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Morholt posted:Also later in that thread, grogpost.png: This was the only proper, well-argued post in that whole thread
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# ? Jan 14, 2015 13:20 |
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# ? Jun 6, 2024 13:28 |
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That's actually a good post
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# ? Jan 14, 2015 13:32 |
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My favorite part, besides Johan demolishing their arguments, is where the grogs defend a turn-based strategy game that takes 2 minutes to process a turn on a modern goddamn processor. The reason it's ok is that PBEM is slow too. In the year of our lord 2013 play by email was brought up in an argument. It's also ok because 'boardgames take time to play too'. Devs who think 'yeah ok this seems acceptable' and the fans who defend it are so far divorced from what's considered playable in the real world, I don't even know. I wonder why these games are so niche?
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# ? Jan 14, 2015 13:54 |
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2 minutes to process a turn is entirely reasonable. the 30mins+ it took PoN from the midgame onwards is not.
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# ? Jan 14, 2015 14:00 |
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Pharnakes posted:2 minutes to process a turn is entirely reasonable. the 30mins+ it took PoN from the midgame onwards is not. Space Empires V.
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# ? Jan 14, 2015 14:20 |
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Morholt posted:Also later in that thread, grogpost.png: Of course, the only responses to that were essentially: - Are you a wargame developer? No? Then STFU. - Yeah, but will it sell WitP? Obviously not, so no price reductions or Steam ever! - Sure, but I tried to give away a grog game for free to all my friends once and nobody took the offer, obviously wargames can't do well in the wider market. That last one bugs me particularly - for all that they pride themselves on being smarter than your average gamer, they seem to have trouble figuring out the problem with anecdotal evidence.
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# ? Jan 14, 2015 14:28 |
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I was mostly astounded by the length of that post. I can't imagine caring about prices that much, sorry.
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# ? Jan 14, 2015 14:35 |
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It can be a stupidly expensive hobby, as far as PC gaming goes. Why not care?
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# ? Jan 14, 2015 14:44 |
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I don't, actually - I just enjoy arguing against stupid positions a little more than I should and I type pretty quickly.
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# ? Jan 14, 2015 14:45 |
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So apparently this maniac just got atleast 10 kills today If you need 5 kills to be an ace, if he got ace in a day he must have had 4 or less kills yesterday. And this was against carrier planes too, not easy mode betty bashing.
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# ? Jan 14, 2015 14:57 |
Mans posted:Graviteam Tactics: Operation Star Yay. (It's cheap now so it doesn't matter). I don't understand why people seem to not like it here. I started playing it as an alternative to CM after the demo originally put me off it a while earlier and now post some patches I like them both. Some Things it does better than others: Built off a tank sim engine: If you like war machines and their various bits and bobs you'll like GT more straight away (this is why I liked it). Has the most detailed damage and physics model of all the strat Grognard games (that I know of). Watch individual suspension go up and down, tracks slip on mud, vehicles change gears and rev their engines, that kind of stuff. Has modern graphics: This one is obvious. Dynamic/persistent campaigns: as opposed to CM campaigns, only if you like that kind of thing. Limited abstraction: personal preference again.
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# ? Jan 14, 2015 15:09 |
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gradenko_2000 posted:Maps are too big, controls are way complicated, it's always in real-time, it has nice visuals that you never see because you have to be zoomed because again the maps are too big. I'm not sure if your suggestion of CoH was a jab or not since i really hate CoH's mechanics. Also Men of War Assault Squad 2 is out on steam and i spend too much time playing it to enjoy going back to something so arcadey Flannelette posted:Yay. Am i looking in the wrong place or something?
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# ? Jan 14, 2015 15:16 |
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God damnit I got Operation Star for £1 back when it was on one of those 'pay your own price' charity sales but the email is long gone and I can't for the life of me remember which site it was. e: still had the installer on a backup hard drive. Alchenar fucked around with this message at 15:36 on Jan 14, 2015 |
# ? Jan 14, 2015 15:33 |
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I may have been too hard on it. I wanted to like Graviteam Tactics, but it never clicked like CM did.
