Chapter 34. Pingguoniu's Age of Empires

A chapter from ONE MORE WAY: The History Behind Chinese Esports, by BBKinG (Liu Yang). Translated from the Chinese original: 三十四 苹果牛的《帝国时代》

First published in the author's Zhihu column on August 9, 2014: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/19814374

This translation was reviewed against the Chinese original on August 1, 2026. If you spot a mistranslation, a wrong name, or a factual error, please open an issue or send a pull request.

Pingguoniu says the esports road he took was well off the mainstream, and a lonely one.

I think that is only half right.

More than ten years ago, at the age of eighteen, with no money and no media attention, Pingguoniu founded the Age of Empires II China Conquerors League on his own. He gathered a large group of forum players around him and, on the small amount of prize money crowdfunded each year, kept the Age of Empires II Zhonghua Cup national team league and dozens of other tournaments running for five years.

Then, in 2005, he threw himself into World of Warcraft, the hottest online game of the day, and took its player versus player side to a level that made him known worldwide. Foreign players voted him one of the ten great gods of war in World of Warcraft and the fourth best PvP player in the world. He also finished third in the ESL arena competition and was inducted into an overseas World of Warcraft PvP hall of fame, where his highest ranking was second.

I said, surely that does not count as lonely?

He shook his head and said the World of Warcraft arena never became a mainstream esports discipline.

He had a point, and I had nothing to say back.

Pingguoniu's real name is Wu Fan. I met him for the first time last year, at an esports event in his home town of Jincheng, Shanxi Province. All 6,000 seats in the culture and sports hall were taken and more than a thousand people were still waiting outside, which surprised me a great deal.

My first impression was that he had spent time in the army. He narrows his eyes when he talks, with a smile on his face, and although he speaks slowly and deliberately there is steel behind the softness. I later learned that he was a military academy graduate who had held the rank of captain and served eight years as a professional soldier.

Most of his classmates from the academy are now regiment commanders in the army. He chose a different kind of command, the raid leader in World of Warcraft.

Games changed Pingguoniu's fate, and he changed the way games were played.

I imagine plenty of people have heard of Age of Empires, but compared with other games of the same period, not many played it deeply. Younger readers may even ask whether it was an esports discipline at all.

The answer is certainly yes. Age of Empires, developed by Ensemble Studios and published by Microsoft Game Studios in 1997, came out earlier than Blizzard's StarCraft and won the E3 award, the highest honour in the industry that year. From WCGC in 2000, the predecessor of WCG, it was an official esports discipline. A few years later the follow-ups to Age of Empires, namely Age of Empires II, Empire Earth and Age of Mythology, every one of them took the quarterly crown for global game sales.

Age of Empires II: The Conquerors, released in August 2000, deserves to be called a classic in particular, and it was the standard version used in competition both in China and abroad.

That release had a clear purpose from the start: to make the game more competitive, to remove some of the bugs in Age of Empires II, and to bring out the tactical character of each civilisation. Everything was built around esports.

Those changes made The Conquerors the most successful title in the Age of Empires series. Even now a number of gaming platforms still offer online matches for it. The series also carried a great deal of technology ahead of its time, which later real-time strategy games borrowed. Among all the real-time strategy games of that period, Age of Empires had the best graphics. It let users rebind their own hotkeys, and from Age of Empires II onwards it had a replay function, something StarCraft did not have until version 1.08.

Age of Empires therefore had a deep and lasting influence on the design of other games.

Few people know the game today, but in the internet cafés of 1997 to 2000 quite a lot of people played it. It was a game with real charm. It took the culture of warfare before gunpowder to its limit, and every version had its matching historical civilisations. Age of Empires II had eighteen of them, including the Huns, the Franks, the Persians and the Chinese, each with its own units and its own development characteristics. The Huns were nomads and did not need to build houses for population. The Spanish had hand cannoneers. The Chinese had the Chu Ko Nu repeating crossbow.

