Developer inlägg

Skrivet av Asylan, 21.06.2021 at 21:03

This is a reach but how about bits and pieces of the code for people to do small tweaks to Quality of Life. Like for example the chunk of code that is for competitive... (the more and more I type this idea out, the more I know it's totally fruitless)

It's a nice idea but with the way atWar code is spread out, anything you would think of as a "1-line change" is probably 5 changes in random different places. It would be tough for anyone to figure anything out without access to the complete code

Example: when I added the chat icons -- which you'd think would be a tiny little change -- it ended up nuking all casual games. Why on earth would those 2 things be related?? (Well there's a reason I figured out later, but it wasn't obvious... that's the kind of stuff I end up dealing with so often here....)

The panda jew

Mobster is mine

Thanks everyone appreciate it.
I would like to let everyone know for my first order of business, I'm going to be deleting Perfect Defense. So everyone better say bye bye while you still can.


Jk

Congrats Mecoy! I know you'll do well!

Skrivet av Asylan, 20.06.2021 at 21:31

Skrivet av Doctress Daisy, 20.06.2021 at 10:33

Skrivet av Alois, 19.06.2021 at 18:00

We have plans for everything you just said. Just need volunteers

I have been rejected as a mod here several years ago, I was softly rejected as an admin recently, and when I applied as a supporter, YOU answered me that I get a role in the Helper Team. That is not what I applied for and you gave me no context so I handled this as a joke and another rejection.

I'm done in this regard. I wish you'll find people with this attitude.

More bureaucracy than the IRS tbh. You'll prob spend 3 years of your life proving to the supporter team that you can be a "reliable" "helpful" "team-player", by doing menial jobs like running events, and then help chat, and then they'll promise you that you can code in the near future... and always in the near future, but never actually give you that carrot. You'll be worked to the bone and then cast aside.

But who doesn't like playing God.

Just to be clear on one point, no one from the atWar community will be allowed access to code, no matter how skilled they may be. For security (and, frankly, liability) reasons, programming will only be done by myself or one of my employees. We would never promise that anyone can help code, because its simply not an option. (I've said this before, and I'm saying it again.)

As for the rest, I don't want any volunteer to ever feel "worked to the bone" (whether as a supporter, moderator, or admin)... atWar is supposed to be something we do for fun, that's all. Yes we're very selective who we choose to represent the game, but of those we choose we're grateful for any time they contribute, without any expectations that they owe us anything. And specifically with the Supporter vs Helper Team thing, I don't know if Pavle plans to continue it that way or not (it's up to him) -- but in general I would support there being LESS bureaucracy, not more.

Just as a side, this is one of the coolest tournaments I've seen in a while and the concept is amazing. I'm changing my donation to 501 PC.

If i don't get picked in the first round i'm banning all the team leaders.

Skrivet av Doctress Daisy, 18.06.2021 at 12:47

RETENTION ISSUE
...

Has anything changed massively since 2010? The short answer is no, nothing changed at all. Risk is a board game like Chess. Has chess become boring since 3000 BC or so, when it was first played in China? No. Strategy games do not age. They improve by generation changes, graphics, and complexity. No strategy game could ever replicate reality 100%, so in fact, atwar is fine for a few more decades at least. It is not "aging" in this term.

I would say risk is almost as popular as chess, they're even competing in western cultures. This theoretically means in terms of available people - as long as atwar has no competitor in this area, - we are absolutely fine. A very easy concept that has been developed into a virtual strategy game. The unique value of atwar relies in this. We should stick to this matter as it's an amazing resource for advertisement (unless we find something better, highly doubt it).

We should return to the roots instead. Why do people prefer atwar? Why would they spend 3 hours conquering the world as China: Southeast instead of sitting in front of their newest Creative Assembly (total war), Taleword (mount and blade), Paradox Interactive (hearts of iron), or Firaxis (civilization) games? Because it's different. It's based on a board game (risk), and started developing in a way that is outstanding, plus eventually managed to find a marketing gap, either by accident or on purpose. To understand this let's take a look back to the early development of atwar.

UNIQUITY OF ATWAR
Now investigate atwar's essential strength (compared to risk board game and strategy games):
1. Besides world map it offers an astonishing customization option, the map editor (which is similar to modding, user-generated sandbox is always attractive for strategy gamers in my experience), where you can replicate and change about everything in the game, setup your own playground.
2. Great potential in the cities-countries system, which also provides the opportunity for further implementations.
3. It features several - on paper unlimited - different types of units, like in modern strategy games.
4. Given the fact we are online, it's a great social activity if you consider that Hearts of Iron or Civilization multiplayer lobbies are almost dead. Their communities live on the games' forums, private communities and such. Atwar can't and shouldn't try to compete with large titles, it's an entirely different story.
4.1. We utilize people to people combat, both real time and casual strategy. That's extraordinary.
5. Quality of Life focused, clean and modern UI design. Brilliant solutions that brought and then upgraded the concept of a board game.
6. Derives from the golden era of Total War series: turn based RTS, almost standalone idea.

