I always felt like the way you need to be playing AoE to be competitively good defeated the purpose of the game for me. It ends up become a rush of min maxing, as opposed to what I loved about the game which was building and designing empires and armies.

I think it’s a little about how they don’t know better either, and there’s no better options. You and I remember when multiplayer games used to be great, but if nowadays they’re all shit, what option do they have?