Say what you want but Old School forums still are miles better platform for serious and organized discussion compared to these discords, reddit's and such casual places where you can spam dautGrass emotes and post some super funny meme pictures of trebuches all day every day. Also having site on the hands of community instead of just foolishly relying on external sites should be highly valued.
I need aoezone. It's the true community site and will not shutdown when Microsoft wants to like the old aoe forum. Even just for lurking about upcoming tournament it's great. Discord doesn't have a proven business model and will sell out at some point. I rather fund you directly. But do you need the money or do you just don't want to admin it anymore? Maybe some community members can help you out on that part.
Threads/Scheduling/Recorded Games/Drama/Hypothetical Player scenarios (the latter two aren't the main reasons).
As well as the calendar, birthday notifications, reactions to posts, discussions which dont often get derailed. I find discussions more engaging and more serious here*
I think we need it currently. If it is the amount of work and the required money that lead to you thinking of shutting it down, there is always the possibility to find people who would be interested in helping out. Maybe there is someone who would be willing to completely take it over even. Maybe there is someone in the community who could easily provide the host space required because he runs servers for a living or for a hobby.
On the other hand, the way this site has evolved it is also not really optimal. It is just trying to put too many solutions for different problems in one place. And I guess not all of the functions are fully optimised due to the constraints of a single forum software and the fact that one man who is mostly concerned with keeping it somewhat together is putting in most of the work while trying to please everyone.
I think, a lot of stuff could change for the better while simultaneously taking load of your shoulders (eventually..). This is my analysis and outline of how a new aoezone or an alternative to aoezone could be run:
The main pillars (of AoEZone) are:
News (Anouncements, Calendar, Results, and possibly Streambar)
Forum (Social, Tournaments,...)
Recording Archive
The news part, which is probably a pretty huge part in terms of traffic, is hardly accessible to outsiders. If I had to start aoezone from scratch, I would make the main page more like a blog or news site. There would be proper anouncement posts of tournaments, written based on the information given by the host. Not focussing too much on specific rules, but more on general information and hype. Something a proper (esport) news outlet which doesn't care about laming rules, color policies etc. can easily comprehend and would be happy to cite. Tournaments could have way more publicity if we could provide them with a professional looking news source that they gladly return to on their own even. This blog could also have posts about recent updates, maybe guides, weekly rund-up threads etc. Sidebars would still have rating, streams, calendar, and additionally tournament results.
The forums would be detached and linked somewhere on the site. The hardcore forum people can still skip the main page and go straight to "...forum/whatsnew" whenever they start their browser. I would probably cut most of the social forums. Actual community building, bonding, and apparantly even dating is done on discord, twitch etc. You can still archive the old stuff for nostalgy if you want. Tournament discussions posts, signup posts, or announcement posts as we have would be the main part of the forums and relevant threads could be linked below the blog posts. General gameplay discussion (e.g. how to counter a team with two spanish players) can still be a part, but can honestly also stay on reddit.
The whole recording archive should be transmitted into a seperate project and linked as well. It can have all the aoezone recordings, voobly recordings, tournament recordings, DE recordings (if we get them) and offer them both with a manual search engine and the required API for the various projects that already analyse some of those recordings.
The advantages are that different pillars can be run by entirely different people on different software and on different host servers. This would require less work to integrate everything on a single forum software, have better performance/stability, and would distribute costs and work,... All of this would lead to a more slim main page with more focus on news than discussion. This could lead to more actual unique visitors per time frame on a leaner site, which in combination should be good in terms of add revenue, sponsored posts, posts with reflinks,...
Apart from what has already been stated about funding and how we can help to contribute I'd like to return to your other reason for a potential shut down; getting older and wanting more time for family. Is there any possibility to identify selected people in the community who could help you with the maintenance and potential feature development?
None of us take this site for granted, like Dogao I check this site more than I'd like to admit. If you decide to keep on trucking I will register for a paid membership for sure.
Regardless how you decide: thank you for all the efforts.
aoczone/aoezone is and will always be the main place for AOE2 competitive scene... so yeah just put the monthly costs and we will be happy to contribute
The calendar and event forums here are the only reliable way I know to get an accurate snapshot of everything that's happening in the community at any given time. Without that I don't think I'd even be able to remember when the grand final of a tournament is. Beyond that, despite all the drama and nonsense, whenever something important that affects the state of the game happens, good or bad, aoezone is the only place where people can have relatively serious discussions about it in actual sentences and paragraphs, which I think can be a lot more important than it might seem at the time. I'd really hate if this place ever disappeared, I'd much rather it pass into someone else's hands if the burden is too much.
I think one thing that comes close to aoeZone in terms of communication is Reddit, however I think that it fills a very different role, eg spamming memes etc. For a central hub to organize tournaments and share general news about aoe I think aoeZone is perfect.
Media like discords are far too spammy for my liking so I rarely check them. I do check the occasional twitch stream but I think I'd be really distanced from the aoe community, in which I'm not too active anyway. So personally I would really be bummed about aoeZone closing down, I love to check this place once or twice a day!
Also the drama has to have a place where it can easily reach 1000 posts ofcourse!
You made me think about it though, and put my money where my mouth is, so here is a bronze support!
