though.

 

[Andy P XIII]

With regard to transferring already equipped gear from one civ to the other, I think everyone would appreciate that kind of flexibility, but before that kind of change should be implemented, we need to consider the affect it would have on the in-game economy.

Right now, gear enters circulation when people find it in chests and exits circulation when people vendor it (or equip it). If we allow people to transfer used gear to their other civs, they can avoid vendoring it. Anytime someone does that, their demand for gear on the open market is accordingly reduced. Any reduction in demand for a good naturally reduces its market price. Similarly, this change would make it easier and faster for us to gear our civs (at least up to a certain point).

I am not particularly sensitive to us protecting market prices for gear and I do not know that we necessarily need to preserve the slow speed at which we each gear our civs. However, I know that others have very strong opinions about the need for us to encourage a robust trading system among players. Some people spend lots of energy playing the gear market. While I don't, I think it's really cool to see people find different approaches to enjoying this game.

Ultimately, my gut says that this proposed change to allow us to transfer used gear may improve the game more than it would harm it. We can always adjust the market in other ways moving forward, too.

 

[Ryddag]

#1:
I agree this would be great, but this require change in game code not server code, so we can only do this with "patch" and i am not sure it will be easy to do.

#2:
I think the current system is good for game economy, i like this idea of "bound" item like this user made a real choice when it equip something.
Also to allow thoose item to be transfered beetween civ is to set the field 'isTrabdable" to true, the empire vault look for this to know if the item can be transfered into it, but set this to true will allow the item to be tradable again so very bad idea, so only way will be todo an patch like for #1.

For auto-stack its something who is done server side so yes we can do it, its planned but low priority for now since its more a "quality of life" features.

#3:
Coin is managed server side, it will be easy to do this change, we can do an poll about it but i think everyone will agree.

#4:

This something who need to be change in game code too (its not server side) so require an "patch", but anyway its a bad idea all online game have this features for good reason don't waste server resource for nothing. And the current timeout is not so bad 10 min i think maybe even more.

 

[ByFstugan]

#2:
I think the current system is good for game economy, i like this idea of "bound" item like this user made a real choice when it equip something.
Also to allow thoose item to be transfered beetween civ is to set the field 'isTrabdable" to true, the empire vault look for this to know if the item can be transfered into it, but set this to true will allow the item to be tradable again so very bad idea, so only way will be todo an patch like for #1.

Not sure if I misunderstood or maybe you here, but wanna check. My meaning was that the Empire Vault should be opened to take in things that are not tradable, so you could trade them between your own civs. Hence the Empire vault should NOT look if "the field 'isTrabdable" is true any more, but instead allow such no matter that field. It seems you approach this question from the item perspective and think what will happen if you change that field on the item? Or is this just to clever so I'm totally lost?

Also, I've done all civs lev 40 once, and since AoEo live died I now have to start over, and it's REALLY REALLY slow to find items since so much of the loot is pure crap. I just realized another suggestion I'm gonna do about this topic Anyhow, most civs will have 90% crap while leveling, since that goes rather fast and you don't find new/better items for many slots. So it would be nice to be able to re-use some of the things you found when leveling the other civs, then you still just will have a little better gear on the trip to lev 40, whereafter most of that will be vendored anyhow.

About post lev 40 and such, there still is a choice to do if you'll bind the item to yourself/the civ and make it impossible to sell or trade with other players. The only difference will be that what you find you can still use if you find something better for your favorite civ. It feels like such a waste to vendor a divine hammer for 300 coins just beause you wanted the best of the best boosted hammer on Greek i.e and not on Celts. I know many feel some level of frustration with this and like this idea due to this fact.