Age of Empires has been enjoying a massive resurgence in popularity and relevance in the last year or two. With a remake of Age of Empires 3 on the way and progress on Age of Empires 4 continuing forward, the fan base is constantly excited for what comes next.
But what comes next can’t take precedence over what’s already here, and the developers at World’s Edge have been hard at work to make sure that the wildly popular Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition remains honed and improved.
The most recent improvement came earlier this week with a batch of hotfixes set to help fix up the title a bit. While many of these were focused on fixing bugs and crashes, some came to stop a rampant cheating problem that had arisen recently.
This cheating issue had grown to be quite severe, with notable names speaking out against it and asking the developers to do something about it on Twitter. There were even a few cases of streamers highlighting when you could tell that someone was cheating.
One such way was researching technologies in the game before it was mathematically possible for them to be able to afford them. Others were of similar make up, such as an opponent fielding an army larger than they had had time to train.
The following hotfixes have been applied:
- Fixed a crash when joining 3v3 and 4v4 ranked matches, as well as when loading a garrisoned Ram onto a Transport Ship
- Fixed issues with the Trophy Case mod which was revealing the location of enemy Town Centers by displaying their trophies through the fog of war
- Updated the Calculating Research FX mod to clarify it will only display while researching new tech
- Updated the Sheep Auto-Scout Reward to clarify it to only be available during the May-hem event and is exclusive to single-player content
- Implemented numerous countermeasures to help stop external third-party cheating programs
The thing about cheating, unfortunately, is that the players that decide to do so usually aren’t stopped by countermeasures. Instead, they typically just find another way to cheat in a safer, less detectable way, continuing to mess up the game they’re playing.
As such, World’s Edge has asked that players report any individuals – and the programs they use – to the developers so that they can act accordingly. Reports should be messaged to aoesupport@microsoft.com with as much detail as you can muster.
While there likely won’t be an immediate end to the cheating problem, it’s great to know that the developers aren’t just letting it slide and doing nothing about it. With these fixes, we’ll hopefully see a significant drop in cheating, as well as much-needed fixes to the other problems addressed by the patch.
