Known Issue:
- Failed to Update Match Details Error In Custom Lobbies
- We are aware of a failed to update match error that sometimes occurs when selecting Empire Wars, Nomad, Crafted Maps, and some other mods. We are investigating this issue and will update this post when more information is available.
A major update for Season Five, is LIVE! In today’s update, we’re turning up the heat with Map Monsters: Summer Party Edition! Scout the land and scour the sea in search for the elusive Wild Man and mysterious Dragon Turtle in our new event! Plus, start a match off strong in Empire Wars – a new, quick-to-action game mode where players start with a burgeoning empire of pre-built buildings and villagers already tasked to resources. But that’s not all: We’ve packed this update with loads of new content and features, ready for you to dive into now!
Here are a few highlights:
- Three new maps: Golden Heights, Migration, and Volcanic Island!
- The start of Ranked Season Five, bringing with it new rewards and an updated map pool rotation!
- Team Voice Chat – strategize with your friends in-match with the new team voice chat! Or use the speech-to-text feature to more easily send communications to your team!
- Visual upgrades, and performance-related improvements!
- New trade updates based directly on community feedback!
- New unique options for every civilization! From unique tech to unique units, we’re making design changes so that each civilization’s personality shines through!
- Additional support for mods that make it easier for everyone in the lobby to start the match.
- … and a whole lot of bug fixes & balance changes!
More On What’s to Come
We’re excited to have you all join in the latest Season of Age of Empires IV! Season Five: Map Monsters Summer Party Edition brings a number of new features and improvements, and we’re already planning for additional patches, events and more over the next several months as part of our seasonal line-up. As well, the team is hard at work bringing Age of Empires IV to console following the announcement last fall.
Read on below for some additional details related to the next couple of months of Season Five.
Changes to Matchmaking Present Today
We know you’ve already read through a lengthy set of Update Notes this week, but following yesterday’s server maintenance, you may notice some changes in Ranked matchmaking today that are aimed at getting you into a match sooner.
These updates change the first band of our matchmaking slightly, accommodating for an initial higher-point difference in ELO between you and the person you’re ultimately matched with. This should shave off some of the initial time to matchmake for any player experiencing wait times of six minutes or less on average. We’re continuing efforts to improve matching for players toward the extreme lower and higher ends of the ELO range, but in the meantime, please send any feedback or issues related to these changes our way.
July Patch
As we mentioned earlier in the week, we’ve already got a patch in the works for late July. This patch will allow us to monitor and respond to some of the early feedback following the release of Season Five (our balance team is always eager to see what you have to say!) and also provides a chance to follow on with a few other meaningful changes, such as:
- Granting Ranked Rewards based on the Highest Rank you achieve during a season vs. Final Rank. We mentioned investigations were underway in our post on Monday, and we’re excited that the first wave of actions needed to complete this work were included with the server maintenance from June 14th. Ranked Rewards are tracked and granted via the server, so this was an important first move to take. Next steps include updates to the client to support this change within the UI.
- Updates to queue dodging. You can read more about our plans in the Season Five release notes, and some of these changes are currently tracking for our July update.
- Balancing & bug fixing. We’ll be paying close attention to what we hear from you about the Season Five build.
Late Summer Patch
Major updates like Season Five add a huge amount of content and changes across the board and also provide a great opportunity to keep the game fresh. Our Public Update Previews help us collect and respond to major issues beforehand, but we also expect to “fine tune ” and continually support throughout a season via smaller targeted patches.
Still in the works, but we’re keeping eyes on a late summer patch to light up some Seasonal Events, and also to further iterate as your feedback and input shakes out.
Pick Up a Copy!
Starting TODAY through June 19th, get Age of Empires IV from Steam at a 40% discount!
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