DD has nailed it here. When you look at players who do stick around, at least one feature from the above list applies to nearly all of them. AW has a way of hooking players, but it takes a certain amount of commitment to get through the learning curve. It's not easy to talk to someone who left and ask why, but the handful of people that i've spoken to say 2 things ... mature players who didn't like the toxicity of immature players... this has been solved for the most part, and continues to improve. But the big one now is 'too hard to learn'. AW, like chess, is a strategy game, but it takes time to develop. It's the double edged sword... once you get into the strategy, there is so much room to grow, develop, specialize and refine, but it's a big hump. So many players that leave want something flashy they can dive into and get quick fix... AW just isn't that type of game.

SO how to solve retention? It's like the makers of Risk asking how to sell more games. I think nearly everyone has heard of or tried Risk, but i'm guessing fewer than 1% actually buy the game. The board game takes a long time to play a full game, and AW is no different. Yes, we have casual, which solves the time problem for people busy with school or work, and casual games continue to be a big draw (125 games in progress as i write, which is about a thousand players) so AW is doing it right... but how to increase those numbers?

Perhaps the focus should be finding a way for new players to experience the strategy side as soon as possible, so they get a taste before they leave and say 'too hard to learn.' It's hard for old guard players to remember exactly how they got hooked and how this could be accelerated, but if we could talk to those few that stick around more than a month, they might have better suggestions to how we can reduce the time to experience the thrill of the strategy, and that it might increase the retention. Unfortunately i can't see 60% retention, or even 10%... AW is truly not for everyone... but timeless classics (like chess) rarely are.

Skrivet av Kaska, 19.06.2021 at 03:16

In my opinion, three things must be done before anything else :

The tutorial

The tutorial

The tutorial

The rest is conversation

I agree the tutorials (intermediate & advanced) need to be done. However there are a lot of people who don't even bother looking at the one we already have. I think we might need to do something even more fundamental... like maybe tooltips/nags built into the game until r3 or something. So people can't miss them.

Skrivet av Mobster, 19.06.2021 at 02:43

Skrivet av Dave, 19.06.2021 at 02:17

I've seen it. I don't have the source code for it, unfortunately, but I installed it once and played around with it. I plan to do something similar.

Wow is there really nothing? Wouldn't Amok or Ivan have something in somewhere?

I could ask them if they still have it, but even if they did it would probably be very outdated by now.

Anyway its no big deal... I built something similar once before, it won't be too hard to do it again.

Skrivet av Roma Invicta, 19.06.2021 at 02:09

Skrivet av Dave, 18.06.2021 at 21:09

Please at least just look at our old silverlight launcher(not the webpage) and see if that's any help for a starting point. Everyone has either forgot about it or skimming over that part.

I've seen it. I don't have the source code for it, unfortunately, but I installed it once and played around with it. I plan to do something similar.

Skrivet av Alois, 18.06.2021 at 21:11

In my opinion, we should have added ourselves on steam as soon as we were able to (aka when Dave made the landing page i think a year-year and a half ago) as we'd be better off in pretty much all areas, even if we aren't fully developed. we'd gain players, help, offers, etc if it was taken care of correctly.

Also on top of this, I believe it's time for Dave to create more structure within the leadership (dividing tasks more and entrusting leadership with more) so a side gig can be less of a stress to work on; It'd allow for something such as adding steam to be taken care of easier. Otherwise, I don't think adding steam will work out.

Maybe you're right, maybe I should have done Steam a long time ago. I don't know.

About staff, I'm going to be making an announcement soon (probably this weekend) so stay tuned...

^^ ten years from now, that little joke is going to cancel me from getting a Congressional seat or something

I like this one better.

With as many fags as we have on atWar, we should make this the logo year-round.

Skrivet av Doctress Daisy, 18.06.2021 at 15:41

On the contrary, I exactly know how the changes I'm talking about would look like in code and I have flawless picture of how difficult it is what I talked about.

I've worked as a professional programmer for 10 years, plus programming as a hobby for 20+ years. Prior to starting my own business, the job titles given to me included Full Stack Developer, Senior Software Developer, and eventually Director of Digital Services. I've had almost 3 years now of getting to know the atWar codebase specifically... and with all of that together.... even *I* would not be able to tell you everything required to implement your changes. At least not without spending some considerable time planning it out.

