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.
I support the idea about bringing the game on Steam, but I also agree with Dave that maybe some fixes need to be made before such things happen. Just as someone stressed the importance of user retention, we also must deal with toxicity in our community (which we have been dealing with for months now). We do not need immature players that have been punished in the past for bad behavior to give us negative reviews for no objective reason.
In my opinion, this game has great chances to exponentially increase its playerbase if we make it new players - friendly and eliminate toxicity. Much worse games of similiar genre have bigger communities, I could talk about names aswell, but I will leave details for private conv with Dave I guess.
Yet Travian, Supremacy, Ikariam have millions of players...
They spent millions advertising for 10 years aswell.
Good now beats perfect in the future, basic rules of business, what are the major bugs ? Starting game where you're not a host ? The only one I can think of is when you send units on multiple locations from a trans they tend to go where they are not sent.
Imo we need to advertise on 4chan, 8chan, etc. The places that match this toxicity and energy
----
No such thing as a good girl, you are just not the right guy.
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).
----
All men can see these tactics whereby I conquer,
but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved.
--Sun Tzu
Advertising isn't necessarily the problem, it's retaining those players so maybe you are right in choosing the places where people generally have thicker skin and are more likely to survive in atwar.
with toxicity in our community (which we have been dealing with for months now).
Years. Steam has too
I think reorganizing the Fourm into sub categories is good, as their are loads of random Topics that pop up everywhere.
For new players I think it's good
----
*War in Europe again isn't good for anyone... that's why the EU is an Absolute! Long Live The Forth Realm! Long Live Europe!*
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.
----
All men can see these tactics whereby I conquer,
but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved.
--Sun Tzu
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.
we also must deal with toxicity in our community (which we have been dealing with for months now). We do not need immature players that have been punished in the past for bad behavior to give us negative reviews for no objective reason.
In my opinion, this game has great chances to exponentially increase its playerbase if we make it new players - friendly and eliminate toxicity. Much worse games of similiar genre have bigger communities, I could talk about names aswell, but I will leave details for private conv with Dave I guess.
We need more meta gaming going on, Toxicity can be controlled but it can't be stopped. 2014-2017 AW had the most meta gaming going on and it not only brought activity to the game because it used more than just the game its self but it also brought players in naturally. Maybe we could work on bringing more... rivalries, alliances, etc. You don't see that here anymore and it was what made the game so good on top of everything already going on.
Good idea, but i dont think moving to steam will have much affect
atwar is just kinda old and isn't attractive to kids and teens and they wont play it regardless if its on steam.
i think this game was successful because it was a pretty well made strategy game that didn't require a ton of load on your pc like total war during the days where everyone had pretty shit pcs
now we all got good pcs, what does this game have to offer that other games cant?
how does this game compare to other strategy games?
plus, even if it goes on steam, it might get negative reviews which would be potentially very damaging to the game when attracting new players
maybe this game can be revived if dave burns a ton of cash on it and hires more programmers, but i dont think he is willing to spend that cash
so overall i don't think going on steam is a good idea at the current state of the game
It's what totally me and SunTzu been saying this game needs to move on to some game engine to get more player base and steam is by so far that can help out player base problem.
Second thing this game needs a major update to be on the line to attract players and so many other areas that need to be revised again, which means coding part.
If the game allows channels to create content on history where there are several channels on youtube this will be another boom for Atwar to grow I think they would love to use this product as it will allow them to actually show units, reality based map, battles expansions and much more.
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.
Epic games could be a better option, they seem to be spending a lot of money to give free games to people so maybe they'd even pay something to get atwar on their platform. Otherwise steam would be a good option too, if Dave is serious about this then maybe he should look back at the old silverlight launcher that we had since that was already a standalone launcher that worked and wasn't buggy HTML5. It would still take a little work of course but the building blocks are there I believe.
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.
OK. I see many good points and even more bad ones. It's not your fault, probably most of you are not web developers or software engineers at all, given that you are adults in the first place. Let me give you my point of view of the retention issue.
RETENTION ISSUE
In order to sustain a straight retention value on the graphs, we need to keep the players enganged. It's necessary to focus on retention and engagement at once. How can atwar engage the youth (gamers)? 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.
