Classic Voobly.



Want to get their dictatorship power in writing so they can screw over people who have built their livelihood around the game if one of their mods or high ups gets angry.



Everyone has to display your logo? Who do you think you are? No other games have to do this, stop thinking you are special.



I guess reading all of this comes off as who do you think you are? They are going to enforce streamers having to put up the tournament logo? What on earth does that have to do with Voobly? That is up to the tournament host, not you, sort it out.



Not allowed to have the mature audiences notification? That legit feels illegal. At this point I would like to remind people that you can't just throw Ts and Cs up on a website and count it as legal terms. I have fought Ts and Cs like this before and won because that isn't how the law works.



It is reasons like this I stopped supporting Voobly with membership. Basically we have a platform that looks like it was created 1,000 years ago, handles like it was created 1,000 years ago but is sadly the best we have. The excellent work done by those outside this Voobly hierarchy is always delayed because of the person that makes money from Voobly. How long was our latest Beta for example.



I hope DE does exactly what they are aiming for: A better Voobly + better scenario editor + better AI + improved mod support. - This was their goal, I hope they succeed to the level everyone agrees and Voobly and HD players alike can all move over. I know people are very skeptical after HD, but we can hope eh? If they fail, as many people seem to expect, I guess we will either be left with putting up with Voobly thinking they are the gods of AoE2 or hopefully a crack team of experts can come up with something that at least handles like 2010.



Lets just get this right out there, why are they doing this?



It has been clear for months, years even at this point. They don't like they are not the #1 earner in AoE2 anymore.



A little aside here - Let's not pretend Voobly makes little to no money. When I tried to buy Voobly back when I first join the scene my plan was effectively just try to improve Voobly. I was told everyone working on it is a volunteer, making nothing from the platform. All profit is shoved to elusive who seemingly does the odd bit of work every 6 months at this point. An army of minions for no cost, the dream. I come in and ask about buying Voobly with the plan that all profit the platform makes gets put back into it. Actual improvements to the system. I was effectively told all staff would quit (odd given they are volunteers and I didn't really want to change anything just put the profit BACK INTO the platform not away, but oh well). Had a bit of a chat with a few ex Voobly employees/volunteers to see if they would be interested and they effectively warded me away saying it was rotten to the core and even buying it and replacing everything wouldn't help. I was made aware that the effective price to buy Voobly was $250k. Apparently the pandaTV china streaming platform thingy (if that is what it is called) was quoted this price. Standard valuation practices puts the post tax profits somewhere between $40-$50k a year.



Right, back to the point. If Voobly are making somewhere between $40-50k a year (complete guess based on information I received before - there is probably a way to find the company and look at their filing history but I have no clue how to do this outside the UK)for the years they are "saving the AoE community" then they are also the biggest earner from the AoE community. But then the twitch boom happens. Suddenly our top streamers are out earning them, people are actually making a living from this game and that really seems to piss some people off, so they are prepping to lash out.



We are growing at an excellent rate right now and that has nothing to do with Voobly. But Voobly is where everyone plays you cry! Well, why has the game not been growing like this since when fire was invented given that is when we first saw Vooblys UI. Voobly has changed pretty much nothing since then. The userpatch team, WK guys and I am sure many other tech support guys have helped push things more than Voobly have. Twitch and the streaming community have pushed numbers through the roof. The growth of twitch, our big streamers, Rocketbeans TV, HD - hell even Microsoft getting involved with prizepools again. Microsoft putting KOTD2 and NAC2 on the launcher will have brought so many viewers to us.





Basically, screw Voobly and their god complex.



If DE sux, can some super smart team make us something good please?