Basically, if you guys didn't know, age of empires 3 is buggy as shit. You can't play a game for more then 10 minutes without having a system reboot, and if you do manage to connect to Ensemble Online, you'll be kicked off because of "Sync Errors" in the game play, oh yeah, and you can never really win a game, because at the end of the game, everyone starts lagging (same at with the beginning) and is kicked, meaning you don't get experiance for your win or loss.
So I opened up a case with microsoft tech support so I could troubleshoot my problems, my system is well beyond the reccomended requirements and I can run well over a dozen games at good settings and play smoothly with no problems at all. I did everything my tech support guy told me to do (his name was Vaibav somethingsomething, Microsoft loves its customers so much they outsourced everything to India, and to say the least, the parts of India I'm sure where a fluent English speaker is hard to be found). I updated drivers, flashed my bios, hell I even reformatted... TWICE! All thinking my beloved Ensemble Studio's made an amazing game which should be running. I was blaming my own system and thought it was because of my integrated sound (Aoe3 has a problem with Realtek AC97 sound aswell, go figure) so I was considering buying a new soundcard, and then I got to my grips and read the agecommunity.com forums. At first I thought I was the only one experiancing these stability issues, but it turns out there are dozens more on these forums, some who can not even load up the game, and if they do it crashes, there are problems ranging from lockups to crashes to freezes during loading screen. Those who can play the game successfully complain of the horrible Ensemble Online experiance of lag and disconnects which plague the online games, and the unfairness of their rating system, putting n00bs with higher card decks above better players (In a warcraft comparison, its like you are a high level player vs. a n00b, you win, you get some points and the n00b gets like a million, so you only go to level 2, and the noob goes to level 30). Finally, I reply to my tech support guy saying nothing he has reccomended I try has worked and I am starting to get a bit frustrated. So he responds to me and tells me there is something wrong with my operating system and that I have to reformat yet again. That was the final straw. I'm sick and tired of whats been happening so I responded to his email.
So I opened up a case with microsoft tech support so I could troubleshoot my problems, my system is well beyond the reccomended requirements and I can run well over a dozen games at good settings and play smoothly with no problems at all. I did everything my tech support guy told me to do (his name was Vaibav somethingsomething, Microsoft loves its customers so much they outsourced everything to India, and to say the least, the parts of India I'm sure where a fluent English speaker is hard to be found). I updated drivers, flashed my bios, hell I even reformatted... TWICE! All thinking my beloved Ensemble Studio's made an amazing game which should be running. I was blaming my own system and thought it was because of my integrated sound (Aoe3 has a problem with Realtek AC97 sound aswell, go figure) so I was considering buying a new soundcard, and then I got to my grips and read the agecommunity.com forums. At first I thought I was the only one experiancing these stability issues, but it turns out there are dozens more on these forums, some who can not even load up the game, and if they do it crashes, there are problems ranging from lockups to crashes to freezes during loading screen. Those who can play the game successfully complain of the horrible Ensemble Online experiance of lag and disconnects which plague the online games, and the unfairness of their rating system, putting n00bs with higher card decks above better players (In a warcraft comparison, its like you are a high level player vs. a n00b, you win, you get some points and the n00b gets like a million, so you only go to level 2, and the noob goes to level 30). Finally, I reply to my tech support guy saying nothing he has reccomended I try has worked and I am starting to get a bit frustrated. So he responds to me and tells me there is something wrong with my operating system and that I have to reformat yet again. That was the final straw. I'm sick and tired of whats been happening so I responded to his email.