And now the weaknesses, where we should definitely improve:
1. Overall design of the User Interface, map editor and such. The game was already giving retro vibes back in 2012-2014, now in 2021 this contrasts even more (in a bad meaning this time). The most important thing here is the in-game interface, obviously.
1.1. Add more colors, make the panels easier to handle, make it more user friendly, change the UI in a way suitable for future expansions and updates, like if it was designed for a 12 years old.
2. Quantity matters too - probably more than quality - in a strategy game. We need more units, more strategies, more CONTENT. This must remain nearly ignorant to the parallel quality changes (adding two buttons or three to the interface and changing the background shouldn't prevent us from adding logistic wizard strategy, right? object orientation in the development team too, please...)
2.1. Seasonality. 3 months for a cw season is a thing. On the other hand we don't get any content changes, or they are just minimal and disappointing, see point 2.
3. To make atwar more interesting and engaging, it needs depth. No, I don't mean witch doctor's and froyer's walling skills in cw. I mean things like improved diplomacy, more types of cities, units, generals (remember tank general? inner joke nevermind XD), better naval and air combat (ground dominates now).
4. Game settings tend to look like we are in a beta phase. Limited to 20 players, then limited to 40. Limited to 4 teams. You cannot disable buildings. You need premium to have extra cities. This can be modified either way: add more premium options as the game develops or make it a free feature and focus premium on something else. As JUGERS once said, we need more customization, not less. He might have been wrong with the buildings, but in general, he was right.
5. Development is so diverse and elitist, every single update I've seen so far in the last 3 years was focusing on bugfixes and improving CW. Dave please, a decade passed, listen to the peasants not the nobles. I promise it will benefit all of us. We need ranked games, new game modes, not improving fucking eu 3v3 cw. We can keep eu 3v3 cw nearly the same even if the game has a lot of news to it... so the 10 years old atwar players can satisfy themselves in the old cw, incubated... whatever.
6. This is a counter argument here. Nobody cares about toxicity. We don't have 80 games running in the beginner lobby so that we can ban people like waffel. They're one of the most important members of the community. Fortnite players will never come to atwar. I believe our vast majority of players are mature adults, and only minor percentage of them is toxic, like the rest of the internet (...)
PERSONAL SUGGESTIONS
1. AI for the neutrals. Complicated but probably worth the efforts.
2. More diplomacy options, for example a reworked system where you can trade your resources or land to someone.
2.1. Bound resources to countries, for example natural gas in Russia: Siberia. Do not question it. Ask people. Implement it.
3. Quality of Life improvements like auto-unit-moving? For example if you hold down CTRL key and click 3 places, the unit will try to move to those places in the next 3 turns, except if it's interrupted by a player's wall or the sea. This is very useful if we want to add more complexity to the game, it saves a lot of time, similar to auto-production.
4. Map views. If more things are implemented, it's necessary to add more views to the map. I mean an income view that ranges from green to red to see where is the most money on the map, a reinforcements view, a naval view, an air view, etcetera. Not just stealth detection and move range views.
4.1. This game lacks missiles. I don't care how you implement it. Maybe Notify the player with a red spot above the city or something that indicates a rocket is coming in next turn, so you cannot abuse the 100 move range of a rocket. It should also be more limited. This is related to world map now, but it would be even greater for custom maps.
5. Steam and Epic Games sound not good but NECESSARY steps to keep the game alive and grow it. Is it on steam? No. Will we have less players if no one clicks on our steam advert? No. Then no comment. Even though, the game should be improved for this... in first hand.
6. More types of units. Or just simply more units. How long are we asking for trucks, trains, aircraft carriers, cruisers (...) ?
7. One general is a nice minimalistic thing, very good for competitive play. Larger scenarios require stuff like a field officer unit update, similar to general, it could be highlighted with some different element instead of a star with different bonuses and upgrades.
8. The upgrades. Holy moly. Double it. Triple it. Quadruple it. Make current ones cheaper. More premium options. End of story.
9. As I mentioned the UI is trash. You already know this by now Dave, and everyone else, but still I have to mention it. The chat keeps jumping down to the newest message, spectators' message can still be seen after ignoring, I don't know if moderators have a panel with buttons or they still use commands, lack of kick and host swap options in the lobby, unpleasantly aged forum, some menus are hard to find or are in the inappropriate spot (like the elo calculator), etc...