In Age of Empires, and everything discussed below refers to the Age of Empires II: The Conquerors version, a civilisation advances through four stages: the Dark Age, the Feudal Age, the Castle Age and the Imperial Age.

Its competitive format was unusual too. Because the game puts a lot of weight on building an economy, and because the maps are randomly generated, scouting in the early game takes a long time. Fighting usually starts around the twelve minute mark in the Feudal Age and finishes in the Castle Age, and a game normally runs about half an hour. In team games between sides of equal strength it can last an hour or longer.

The market in the game, for instance, let players sustain themselves indefinitely. Two of the world's best players are said to have spent several days and nights on a single one versus one game on Black Forest.

The China Conquerors forum

Around 2000, when the AsiaGame battle.net server was still thriving, the AsiaGame Age of Empires forum was where most of the game's players gathered. After AsiaGame battle.net broke up, Pingguoniu set up the China Conquerors forum.

To pull everyone back together again, Pingguoniu began organising the first Zhonghua Cup national team league for Age of Empires.

In those days esports events had neither money nor media coverage, and finding sponsors was the biggest problem. Fortunately, a jeweller from Guangdong on the forum loved the game enough to put up 10,000 yuan in prize money for the first year, and the refereeing and the rest of the work was all done voluntarily by a group of forum enthusiasts.

That is how it went for the next five years. More than a hundred clubs entered every year. The league ran 1v1, 2v2 and 3v3 formats in a group stage round robin, and a single season took three to six months. At its peak it brought together more than 150 clubs from across China, with over ten thousand people online.

If you have never run a league yourself, you may not appreciate how terrifying that workload is.

More remarkable still, Pingguoniu was in the military academy at the time. The rules allowed him out only once a week, and he had to be back within four hours.

To get out and organise tournaments on the forum, he relied on his decent writing and his web-building skills. He volunteered to write documents and build websites for the academy's administrators, and even took private jobs building pages. He worked every connection he could think of, all so that someone would help him get out and go online.

He also pulled strings with the telecoms bureau and ran three kilometres of telephone line to his dormitory, purely so that he could get online.

As Warcraft III and a wave of online games drew players away and split the community, Age of Empires slowly declined. By 2005, crowdfunding the prize money had become very difficult, and when one sponsor's prize payment was delayed Pingguoniu took the abuse for it. That left him disheartened, and he swore that next time he would play a mainstream game.

Looking back now, Age of Empires did have its glory days. From 2000 to 2003 it was an official WCG discipline. Later titles in the family followed: Age of Mythology: The Titans at WCG 2004, Age of Empires III: The WarChiefs at WCG 2007 and Age of Empires III: The Asian Dynasties at WCG 2008. All of that was recognition of the game.

Chinese players fought hard too.

In the summer of 2000, at the first WCGC, the World Cyber Game Challenger, the Chinese mainland sent four Age of Empires players for the first and last time, and all four reached the last sixteen. ICBK went further, finishing in the top six and losing narrowly only to Mozory of South Korea, who went on to win the title.

Taiwanese and Hong Kong players did well in Age of Empires. Zeng Zhengcheng of Chinese Taipei, ID IamKmkm_tw, once ranked third on ZONE and pioneered the 25P 5MM forward build, which earned him a reputation as the most ferocious attacking specialist in the game. He won the world championship at WCG 2001 and the 2v2 team title at WCG 2002.

At WCGC 2000 the Taiwanese player Jordan finished second in Age of Empires. At WCG 2001 the Hong Kong player chun_yu finished third, and at WCG 2002 Ming Chu Chun of Chinese Taipei finished second.

Strictly speaking, the Age of Empires players on the Chinese mainland were technically stronger at the time. They simply never had the chance to compete at WCG, that most prestigious of events.

Had mainland players been able to enter the WCG Age of Empires event then and done well, a great deal might have turned out differently.

How should we judge Age of Empires?

Pingguoniu says that although he loves Age of Empires himself, objectively it never became a hit and never attracted much media attention. Most of the people who played it came from traditional industries rather than IT, which made it a niche esports discipline. Many people eventually accepted that, and the forum discussed the reasons.