So it's quite impressive you are able to exactly know all of that, especially without even seeing atWar's source code. Either you're a 1000 times smarter than me*, or its not as easy as you think it is

* and I don't claim to be smart. I mean I did buy atWar so that's a big question mark next to my potential smartness.

Skrivet av young lil ouch, 18.06.2021 at 15:08

realistically, dave probably has a family and a job. this game is probably a side gig for him. like most people, he's not gonna dump time/resources for something he isn't going to get a return on.

This is exactly the case. I wish more people appreciated the fact that AW is just a side gig for me. Its something I'm doing for "fun" (theoretically anyway... lol).

Skrivet av Dave, 18.06.2021 at 14:03

Skrivet av Sid, 18.06.2021 at 09:51

I wonder what atWar's user retention should be? I don't know what it is, but I wonder how far off the mark we are from similar games.

Thanks for the reply! I see now why it hasn't been done yet.

Well, that's an excellent question. I don't know what it should be. I have no other games' data to compare atWar to. I would love to find out somehow what retention numbers should look like in a successful game... but I haven't been able to find this so far.

All I have to compare to are my other businesses, which are mostly ecommerce-related software. One of those, for example, is a business I've had for 3 years. I have spent exactly $0 dollars on advertising it, yet its been growing on a straight upward trend since day-1. I make money by charging an annual license fee -- 60% of my customers renew after the first year.

Imagine if atWar had the same stats! Right now we average about 10% of new users who are still playing after the first 30 days (I'm not home so I don't have the exact numbers in front of me atm, but off the top of my head I know its close to that). After 365 days that percentage goes down to almost nothing. Imagine if instead we had 60% of our new users still playing after a year -- there wouldn't be any problem!

Of course, games and e-commerce software are totally different things, so maybe this is an unfair comparison. I could also be entirely wrong about atWar, maybe 10% after 30 days is a great number. It doesn't feel like it to me, but who knows. I really would like to find out somehow. (If anybody has connections or knows the stats for a successful game.... lemme know....)

I'll try to contact some other similar games.

Skrivet av Sid, 18.06.2021 at 09:51

I wonder what atWar's user retention should be? I don't know what it is, but I wonder how far off the mark we are from similar games.

Thanks for the reply! I see now why it hasn't been done yet.

Well, that's an excellent question. I don't know what it should be. I have no other games' data to compare atWar to. I would love to find out somehow what retention numbers should look like in a successful game... but I haven't been able to find this so far.

All I have to compare to are my other businesses, which are mostly ecommerce-related software. One of those, for example, is a business I've had for 3 years. I have spent exactly $0 dollars on advertising it, yet its been growing on a straight upward trend since day-1. I make money by charging an annual license fee -- 60% of my customers renew after the first year.

Imagine if atWar had the same stats! Right now we average about 10% of new users who are still playing after the first 30 days (I'm not home so I don't have the exact numbers in front of me atm, but off the top of my head I know its close to that). After 365 days that percentage goes down to almost nothing. Imagine if instead we had 60% of our new users still playing after a year -- there wouldn't be any problem!

Of course, games and e-commerce software are totally different things, so maybe this is an unfair comparison. I could also be entirely wrong about atWar, maybe 10% after 30 days is a great number. It doesn't feel like it to me, but who knows. I really would like to find out somehow. (If anybody has connections or knows the stats for a successful game.... lemme know....)

Skrivet av Dave, 18.06.2021 at 06:43

All of these things *should* be helping to improve our user retention

I wonder what atWar's user retention should be? I don't know what it is, but I wonder how far off the mark we are from similar games.

Thanks for the reply! I see now why it hasn't been done yet.

Skrivet av Ivan., 18.06.2021 at 08:50

Skrivet av Dave, 18.06.2021 at 06:43

why dont you encourage youtube channels to use this platform to make their content that basically only focus on history related to wars or shout out their multi times the list I've talked about in my previous comment is the charm the might use for their content and their user base will find out about this game and who knows who finds interest in it.
maybe some sort of agreement or payment can help out

We've reached out to a lot of youtube channels and they all want money. We did pay Kings & Generals (a lot of money, btw) and just like everything else, we got a bunch of new users and 0 stuck around. It's not so easy.

Skrivet av avatar, 17.06.2021 at 06:22

^^ This is profound.

I've never been opposed to Steam. In fact, I think its a good idea, and I plan to do it. Its just a question of when.

I do worry about getting a lot of negative reviews, given the game's current state. While I've fixed quite a few bugs, it still seems like just the tip of the iceberg. Not to mention how dated the UI is and all the other problems we all know about.

What I worry about more though is our user retention issue. We easily get 3-4K new registered users (not guests) every month, but so few actually stick around and become regulars. We tried advertising a bunch of different ways and it was the same thing -- we could get a boost of users but none of them stuck around. I'm afraid it would be the same with Steam.

