Before I detail the reason for this petition, I shall introduce myself and what Age of Empires II: HD Edition (referred to as HD or AoHD henceforth) and Age of Empires II: The Conquerors Expansion (AoC) are.

My name is robo, I have been an active member of the online AoC and HD communities since mid 2013, through participating in tournaments, organising tournaments, viewing live streams, cocasting in live streams, running a pretty crappy youtube channel and moderating the largest AoC forum (aoczone.net).

AoC was the first expansion for Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings, released in August 2000 (yes 16 and a half years ago, the original AoE 2 was released September 1999) and has been played at a competitive level, although in a very small community compared to the more mainstream esports, since then, primarily due to the fan run clients that replaced the Microsoft MSN Gaming Zone once it shut down (IGZone and voobly.com are 2 of these). This game still runs perfectly fine on current pcs, although some work is needed to get around win7 onward, which is to be expected for a game created on win 95.

The HD edition was 'created' by Microsoft, in reality it is a rework of the existing code, following the fan made expansion The Forgotten Empires (later released as The Forgotten on steam), released December 2012, which has more than half a million downloads since then, which showed how popular AoE2 still was, and how many people were likely to play it purely for nostalgia reasons.

Since its release in April 2013, HD has been plagued by a significant number of game breaking bugs and performance issues. These issues encompass all areas of the game, including but not limited to, crippling performance issues, strictly worse unit pathfinding than the original, a laundry list of AI bugs, inability to save and restore multiplayer games, scenarios crashing the game, out of syncs, buggy unit selection, buggy patrol, broken sound effects, breaking how 'slinging' (the act of sending resources to one of your allies) works. With every patch that fixes an old bug they introduce several new ones and leave others unfixed. This needs to change.

These are just basic gameplay issues, without even touching on the issues pertaining to performance. HD has significantly more pc, internet and input lag then the original AoC for most people, the game randomly desyncs, players lose rating points for no reason, mouse cursors do not display properly, and lobbies mysteriously appear and disappear, some of the new maps don't work properly.

To top all of this off, the teams also released Age of Mythology: Extended Edition and a new expansion for it, The Tale of the Dragon, and they too are severely bug laden, but as I have very little experience with those games, I shall not expand on it.

Now I would like to say that I am a massive fan of the African Kingdoms expansion (and the changes made to the Forgotten) as they bring nice balance changes, new maps, new civs and campaigns, new maps and game settings. All in all it adds an immense amount of content to the game, but the problems associated with HD are frustrating in the extreme.

If HD were to be fixed, Microsoft would presumably make more money, as AoC could become an officially supported ESport (current tournaments are anonymous sponsors or community donations), and the players, who have still played HD even with it's issues, because they are passionate about this game.

The aim here is not to condemn the developers by saying they're incompetent, but to get them to realize how passionate all of the players are, and that we know the developers could do so much more for the game.

Thanks, robo <3

P.S. new bugs will be added as they are found, or made known to me.