10. A variety of ranked games, not just cw. This would be great for a more challenging, but also more rewarding (sp, pc) game mode. There has been dozens of cw suggestions, I won't go into this in depth now. But keep in mind that cw at the moment is fine, and absolutely not prior #1 to change. Keep it as it is for now.
11. Numerous other things, I could write a book, but hopefully you got the idea by now. Whoever you are dear reader if you got this far, bless you.
SOLUTIONS FOR RETENTION
The whole point of my long message summarized, let's see.
In order to gain players and solve this retention issue the answer is quite simple. We need continuity. We need to continously, seasonally upgrade the game, hence why I provided ideas above. There is a lot to add or change to make the game more attractive and engaging for newcomers. Atwar has twitter, discord, even facebook if I know right, so we should start posting about the new MASSIVE updates there. Not two new strategy and one of them is taken away again. No... This leads to nowhere.
Generally speaking, twitter and discord are good to keep the community engaged and active, but the most important thing is probably twitch or youtube (and epic games or steam for obvious reasons as mentioned before...). I would support Sid in his videos but let's face the fact that he is an unpopular person on youtube. Who play games? The youth. How will we attract the youth? Through videos and streams. That's the current trend.
For example we should invest into some strategy game player with 200 thousand subscribers on youtube, asking him to make a professional showcase video or gameplay series of atwar. Now think about it for a second. Is atwar ready for this level of advertisement? Or we need to change a lot of stuff. Yes. If you think about it, we need to change a lot of stuff. What arre you waiting for... go continue coding or giving ideas to Dave.
In my opinion this is the straightforward way to success. Not only to bring atwar back to life, but to gain a larger playerbase than we ever had. It's not as hard as you think. And I think I have not said anything new. Just the fact we all know. We need content to advertise. Then advertise to gain content idea, then repeat. This is the definition of development.
Thanks for reading it all, greetings.
P.S.: Ivan and Sun Tzu are possibly the most competent people who understand this problem. Excluding Sid and Dave.
The most well made forum post I've seen yet, give it an upvote
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...
----
All men can see these tactics whereby I conquer,
but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved.
--Sun Tzu
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.
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.
----
All men can see these tactics whereby I conquer,
but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved.
--Sun Tzu
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.
Wow is there really nothing? Wouldn't Amok or Ivan have something in somewhere?
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.
----
All men can see these tactics whereby I conquer,
but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved.
--Sun Tzu
Good idea, but i dont think moving to steam will have much affect
atwar is just kinda old and isn't attractive to kids and teens and they wont play it regardless if its on steam.
i think this game was successful because it was a pretty well made strategy game that didn't require a ton of load on your pc like total war during the days where everyone had pretty shit pcs
now we all got good pcs, what does this game have to offer that other games cant?
how does this game compare to other strategy games?
plus, even if it goes on steam, it might get negative reviews which would be potentially very damaging to the game when attracting new players
maybe this game can be revived if dave burns a ton of cash on it and hires more programmers, but i dont think he is willing to spend that cash
so overall i don't think going on steam is a good idea at the current state of the game
It's what totally me and SunTzu been saying this game needs to move on to some game engine to get more player base and steam is by so far that can help out player base problem.
Second thing this game needs a major update to be on the line to attract players and so many other areas that need to be revised again, which means coding part.
If the game allows channels to create content on history where there are several channels on youtube this will be another boom for Atwar to grow I think they would love to use this product as it will allow them to actually show units, reality based map, battles expansions and much more.
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.
Epic games could be a better option, they seem to be spending a lot of money to give free games to people so maybe they'd even pay something to get atwar on their platform. Otherwise steam would be a good option too, if Dave is serious about this then maybe he should look back at the old silverlight launcher that we had since that was already a standalone launcher that worked and wasn't buggy HTML5. It would still take a little work of course but the building blocks are there I believe.
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.
OK. I see many good points and even more bad ones. It's not your fault, probably most of you are not web developers or software engineers at all, given that you are adults in the first place. Let me give you my point of view of the retention issue.
RETENTION ISSUE
In order to sustain a straight retention value on the graphs, we need to keep the players enganged. It's necessary to focus on retention and engagement at once. How can atwar engage the youth (gamers)? 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.
And now the weaknesses, where we should definitely improve:
1. Overall design of the User Interface, map editor and such. The game was already giving retro vibes back in 2012-2014, now in 2021 this contrasts even more (in a bad meaning this time). The most important thing here is the in-game interface, obviously.
