Good to know! What input scheme do you use on that?

I appreciate it, and if I ever do get around to doing something about aoe2 or aoe4 I may use that instance, or if I see someone else express interest in creating game-related communities I'll recommend they head in your direction. But for now I've already created it on this instance, and don't see the benefits as being strong enough to outweigh that.

they’ve created a direct link to the community on lemm.ee and named that link [email protected], rather than just typing [email protected]

I just used the autocomplete built into Lemmy after typing !aom. It works just fine. If I click it on this account it takes me to https://lemm.ee/c/aom, if I click it on my main account it takes me to https://aussie.zone/c/[email protected]. Which is the desired behaviour.

I don't think the hobby drama subreddit back on the old site required the drama to be on-site. You could post about the time WotC tried to revoke their OGL, or when Hans Niemann allegedly used an anal vibrator to cheat at chess, or things like that.

Wow I wish Clem Jones hadn't come along and ruined our tram network. Apparently Brisbane would today have the 3rd largest tram network in the world if we'd kept it going at its peak: no additional new track laid. Instead he ripped it up and we have not one metre left, except when you occasionally see bits of it buried when they do road works...like when they expanded Gympie Rd from 6 to 8 lanes over the last year or so. Sigh.

As for hop-on trams, obviously not very accessible. If they had the ability to stop and put down a ramp for people who need it, it could be manageable, but realistically if we'd kept the track, they'd have needed to lower the floor of the trams and raise up the platforms to make for level (or at least near-level) boarding.

Yeah I really like the idea of topic-based instances. There are some issues doing it that way with discovery, and potentially with what happens when communities split (see for example what happened with [email protected] splitting to [email protected]), but on the whole I really like the way it can reduce the drama caused by entirely unrelated factors. I'm a big fan of ttrpg.network for that reason, and I guess you could describe my main home instance of aussie.zone as being one, too.

I'm curious about that business. With so many Mastodon and other fediverse instances available for free to anyone, what's the business model for a paid service?

It's not so much a new game as a remaster of the old game. Back in like 2016 they announced they were making Age of Empires 4 and also "Definitive Editions" of 1, 2, and 3. The DEs came out in 2018, 2019, and 2020, and AoE2 and 3 DE were both really good and successful. Then a couple of years ago they announced Age of Mythology was getting a similar treatment. It came out for people who ordered the Premium Edition last Wednesday, and releases to the general audience tomorrow. So far it's been a massive success critically both in mainstream gaming press and with Age players.

edit: AoE2 DE did a fantastic job of unifying disparate communities. Before it, most low-level casuals played on the 2013 HD edition and most high-level and pro players played on Voobly with fan patches based on the original CD version of the game. After DE, everyone plays DE. The same seems to be coming true for AoM. Previously there was a split between Voobly and the 2014 "Extended Edition" (which also included some very controversial patches around 2016 to coincide with an equally-controversial expansion DLC). But already it seems as though people are embracing the "Retold" edition of the game, whether casual or pro.

Oh wow, I didn't even realise you could do relative links like that in Lemmy.

It's a shame post IDs aren't globally unique so you could do something like that with individual posts.

Oh neat. I've never even seen that instance before. I was thinking at some point I might get around to creating an aoe4 community too, and possibly creating an aoe2 one on a less controversial instance than the current [email protected] (and with a mod who's not inactive). But I've my hands full already so I won't be doing that too soon.

I don't own a console so I've not had direct hands-on experience with this, but as an aoe2 and aoe4 player I've seen that they've introduced many of the same changes there, seemingly with success. This is the first time though that they've had the villager priority system on desktop. I tried it out during AoM's beta on my computer and...it was terrible. I love that the option exists and it combined with AoM's villager autoqueue are probably brilliant options for beginners that can help them be much better than they otherwise would. But you don't have to be very good at all for the imperfections in Villager Priority to at least feel way worse than what you can do yourself.