Sorry I meant for online matches, although some people would draw a distinction between age of empires: the conquerors and age of empires: hd edition.
You can check the player history for steam here[0], it's almost at an all time low, although this number includes people logged in playing single player too, while voobly's numbers (just over 1500 at the time of writing) include people spectating matches and waiting in lobbies or idling.
Unfortunately there were performance problems on the release of aoehd, pretty much up until 1-2 months ago, leaving the community fragmented. Typically steam is where you'll find casual gamers and voobly is where slightly more experienced players go (although they do have a new player lobby with casual gamers too). During steam sales however the hd edition does get an influx of new players every time (you can usually pick it up for $5).
Since I'm talking about platforms it wouldn't be fair not to mention game ranger[1]. I don't know a lot about it but the rumours are they largely play standard (non-userpatch) aoc or the forgotten empires[2]. I have got no idea about the userbase size though.
Are the performance problems you refer to the horrible slow-down in multiplayer? I've never had any client-side performance problems with AoC (Steam edition or prior), but the network slow-down has always been there, and makes substantial games with more than about 4 players essentially unplayable. I haven't checked on the Steam edition since a couple months after its release, but if they managed to fix that I would be elated.
Both client and network but most of the fps issues and scrolling issues have been fixed. I think patch 3.8 fixed some of the memory leaks and "out of syncs" also. It's definitely worth another go. They also changed the default hot keys to a grid layout late last year too, just in case! :)
You can check the player history for steam here[0], it's almost at an all time low, although this number includes people logged in playing single player too, while voobly's numbers (just over 1500 at the time of writing) include people spectating matches and waiting in lobbies or idling.
Unfortunately there were performance problems on the release of aoehd, pretty much up until 1-2 months ago, leaving the community fragmented. Typically steam is where you'll find casual gamers and voobly is where slightly more experienced players go (although they do have a new player lobby with casual gamers too). During steam sales however the hd edition does get an influx of new players every time (you can usually pick it up for $5).
Since I'm talking about platforms it wouldn't be fair not to mention game ranger[1]. I don't know a lot about it but the rumours are they largely play standard (non-userpatch) aoc or the forgotten empires[2]. I have got no idea about the userbase size though.
[0] http://steamcharts.com/app/221380#1y
[1] http://www.gameranger.com/games/
[2] http://forgottenempires.net