First, they felt Age of Empires was unlucky in being born inside a Microsoft games studio. Microsoft had built the GameZone battle.net service early on, but its corporate strategy at the time did not seem to involve promoting esports games, and it never pushed the title hard. After 2001 it more or less stopped paying attention, and Age of Empires II stopped receiving updates after version 1.0C.

Second, Age of Empires never passed the Chinese approval process. Legitimate copies could not enter the country, there was no officially licensed distributor in China, and the game received support with neither promotion nor Chinese localisation. International tournaments therefore never invited mainland players.

Third, the lack of a Chinese version early on, combined with the game's vast and complicated western historical background, raised the barrier to entry considerably and made the game high end and niche from the start.

Fourth, the complexity of the design meant the early economic build was too slow and the matches were not much of a spectacle. The first fight came around the twelve minute mark and razing an opponent completely usually took half an hour. Casters often had nothing to talk about in the early stages, and the fighting itself involved very complicated control.

Fifth, StarCraft, Counter-Strike and other games with smoother controls and graphics had already emerged in the same period, and the choice of online games was widening.

And so Age of Empires, an esports game full of cultural texture, gradually passed out of view.

Pingguoniu then set out on his World of Warcraft campaign, where he applied his esports thinking and shone in the arena era.

On the World of Warcraft arena, Pingguoniu says Blizzard intended both the arena and rated battlegrounds to move the game towards esports. Even though it had already become the biggest online game in the world by player numbers, and even though World of Warcraft appeared at many esports events, including WCG 2011, in a sense it still failed. It remains a discipline outside the mainstream.

First, he argues that World of Warcraft is a PvE game at heart. PvP competition against other players is what only a small proportion of players want, and many of the people in the arena are there for the gear rather than for esports.

On top of that, fighting people and fighting the computer are two different goals. Everything from gear requirements to skill design differs between them, and the two can be completely opposed paths. Resilience on the old PvP gear, for example, was useless in PvE instances. Blizzard tried to balance the PvP and PvE systems, but on the whole it did not succeed.

Another problem is that World of Warcraft has too high a barrier as an esports discipline. To experience esports in World of Warcraft, a player first has to level a character to the cap of the current patch, then accumulate entry level gear in battlegrounds, then study gear sets, enchants, gems, glyphs and specialisations, and only then reach the arena and rated battlegrounds. The process takes a very long time.

That is before mentioning the thirteen races, eleven playable classes, thirty-seven talent specialisations and three arena formats in World of Warcraft, all of which present players with an enormous challenge.

At the same time, matches involve so many abilities going off at once, at such speed, that they are relatively poor to watch. Often the audience has not worked out what is happening before the match is over, and many World of Warcraft players do not enjoy watching competition at all.

Pingguoniu has organised World of Warcraft tournaments himself, such as a one versus one God of War series. He says a one versus one format watches better, because at least you can follow the abilities of two players clearly. His God of War series was one versus one only and the audience response was very good, with many matches drawing more than ten thousand concurrent viewers on YY.

After World of Warcraft failed to become an esport, Pingguoniu says, other developers began trying to separate the PvP and PvE modes, and turning online games into esports has become a question everyone is thinking about now.

World of Warcraft patch 6.0 is about to be released. With esports booming as it is, Blizzard has again made many changes to the game, such as adding a spectator mode and lowering the barrier to competition. Those major moves may bring something new to the World of Warcraft arena and rated battlegrounds.

All of this shows how unusual Pingguoniu's gaming career has been. He has always been at the edge of the esports community, either very close to the single player crowd or moving between online games and esports. Age of Empires and World of Warcraft both have huge numbers of fans worldwide, but the earlier attempts to turn them into esports were not successful. That is highly representative, and the reasons are well worth studying closely. At the very least it shows that a game's own strategic direction and positioning matter enormously, whether it goes on to be popular or not.