Number of Players and Team Composition for PVP in Age of Empires Online

[Dorkfoot]

I didn't get to play the beta much, and never got to the PvP portion of the game, but from what I understand, is there only 1v1 and 2v2 in PvP multiplayer? I have played AoE2, AoM and AoE3, and each one had at least FFA (Free for all) and up to 8 players. AoE2 was always the most robust, with any team combination, dynamic in-game diplomacy (switching allies’ mid-game) and even the option for multiple players to control one civilization.

[AZUL]

I'm a bit worried when I hear that only 3 of my family and/or friends can play in one game. For a game that strives to be the perfect marriage of RTS and social gaming, there seems to be a fundamental lack of RTS and social gaming here. With the pedigree that comes with Robot, Gas Powered Games, and Microsoft Studios, I was hoping for not only an evolution in genre, but also an improvement in gameplay and player interaction.

[RockOn]

I'm sure there are technological hurdles and such, but I would have hoped that one of the main goals from the beginning of development was a robust and genre defining multiplayer feature set. I know the people responsible are capable of such. And if the answer is "1v1 and 2v2 is all the AoEO community needs and asks for" than that's fine. It's a beautiful game, and I still have my old AoEs to play. This has turned into a question and a rant, but I guess what I'm asking is; if no more than 4 players can participate in narrowly defined parameters such as 1v1 or 2v2.

[Squibbit]

I hope so do put it in. My thinking is they want to add features in later on that you have to pay for. They know that a lot of people want 3v3 4v4 FFA in the game so why not leave it out and make people pay to get a load of extra cash? It's not ideal for us but as a free to play title sometimes they have to cheat their way out of players to earn their money. Yet they may not do this and leave it out the game altogether who knows but like you say it seems a weird aspect of the game to leave out since it has been a key feature in all the other games.

[Wyvern]

They more than likely will be implementing this in the future. They are missing a lot of PVP aspects of the game because pre-launch they didn't focus much on PVP. They focused more on PVE because when the game went live, it will be easier to add on the PVP content instead of the PVE content. Everything that we are asking for in PVP takes a lot of time to implement. We must remember that GPG has only had about 2-3 months to work on ALL of the stuff we want. We can't, and shouldn't expect them to be done by now. It is too earlier.

[ApplePowerPC]

If these were simple changes or features, they'd be in the game today. All of these things are do-able, we know how to do them as we've supported them in our own games, but they take time as they are some of the most complicated features to develop. A replay system alone will take multiple months of development. Team ranked will require we implement a team UI and data structure to store on servers and a completely new leader board system and server infrastructure to store them, since Live doesn't support teams.