1.1. Add more colors, make the panels easier to handle, make it more user friendly, change the UI in a way suitable for future expansions and updates, like if it was designed for a 12 years old.
2. Quantity matters too - probably more than quality - in a strategy game. We need more units, more strategies, more CONTENT. This must remain nearly ignorant to the parallel quality changes (adding two buttons or three to the interface and changing the background shouldn't prevent us from adding logistic wizard strategy, right? object orientation in the development team too, please...)
2.1. Seasonality. 3 months for a cw season is a thing. On the other hand we don't get any content changes, or they are just minimal and disappointing, see point 2.
3. To make atwar more interesting and engaging, it needs depth. No, I don't mean witch doctor's and froyer's walling skills in cw. I mean things like improved diplomacy, more types of cities, units, generals (remember tank general? inner joke nevermind XD), better naval and air combat (ground dominates now).
4. Game settings tend to look like we are in a beta phase. Limited to 20 players, then limited to 40. Limited to 4 teams. You cannot disable buildings. You need premium to have extra cities. This can be modified either way: add more premium options as the game develops or make it a free feature and focus premium on something else. As JUGERS once said, we need more customization, not less. He might have been wrong with the buildings, but in general, he was right.
5. Development is so diverse and elitist, every single update I've seen so far in the last 3 years was focusing on bugfixes and improving CW. Dave please, a decade passed, listen to the peasants not the nobles. I promise it will benefit all of us. We need ranked games, new game modes, not improving fucking eu 3v3 cw. We can keep eu 3v3 cw nearly the same even if the game has a lot of news to it... so the 10 years old atwar players can satisfy themselves in the old cw, incubated... whatever.
6. This is a counter argument here. Nobody cares about toxicity. We don't have 80 games running in the beginner lobby so that we can ban people like waffel. They're one of the most important members of the community. Fortnite players will never come to atwar. I believe our vast majority of players are mature adults, and only minor percentage of them is toxic, like the rest of the internet (...)
PERSONAL SUGGESTIONS
1. AI for the neutrals. Complicated but probably worth the efforts.
2. More diplomacy options, for example a reworked system where you can trade your resources or land to someone.
2.1. Bound resources to countries, for example natural gas in Russia: Siberia. Do not question it. Ask people. Implement it.
3. Quality of Life improvements like auto-unit-moving? For example if you hold down CTRL key and click 3 places, the unit will try to move to those places in the next 3 turns, except if it's interrupted by a player's wall or the sea. This is very useful if we want to add more complexity to the game, it saves a lot of time, similar to auto-production.
4. Map views. If more things are implemented, it's necessary to add more views to the map. I mean an income view that ranges from green to red to see where is the most money on the map, a reinforcements view, a naval view, an air view, etcetera. Not just stealth detection and move range views.
4.1. This game lacks missiles. I don't care how you implement it. Maybe Notify the player with a red spot above the city or something that indicates a rocket is coming in next turn, so you cannot abuse the 100 move range of a rocket. It should also be more limited. This is related to world map now, but it would be even greater for custom maps.
5. Steam and Epic Games sound not good but NECESSARY steps to keep the game alive and grow it. Is it on steam? No. Will we have less players if no one clicks on our steam advert? No. Then no comment. Even though, the game should be improved for this... in first hand.
6. More types of units. Or just simply more units. How long are we asking for trucks, trains, aircraft carriers, cruisers (...) ?
7. One general is a nice minimalistic thing, very good for competitive play. Larger scenarios require stuff like a field officer unit update, similar to general, it could be highlighted with some different element instead of a star with different bonuses and upgrades.
8. The upgrades. Holy moly. Double it. Triple it. Quadruple it. Make current ones cheaper. More premium options. End of story.
9. As I mentioned the UI is trash. You already know this by now Dave, and everyone else, but still I have to mention it. The chat keeps jumping down to the newest message, spectators' message can still be seen after ignoring, I don't know if moderators have a panel with buttons or they still use commands, lack of kick and host swap options in the lobby, unpleasantly aged forum, some menus are hard to find or are in the inappropriate spot (like the elo calculator), etc...