Aoezone is the only way I get aoe-news. I've never liked reddit and discord is no place for "news" and tournaments imo. I dont play much myself these days, but I am checking aoezone daily, mostly for the calendar to find out about tournaments and who's streaming.
Maybe there will only be 100 people saying we need this.
I don't think that many people responding here will say no, we don't, so I am not sure if this is the right place for a survey.
You are right that also other forums have shut down. Still, AoEZone is more active than AoCZone was 2-3 years ago.
Maybe you can reduce the costs and/or the time you spend on it. I feels like almost everything is only done by you and robo nowadays, so maybe you need to ask for more help.
As others have said, AoEZone is an important archive and central connection. Maybe younger people think differently, but I don't want to be in 20 Discord groups, only know via e-mail notification when a stream goes live or spend more time going through Twitter profiles, if AoEZone can handle all my needs.
It is true that Discord is good for events or questions for one stream etc., or even scheduling, but for tournament announcements, results, interviews, and a few other things AoEZone still seems suited better.
Next tournament: add x % of the prize pool for AoEZone? (There is more money in AoE now than ever.)
As someone who never posts, I just wanted to say that to me this is, as someone else put it, a "central hub" for aoe2.
Here I get info about new tournaments, upcoming events and streams. The calendar on the right is great and as far as I''m aware there's no other place as complete as this.
If the forum part was shut down I don't think it would be the worst thing, especially given the amount of drama created here. However, i'd really love it if the site continued, maybe containing just the things I said above and a few others. I think doing that would decrease the traffic and help when it comes to financing the site.
So.. in very simple words AoE Zone just provides the best overview regarding the entire AoE-scene.
-> I think without AoE-Zone we would miss out on a lot of easy accessible information..
For example:
If I want to know "when is X vs Y in Z's Super Great AoE Cup?"
-> I go to AoE Zone
If I have a question regarding a build order
-> I go to AoE Zone
If I want to share my opinion on events
-> I go to AoE Zone
If I just want to lay back, grab some popcorn and read through some nice AoE Drama
-> I go to AoE Zone.
It's like the only overall market place we really have when it comes to AoE.
..Sure we have Twitch Chat
-> But Twich obv. only provides information regarding the correpsonding streamer. If I want to inform myself about NAC3 and the Hidden CUp i go to AoEZone instead of Nilis Twitch and then T90s twich.
Also Information on AoE-zone is also there when there is no active stream.
..Sure we have Discord
-> But it's more or less the same with the Twitch Chat argument. Also I have such a hard time taking Discord serious as information source. Because there is just so much nonsense on every Discord. Sure people can talk about everything they want to. But I never have the certainty that I really find what I need after reading through thousands of Discord channels. Since AoEZone is such a big AoE market place I kinda expect the things I am looking for to be there.. .. so I don't need the messy Discord servers, (And never used them except for communicationg purposes while playing.. ..and I did posted a few memes here and there)
..Sure we have social Media (Facebook for example is mentioned in the first post)
-> But I highly doubt that there will ever be a social media group with an "overview-structure" as we have it on AoEZone.
To put it all in a nutshell ( <- For Germans: Bäm Englisch Abi und so) I think without AoE Zone many people wouldn't find information that they are looking for and therefore have harder time understanding the game and the community and therefore lose interest in the game in general.
I think a visible donation goal on this site would be a good thing to keep this site alive.
Currently there is 354 visitors online. I do think there i a lot need for AoEZone and number of daily visitors show people care about forums even thought they don't have account or post anything. AoEZone i basically only site you can centrally see events, event calendar, drama and other discussion that doesn't fade away after 2 weeks.
Ofc we can move to ageofempires.com or something if we have no other choice but this will have negative effect on community so if maybe you could ask if microsoft would want to donate/help to upkeep vital community site?
Discord is like shoving everyone in a whatsapp chat. Great for certain things but certainly not replacing AoEZone.
Basically the same thing I said about Voobly, if cost is an issue, let us know how much and the community won't let you pay. Targets will see much better results than just saying to support this way.
This is where I go to get a sense of the current pulse of the AoE community, and it's been especially useful lately as I reacquaint myself with the goings-on in the community after a half-year hiatus from the game. The forum format is so much more conducive to discussion across the various subgroups of the fan base, and allows for deeper discussion to continue without being buried in walls of messages and split across multiple micro-communities. Pair that with the incredibly valuable record-keeping of tournaments, matches, discussions, and drama () as well as the far superior design of this site over the official forums, I believe that this site is absolutely invaluable to the community at large. In fact, I'd much rather see the word spread that this site exists and bring more people onto the platform.
That said I totally understand the want at a more advanced age to step away from a project that is demanding a lot of attention and spend more time doing other things. I would be deeply saddened to see the site go but would understand your position on the matter. Regardless, I'd hope to see the project handed off before it came to a shut down.
Any value in asking the bigger streamers to mention Aoezone every now and then? Perhaps also add a command on Twitch with the link. I know Nili does this a bit but I have not heard the other streamers do this much, if at all. Just a few words explaining that it a great resource for the calendar/questions/forums/tournaments/etc might from the big streamers might get more people visiting the site.
Discord is absolutely not an alternative in my mind. Silver account activated
- There currently isn't any viable alternatives out there imho, so I'll support as long as it's needed! <3
Thanks PkZ and staff for running this platform, you're so valueable to my way of interacting with Age and the community <3
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