Now maybe we should do Steam anyway -- it doesn't cost much, and it wouldn't be that hard to do. Fair enough. Even if we end up with only 1 or 2 new users sticking around, hey that's 1 or 2 more we didn't have before.

What I'm really focusing on though is trying to solve the user retention issue at its core. Any QoL update I've done has just been quick & easy stuff to try and keep the existing community happy -- nothing really complicated. My real interest is how to get brand new users to stick around for longer periods of time. That's why I've done things like updating the tutorial (I know, still a work in progress, but its better than it was before); updating the start game UI to expose people to more variety of maps; giving free players the ability to play promo'd maps; giving daily login SP to encourage repeat activity; giving PC earnings from games to encourage people to stay all the way to the end and not abandon; putting a lot of effort into reducing toxicity and making this a friendlier environment (which continues to be a struggle, but we have achieved the removal of some of the worst people); and putting a lot of effort into building the Supporters team to help/mentor newbies.

All of these things *should* be helping to improve our user retention numbers, but the hard truth is they've continued to go down, not up. I don't think any of the things I just mentioned objectively made retention worse, per se. Its just that we're fighting against a downward trend that's been going for a long time now. I'm sad to say, nothing that I've done so far has stopped this decline. Excepting the huge temporary gain from Coronavirus lockdowns, and fleeting little gains here and there from advertising, the overall downward trend has continued unabated.

I have more ideas I'm working on to try and make some positive breakthrough with the user retention numbers. (I don't want to say what they are at the moment because it will just derail the thread, but you'll see when they arrive.) If I can find a way to turn the downtrend into an uptrend, then doing advertising and Steam and everything else would be much more worthwhile.

Anyway... Like I said, maybe we should do Steam anyway and see what happens. I just wish we could find some way to actually hook new people when they come in the door. I would feel much more confident about it in that case.

Also, and this is going to sound terrible but to be totally honest, it *would* be kinda nice if people stopped bugging me with little QoL ideas so much, because realistically 99% of them are not gonna get done anyway. I mean I appreciate that people want to help out, but we already have tons of ideas. We're not lacking in the idea department. I do want to keep the existing community (minus the toxic ones) around as much as I can, but I'm much more focused on the r0-r3's... that's where the future of AW will come from. And if we do Steam, it would be much better if those new users actually stuck around.

I should mention that what i'm asking is not "easy" and probably one of the harder things being suggested

Sorry Dave!

You guys are bombarding Dave everyday with good ideas, and he's been amazing at trying to cater towards everyone and make things fun/new/exciting but what we are lacking more than anything is playerbase, and it's showing.

The Issue:
It's no surprise that the activity level is diminishing since our covid party is almost ending. I'm sure you've all noticed both lobbies, especially the beginner's lobby drop in activity. All these updates are great for older players but the competitive community is not what keeps AtWar alive, it never has been. It's the influx of newer players replacing older ones that keeps AtWar alive. People are always going to leave a game once they get older or bored.

The Solution:
One of the first things I brought up to Dave was inquiring about if it was feasible to bring the game to Steam (https://store.steampowered.com/). He seemed reluctant and hesitant at the time but I think he's onboard with the idea now. I've already made a post about it, which you can read below but i've taken a SS of it for easier viewing.





I'm suggesting maybe we all stop asking for minor QoL updates from Dave and move towards the real issue at hand. Let's get the game some players.







My Older topic:
https://atwar-game.com//forum/topic.php?topic_id=34376
Others:
https://atwar-game.com//forum/topic.php?topic_id=40099
https://atwar-game.com//forum/topic.php?topic_id=35242
https://atwar-game.com//forum/topic.php?topic_id=34474
https://atwar-game.com//forum/topic.php?topic_id=25968
https://atwar-game.com//forum/topic.php?topic_id=25900
https://atwar-game.com//forum/topic.php?topic_id=25374
https://atwar-game.com//forum/topic.php?topic_id=15184

No response, I'll give it another day.

Skrivet av Not I_Hate_You, 16.06.2021 at 21:05

Is it only me or Insurrection dissapeared?

We were tinkering with it for a few days but decided to hold off for now.

I told you that I would deny it if the only thing you are going to say is "it's my younger brother". Yes, the only way i'm going to believe you is if you (Witness) records your little brother playing the way he did against DJ today, without me seeing you practicing/teaching him on another account or game. Don't play ANY games on ANY account until then. Message me on discord if you're really serious about this. My name is: Sid#8095.

We'll make a 1v1 and you can record or stream your brother playing against me. If you can do that then i'll unban you and apologize.

No format, Denied.
https://atwar-game.com/forum/topic.php?topic_id=44630

In, Donating 100 pc

No format, denied.