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# ? Jan 14, 2015 15:52 |
Mans posted:I bought it anyways because it's cheap as gently caress and the idea of a war game set in Angola makes me think both my grandparents would be proud (or mad, depends on what side i choose ). They're in a different branch yeah, Germany gets stugs and marders. Russia doesn't have any I don't think as it's set away/before their deployment. Also its a different kind of strategy than CM, you have to think of yourself more as a commander giving orders to the platoon commanders to carry out rather than managing all your units directly. I generally give broad orders while paused every few minutes or more and only sometimes micro mange my units, then look at the pretty graphics in between. ( this is reenforced by the systems in it now that mean you can't many orders in quick succession and can't do things like give target orders). Also you have to know what all the icons, orders, comms link system and buttons do but that's just the grognard way and the tutorial in the game tells you basically everything (manual doesn't) )
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# ? Jan 14, 2015 16:26 |
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Tomn posted:Of course, the only responses to that were essentially:
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# ? Jan 14, 2015 16:27 |
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Pharnakes posted:2 minutes to process a turn is entirely reasonable. the 30mins+ it took PoN from the midgame onwards is not. No it's not. Let's say a game has 200 turns in it, 2 minutes of processing is over 6 hours of staring at loading screens.
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# ? Jan 14, 2015 17:22 |
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Myoclonic Jerk posted:So, if fighter escorts are mostly ineffective, how do you use fighters offensively? Sweeps? Sweeps/airfield attack should work in drawing out CAPs but WitP's manual even states their are 3 levels of CAP readiness (In air, ready to take-off and available). If you have enough fighters, a sweep might look like a bomber group and have CAP fighters sent to intercept, or sneaking some low-flying fighters to attack airfields and hit the CAPs on the ground should theoretically work. I'll admit I haven't put an immense amount of time into WitP as I'd like; I've always found combat reports for air combat to be lackluster, but this is coming from someone who's played a lot of flight sims and expect nothing less than Ace in a Day or a smoking crater as my rewards.
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# ? Jan 14, 2015 17:59 |
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uPen posted:No it's not. Let's say a game has 200 turns in it, 2 minutes of processing is over 6 hours of staring at loading screens. And how much time is actually being spent per turn doing, y'know, the "playing" thing? If it's 30 seconds per, yeah, 2 minutes per is pretty steep; if it's a Grey Hunter day-by-day WitP, I expect it might not be as noticeable overall. Unless you're going full grog and logging such details, of course.
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# ? Jan 14, 2015 18:44 |
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Pharnakes posted:2 minutes to process a turn is entirely reasonable. the 30mins+ it took PoN from the midgame onwards is not.
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# ? Jan 14, 2015 18:52 |
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Zamboni Apocalypse posted:And how much time is actually being spent per turn doing, y'know, the "playing" thing? If it's 30 seconds per, yeah, 2 minutes per is pretty steep; if it's a Grey Hunter day-by-day WitP, I expect it might not be as noticeable overall. Yeah, whether two minutes is acceptable depends on how long you are playing the turns. In a large, detailed game taking 15mins+ to play the turn, I don't see why 2 minutes of resolution is bad. Obviously shorter would be better, but if that's the price you have to pay for a certain level of fidelity or scale then so be it.
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# ? Jan 14, 2015 19:01 |
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I don't get why they wouldn't even try one game as an experiment. Like, just put the Shock Force pack on there with all the modules patched up for $50. Something older which sales have prob dwindled but still works on modern systems painlessly. If their groglogic is somehow accurate they won't lose much. If it's not (and it probably isn't), then bam more money for Battlefront. ...unless they think there's hordes of people out there who would buy it at a Steam level price and dammit they should pay the grog price or nothing. ...but then that means they think there's potential sales out there they don't want and how are these people running a company
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# ? Jan 14, 2015 19:14 |
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One of their arguments against Steam literally boiled down to, "We don't want to pay the money to Research how much money we could make by selling games on Steam because we don't believe we will make as much money as it will cost to do the Research." So I think if you are trying to discern any sort of logic from their arguments at all, you are just going to give yourself a headache.
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# ? Jan 14, 2015 19:22 |
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Detailed simulation of all aspects of modern warfare: feasible. Applying a college sophomore's understanding of price elasticity to straightforward business decisions: not feasible.
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# ? Jan 14, 2015 19:48 |
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Doesn't Valve give companies pricing recommendations when they want to list games on Steam? Although their advice is presumably "Don't list your old rear end game for $80" which is akin to heresy for some.
