It seems likely that Greta will post something on Instagram before Autumn's birthday. Acting on the dubious assumption that it won't cause harm if information is revealed: it seems I am procrastinating by waiting until Greta posts something on Instagram, before I watch Pey's videos and check your Twitch and YouTube accounts for what I assume will be the final time.
Topic: Hera vs 7 DOTA Players Showmatch at 18gmt
I have watched the first two hours. The way that Hera uses "unc" to refer to older males, just like your friend used it to refer to himself upon reaching 30 years of age. I think this is an example of a good prejudice. People don't like to be seen as old, and the use of "unc" forces people to acknowledge their age and strive to have a life where they will not be embarrassed to be called "unc" when it happens.
Notably, someone who acknowledges their age will probably put more focus on having children. Muslims have higher fertility than the average; both Hera (who was fasting during these games, due to Ramadan) and your friend are Muslim, and I'm guessing the use of "unc" is common for English-speaking Muslims as I have not heard other streamers use the term. I think its use might be both a cause, and an effect, of higher fertility: an effect because if everyone has large families, then many people will have uncles.
Despite the use of "uncle" and "aunt" also being somewhat common in Korea and China to refer to unrelated older people, I think it's a little different. People still usually don't like to be reminded of their age, as seen with prank videos where younger females are called auntie or younger males are called uncle. Currently, China and southern Korea have much lower fertility rates (1.0 and 0.72) than countries like Saudi Arabia (2.28), Iran (1.5), Morocco (2.23), or Lebanon (2.24, population 65% Muslim). So people have more actual uncles and aunts, and therefore more people with actual nephews or nieces. An actual nephew or niece cannot cause offense by calling their aunt or uncle by that title, so it's more acceptable on the Internet or in conversation to refer to a male as "unc" based solely on his age. There is a higher probability that a niece or nephew of that male already does this, compared to China or Korea.
About the actual game and gameplay. I feel like when I linked a gameplay video (featuring Gabi) a few days ago, and you posted an unrelated TikTok video, it indicated a lack of interest in the game. So why do people play games at all? Etc.
"A game should be fun for the first hour that you play it." Why would people ever disagree with this statement? (Edit: "because a new player is bad and should be unhappy about being bad at the game".) After Hera made a video a few days ago about a "new overpowered strategy that has no counter", I looked up one of his opponents who quit about four minutes into the game (~140 seconds of real time, since game runs at 1.7x). That player and basically everyone they played against had thousands of games played, at about 1800 rating. (I also saw that the website shows campaign progress for players, and the few players I checked had done almost none of the campaigns despite thousands of multiplayer games, so it would be interesting to investigate more about this. And I found one player who had quit about five games in a row a minute in, apparently in order to lose rating and be matched against easier opponents.)
Someone with thousands of games played is obviously not really in the learning phase. They can name every standard technology, building, and unit in the game. There is, in other words, a high probability that they have forgotten what it was like to learn to play, and they might not have any interest in changes which are designed to help people to have fun "during the first hour that they play the game, after installing it".
Before this showmatch, there were some jokes that Hera might be playing against some people who had literally just installed the game. One of the original players decided not to play, and he might have been in that category of "literally hasn't played at all", but it seemed that, to Hera's surprise given that most of his opponents hadn't been practicing in the preceding weeks, they were all well past the initial stage of learning game mechanics and units.
So, spoilers, although a poll in chat had a minority of people saying that Hera would win the first game, he lost and it wasn't close.
Relevance to my suggestions:
Free-for-all placement matches, where it doesn't matter as much whether you're spending a lot of time reading descriptions or tooltips, would make the first hour of play more fun.
Just controlling a few units would be a lot more interesting to someone who is participating in a match like this and playing AoE2 for the very first time (and for new viewers), compared to controlling an empire. Like, it could be 1v3 for the number of empires, but the larger team could have an extra four players who each only control a few units. Or the game could allow for even more players, like up to 12, if they share player numbers. So 11 players sharing three empires, or one empire with three players and two with four players. The starting number of units and town centers would be more similar than in a 1v7, but the larger team would still have an advantage in the number of people pressing buttons.
