Basically as the title suggested: Why is ornlu not attending the event as caster? It seems that only Membtv is missing due to personal reasons.

Feeling bad for him. Love especially his campaign content <3

I know that controversy is good for clicks, but it still frustrates me seeing a lot of rage-bait videos from some bigger content creators.

1. Does rage-bait content actually help AoE2 grow?

Does this draw in new players? If the AOE2 content is only "Smurf is really big in Aoe2" "You can't play Team Games," "This unit is OP" etc., will they touch the game? Definitely not. Also, while it might tune in the viewers' short time, I don't think that rage bait is a concept that will last you long in AOE2. Why can't more people make content about a certain strategy or a certain game is good? (of course this is way more work than sitting in front of the camera and rambling for 10 minutes)

2. The creators(small part of the community) often underappreciate what AoE2 has

Aoe2 has problems I won't deny that but still we/they don't appreciate what we have: A game that is NOT P2W, no battle pass, the amount and prices of DLCs are modest in comparison to other games where you can by a skin for the price of the games. Unfortunately, nowadays this is a rarity.

And you can by aoe2 for 5$ on sale, and you don't have to pay for the servers. Do I want to see some stuff fixed? Yes. But, additional support generally requires additional revenue. And I don't think there are always easy answers to some problems.

• If someone really wants to smurf, he will do it; it's just a question of how hard he tries.
• In Team Games if you play with two different friends (really good and really bad ones) - or different players- it is hard to estimate your actual elo. I don't see an easy solution that fits every situtation. The current system is designed for players who queue up alone or for fixed teams and here it works really well I guess.
• And also if you want to play team games, you can ask in this subreddit; there are enough players you would like to play with. This would at least ease the frustration on your team site. Or just join a clan and play there team games.

TLDR: please show a little bit more appreciation to the developers, they don't deserver that kind of backlash. And don't give clicks to rage bait videos (which is in general, a good idea) and appreciate content creators how acutally put effort in their videos.

As a disclaimer: If someone is intentionally losing games, that is bad and should be punished. But you can look at their profile, and if they have a 90+% losing percentage in games under 5 minutes with hundreds of games, there is an indication that this is a smurf.

Back to the topic:
I read to many threads in the AOE2 Reddit that complain about smurfing. I am getting accused of smurf in-game and it is super annoying. If you do not make any navy in Nomad, there is no need to blame me that you lose your fishing eco to two warships. And this snowballs.

Even if I play a smurf, then I do not get why this is so bad. I lose a game and then queue up for the next one. If there are <1% smurfs, only every 100 games you should encounter a smurf which should be barely notable.