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# ? Jan 14, 2015 19:51 |
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Goetta posted:Doesn't Valve give companies pricing recommendations when they want to list games on Steam? Although their advice is presumably "Don't list your old rear end game for $80" which is akin to heresy for some. I think they give advice but I doubt it's binding, considering C:MNAO. ..which apparently sells decently enough on Steam despite a grogtastic price. I just want to buy a Combat Mission game without having to deal with an actual customer support person in TYOOL 2015 to play a video game if their bizarre licence system messes up.
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# ? Jan 14, 2015 20:01 |
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somegrog posted:
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# ? Jan 14, 2015 21:51 |
vuk83 posted:Peak grog Dude has awfully bad English for someone with such an apparently gargantuan intellect.
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# ? Jan 14, 2015 22:15 |
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"Come, sub-intellects! Feast your pitiful minds on Table 87a, and weep for those who cannot grasp the glory of the charts!"
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# ? Jan 14, 2015 22:16 |
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"It's them, not me."
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# ? Jan 14, 2015 22:29 |
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The number of rubes that Grey Hunter suckers into buying WITP or whatever through is LPs is a rather powerful counter-anecdote to the idea that you can't get someone into grog wargaming through casual contact.
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# ? Jan 14, 2015 23:18 |
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vuk83 posted:Wargamers are usually also passionate about history. Most of people are very stupid. History lessons quickly make their stupidity apparent to them so they don't like history. I wonder what this guy thinks of economics? Or statistics? Or marketing, or accessible game design, or anything indeed he clearly doesn't have much of a grasp on?
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# ? Jan 14, 2015 23:19 |
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I wouldn't be surprised if Matrix actually wanted to go on Steam (see: slow creep of Slitherine's games in there), but was afraid that putting too much there would strip them of excuses for not including the vast amounts of commercially worthless games in their catalogue (World in Flames, Pride of Nations, non-Admiral's Edition WITP still available for $60), thus bringing down the snake oil scheme. This assumes the goal of the company is not to provide quality product, but to exploit confused and naive bedroom developers and dumb grogs. Selling the crappy part of catalogue is like selling porn in the Internet: you need a client that is either very committed, or very dumb about computers, and with many grogs being fairly old dudes, neither seems implausible. Broken poo poo like WiF would be quickly laughed out on Steam and relegated to comedy gifts during extreme sales, like Bad Rats or whatever. The current snake oil system allows Matrix to hold this worthless crap (that doesn't really generate any upkeep costs for them) and rake in $60 whenever some random misguided buyer appears - literal money for nothing every once in a while. A more involved jump to modern distribution and pricing systems would require Matrix to provide actual quality assurance, to make the products commercially viable and the company is not convinced its got enough decent poo poo in the pipeline to cut loose what is perceived as free money, where the company does little more than host the games and give the developer a cut. Right now they can excuse themselves that the non-broken games on Steam (Battle Academy, Panzer Corps) are easy to otherise as beer-and-pretzels gateway games, while non-broken hardcore games (like WitE, for a certain definition of non-broken) cannot go on Steam without breaking the illusion Matrix' rethoric has any loving sense. Battlefront's games are cool, though, so I guess they're just grumpy old men, like the Spiderweb dude. It's a shame though that the text gets all blurry and hosed up on my new laptop's Intel HD4600 and I cannot find a good workaround for this. 1
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# ? Jan 15, 2015 00:09 |
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Lichtenstein posted:I wouldn't be surprised if Matrix actually wanted to go on Steam (see: slow creep of Slitherine's games in there), but was afraid that putting too much there would strip them of excuses for not including the vast amounts of commercially worthless games in their catalogue (World in Flames, Pride of Nations, non-Admiral's Edition WITP still available for $60), thus bringing down the snake oil scheme. This assumes the goal of the company is not to provide quality product, but to exploit confused and naive bedroom developers and dumb grogs. Selling the crappy part of catalogue is like selling porn in the Internet: you need a client that is either very committed, or very dumb about computers, and with many grogs being fairly old dudes, neither seems implausible. Broken poo poo like WiF would be quickly laughed out on Steam and relegated to comedy gifts during extreme sales, like Bad Rats or whatever. The current snake oil system allows Matrix to hold this worthless crap (that doesn't really generate any upkeep costs for them) and rake in $60 whenever some random misguided buyer appears - literal money for nothing every once in a while. A more involved jump to modern distribution and pricing systems would require Matrix to provide actual quality assurance, to make the products commercially viable and the company is not convinced its got enough decent poo poo in the pipeline to cut loose what is perceived as free money, where the company does little more than host the games and give the developer a cut. Right now they can excuse themselves that the non-broken games on Steam (Battle Academy, Panzer Corps) are easy to otherise as beer-and-pretzels gateway games, while non-broken hardcore games (like WitE, for a certain definition of non-broken) cannot go on Steam without breaking the illusion Matrix' rethoric has any loving sense. Iain from Matrix pretty much admitted in one of the Steam threads that the reason the good games are outrageously expensive is so that those devs run cover for the terrible games which just ridiculously expensive and need to be ridiculously expensive because they will only ever sell 100 copies or so. When I pointed out that that was pretty lovely for the developers who could actually be making decent money from the mainstream market there wasn't really an answer.