Then, basically, instead of the new player being stuck in Feudal age making 10 spearmen against a flood of 40 fully-upgraded paladins, they could control units that are equally as strong as what their opponent is making, just a few of them at a time. Since I recently watched The Fellowship of the Ring, I just think of that. Something that's so old that it was from before YouTube, so it was made as a gif animated image:
Lord of the Rings in World of Warcraft. An animated GIF.
There was that post from Roger Ebert, "Video games can never be art." The original had thousands of comments when I also commented on it in 2011; these comments might be visible on the Internet Archive. I can't remember what my comment said anymore, but the whole view of 'art' being 'the <appropriate verb> of new goals'. If you look at AoE2, you might think that the goal is just to win. But what if you are limited to controlling specific units, with no easy way to switch to other units? Then you can easily end up acquiring the goal, "keep these units alive", which can conflict with the goal of winning the game. Like, one of my suggestions is that you wouldn't be able to execute the units. Executing units that are about to be converted by an enemy monk is common, so not being able to do this is a disadvantage (while also being a way to prevent easily switching the units that one controls).
So it can allow people, both players and viewers, to think about the game in a different way. Basically, roleplaying the units they control, which starts with thinking about what someone in a certain situation would do, and 'staying alive' is a goal that almost everyone who is still alive has.
From a competitive standpoint, focusing on a few units also allows players to see possibilities that they currently do not see. Simplified, a lot of this is "use walls to prevent units from being killed by other units".
But why care about Age of Empires II specifically, whether it's controlling an entire empire or just a few units? Well, I'm just saying, again, that games that focus on guns are boring. (AoE2 has some units with guns, but most of the time during gameplay they aren't available, and the player has zero influence on whether a gun that is fired hits its target, no aiming.) When I watched ExtraEmily play Valorant during the streamer tournament, there was a moment when she started laughing incredibly hard, to the point that she could no longer play, when she saw that Esfand had been given the same instructions that she had — to stay in one place and shoot anyone who came near. Despite that she was completely new to the game and would probably never play it again after the tournament, she found someone who was apparently just as new, and just as bad at the game.
Some games are mainly decorative. To players who like these games, a main attraction is probably that you can't lose. To players who dislike them, not being able to lose is probably a negative point. In "Why economists are wrong", I intended to write about how "confidence in one's actions is essential for spiritual and psychological health, requires both freedom of choice and a way to measure progress." A game in which one cannot lose does not provide any feedback about how well one can solve problems, or whether one's ability to do so has deteriorated.
Hera's gameplay errors:
Now the general who wins a battle makes many calculations in his temple ere the battle is fought. The general who loses a battle makes but few calculations beforehand. Thus do many calculations lead to victory, and few calculations to defeat: how much more no calculation at all! It is by attention to this point that I can foresee who is likely to win or lose.
The Art of War, I.26. Villagers attacking military units: a villager kills a militia in 14 hits, or 28 sec. Militia costs 70 resources, which takes ~210 villager-seconds to gather. If seven players each devote seven villager to gathering the resources for militia, they will each train one militia every 30 sec (training time is 21 sec). If those militia stand passively without attacking, then Hera could kill those seven militia using seven villagers in 28 sec.
It is, in other words, barely effective to attack passive militia when 1v7. The math is similar or even worse with other units. The game featured Roman men-at-arms, who if they had armor upgrade, were taking just 2 damage per arrow from archers, so they would die in 46 sec. (And also obviously worse if each militia kills 0.3 or even 0.1 villagers.)
Basically, despite all the 1v3 and 1v4 games that Hera has played, he was still doing things that 'win' in 1v1 games, but not in 1v7 games. He needed to avoid taking damage until he had better units, or more units.
It wasn't just that his opponents played well, because he remarked after the fight on the woodline where he lost two villagers to militia that he had made the right decision to fight there. He made an incorrect strategic choice — to not wall when he saw early pressure — and did not realize it, due to his lack of calculations.
(For the record, I guessed that Hera would win the first game)
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