Hello everybody, my name is Resonance22 and I am proud to announce that as of today, I am now officially the community manager for Forgotten Empires. As Community Manager, I will be running their social media pages (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram), live streaming Age of Empires games every week on their Twitch channel, and collecting feedback from each and every one of you for the developers. If you’re looking for more Age of Empires content, updates directly from the developers themselves, and all things Age of Empires news, then I encourage you to check out and follow the official Forgotten Empires pages. I will also be writing a wide variety of articles for the Forgotten Empires website.

I started making Aoe2 videos on my old YouTube page over 7 years ago in October 2009. I created the first ever dedicated Age of Empires 2 channel in an era where Aoe2 had almost no videos at all on YouTube. My goal has always been to share the things that make me happy with others, but with such a steep learning curve, I always had difficulty getting my friends into Age of Empires. I also really wanted to see this game succeed and I hoped that by creating commentary videos and tutorials, I could make the game more approachable for new players and raise awareness of my favorite game. Since then, the Aoe2 community has grown to a massive presence on YouTube with the addition of so many new channels that I am huge fans of. After taking a 2 year hiatus and with the announcement of Age of Empires 2 HD Edition, I returned to YouTube and Twitch to build a new channel that would support Aoe2 and all of the other games that I am passionate about. I never would have imagined that my work on YouTube, Twitch, and the Aoe community at large would ever become more than a dedicated hobby, but thankfully I managed to catch the attention of one very passionate developer.

I had the honor of meeting Cysion, the project manager at Forgotten Empires, through my weekly Age of Empires 2 live streams which I still do even now. Back then in 2013-2014, Cysion would always say hi in the chat and take time out of his busy day to answer the community’s questions. I remember he even randomly joined some of my off-stream lobbies to help play-test a very early version of my ResonanceBot Custom AI. During one of my live streams, Cysion was in the chat when my game crashed on a MegaRandom map. He asked me to email him my crash logs so that he could investigate the issue, which was documented and solved quickly thanks to the information that we provided.

And nearly a year later, Cysion heard me asking for new video ideas during a live stream and so he sent me a massive compilation of replays he collected which inspired my popular Break the Meta series. After that, Cysion became busier with development but he still would occasionally ask me for feedback on the state of the game, which was a great opportunity for me to share my thoughts and all of yours with the devs. When the African Kingdoms expansion to Aoe2 was announced, I messaged Cysion, hoping that there would be any kind of opportunity to volunteer to help with development. I am incredibly thankful that he gave me a chance and during African Kingdoms I and a handful of other active community members, assisted with beta testing, filing bug reports, and helping with game balance.

And then in April 2016, Cysion approached me and a few other testers for a more-formal Quality Assurance position at Forgotten Empires. I began working for the company in May that year. As one of the QA Leads, I used my own experience as well as all of the feedback from you guys to help prioritize issues and compile bug reports to forward to Skybox Labs. I also offered my feedback on the design and balance of the Rise of the Rajas civilizations. I’m always looking for opportunities to use everything I’ve learned from over 15 years of playing and collecting feedback from each and every one of you, about what makes Age of Empires 2 such a successful game. We wanted to keep my involvement a secret though, to come back with a strong announcement after the Patch 4.8 beta. And now after many sleepless nights preparing for the Rise of the Rajas release, we are finally ready to formally announce my involvement in the Forgotten Empires team. It is absolute honor to be a part of Forgotten Empires and I am very optimistic about the future of the Age of Empires franchise.