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# ? Jan 15, 2015 00:23 |
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Is anyone still playing Commander: The Great War? I got it over Christmas and on my first try at the game the French were in Berlin by summer 1916, and the Serbs are knocking on Budapest. Is the AI that bad or is it luck/low difficulty level?
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# ? Jan 15, 2015 00:27 |
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Eager to finish mine off so that I can try out the beta, actually.
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# ? Jan 15, 2015 00:29 |
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Lichtenstein posted:Battlefront's games are cool, though, so I guess they're just grumpy old men, like the Spiderweb dude. You know, as an aside, I remember when Jeff Vogel talked about how he ended up getting onto Steam, he mentioned that as a shareware developed he used to take a lot of flak and was looked down upon - apparently the profession was somewhat stigmatized. I imagine, too, that from the days when Matrix/Battlefront first developed their marketing and pricing model out of the ruins of the wargame industry and the moment when Steam opened the floodgates of opportunity for indie developers, Matrix/Battlefront must have gotten a LOT of flak from random passer-bys for their pricing structure, which no doubt they'd gotten used to dismissing (fairly and accurately at the time) for not understanding their industry. I guess they just got so worn into their habit of telling people to gently caress off over the years that they stopped being able to recognize when people were telling them the same thing for different reasons. Edit: StashAugustine posted:Is anyone still playing Commander: The Great War? I got it over Christmas and on my first try at the game the French were in Berlin by summer 1916, and the Serbs are knocking on Budapest. Is the AI that bad or is it luck/low difficulty level? I haven't tried the latest patches, but when I played a few months ago I remember the Allies were considerably stronger than the Central Powers, balance-wise. Try switching sides and see where that gets you.
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# ? Jan 15, 2015 00:30 |
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Alikchi posted:Eager to finish mine off so that I can try out the beta, actually. I can just concede if you would like.
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# ? Jan 15, 2015 00:41 |
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Alchenar posted:Iain from Matrix pretty much admitted in one of the Steam threads that the reason the good games are outrageously expensive is so that those devs run cover for the terrible games which just ridiculously expensive and need to be ridiculously expensive because they will only ever sell 100 copies or so. When I pointed out that that was pretty lovely for the developers who could actually be making decent money from the mainstream market there wasn't really an answer. It is pretty lovely, but at the end of the day there's nothing stopping grog devs going down the steam greenlight route is there? Obviously that won't work for the current releases where deals have already been signed, but I really don't understand what devs who put new stuff onto matrix are thinking
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# ? Jan 15, 2015 00:43 |
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# ? Jun 6, 2024 13:28 |
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Pharnakes posted:It is pretty lovely, but at the end of the day there's nothing stopping grog devs going down the steam greenlight route is there? Being dumb and clueless and listening to Matrix's rhetoric, because they're the industry representatives that must know their poo poo. Also, up front publisher funding. Whatever money was funneled into, say, World in Flames, may be laughable by industry standards*, but for a lone bedroom programmer ability to have time to work on his pet project and pay rent for a while can be huge (and, in this case, acquire a licence without some sort of established name the licence holder could google up and not dismiss immediately). Not everyone can go ahead and become a kickstarter success story. * I mean non-totally bedroom indies, like even the microscopic Longbow Games, or Jon Schaefer's three man operation.
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# ? Jan 15, 2015 00:59 |