10. A variety of ranked games, not just cw. This would be great for a more challenging, but also more rewarding (sp, pc) game mode. There has been dozens of cw suggestions, I won't go into this in depth now. But keep in mind that cw at the moment is fine, and absolutely not prior #1 to change. Keep it as it is for now.
11. Numerous other things, I could write a book, but hopefully you got the idea by now. Whoever you are dear reader if you got this far, bless you.
SOLUTIONS FOR RETENTION
The whole point of my long message summarized, let's see.
In order to gain players and solve this retention issue the answer is quite simple. We need continuity. We need to continously, seasonally upgrade the game, hence why I provided ideas above. There is a lot to add or change to make the game more attractive and engaging for newcomers. Atwar has twitter, discord, even facebook if I know right, so we should start posting about the new MASSIVE updates there. Not two new strategy and one of them is taken away again. No... This leads to nowhere.
Generally speaking, twitter and discord are good to keep the community engaged and active, but the most important thing is probably twitch or youtube (and epic games or steam for obvious reasons as mentioned before...). I would support Sid in his videos but let's face the fact that he is an unpopular person on youtube. Who play games? The youth. How will we attract the youth? Through videos and streams. That's the current trend.
For example we should invest into some strategy game player with 200 thousand subscribers on youtube, asking him to make a professional showcase video or gameplay series of atwar. Now think about it for a second. Is atwar ready for this level of advertisement? Or we need to change a lot of stuff. Yes. If you think about it, we need to change a lot of stuff. What arre you waiting for... go continue coding or giving ideas to Dave.
In my opinion this is the straightforward way to success. Not only to bring atwar back to life, but to gain a larger playerbase than we ever had. It's not as hard as you think. And I think I have not said anything new. Just the fact we all know. We need content to advertise. Then advertise to gain content idea, then repeat. This is the definition of development.
Thanks for reading it all, greetings.
P.S.: Ivan and Sun Tzu are possibly the most competent people who understand this problem. Excluding Sid and Dave.
The most well made forum post I've seen yet, give it an upvote
We have plans for everything you just said. Just need volunteers
This game requires a player to overcome massive hurdles in order to learn and appreciate this game. There is simply no way to learn how to play this game ASIDE from putting in constant hours.
To put constant hours requires patience and time. The magic number for a game like this is maybe 5 minutes. If you can't capture a player's attention for 5 minutes, you are done.
Let's take a look at the possible flow of events from my experience.
I joined the game through the recommendation of a friend. I was REALLY looking for a game like this, the freedom of movement, the uniqueness of each units and simplistic game mechanics.
I joined a coalition and received teaching and assistance from 1 Rank 5 and a Rank 6. I then was "recruited" by Alois to join his "organization". I learned the triangle wall at rank 6.
I learned turn blocking at rank 8.
I joined this game in 2017. I had to play maybe 400-500 of games to learn basic mechanics and I consider myself to be fairly intelligent.
The games that I joined, that had this freedom of movement and the uniqueness of each unit required me to wait 30 minutes to hours for the game to start.
Mind you, these games could "fail" through trolls.
I fought my way through "ranksim" in scenario games and finally became a Rank 11 just this year.
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I had to spend years in order to actually learn how to play this game, and EVERY single day I am surprised by a new tactic.
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The one thing that will solve all of your player problems would be to take the "host" out of the equation.
Just have random scenario games that automatically pop up in the menu- that players can join, that automatically start when everyone has picked- with like a 60 second timer.
Have players dropped into these automatic games, right as they get out of the tutorial.
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You know all of this was just a rant, TLDR; Game takes dedication, at this state if you market it on Steam, the game doesn't have a good low-skill option, so you'll flop.
I had to spend years in order to actually learn how to play this game, and EVERY single day I am surprised by a new tactic.
I agree with a lot your opinions, but this one is a positive one I think. After years of playing, you will get surprised by a new tactic!
I hope the problems of learning game mechanics earlier can and will be solved by intermediate & advanced tutorials planned.
I had to spend years in order to actually learn how to play this game, and EVERY single day I am surprised by a new tactic.
I agree with a lot your opinions, but this one is a positive one I think. After years of playing, you will get surprised by a new tactic!
I hope the problems of learning game mechanics earlier can and will be solved by intermediate & advanced tutorials planned.
i dont think tutorials will help
i feel aw is the kind of game that you need to actually play alot to get good enough for it to be fun
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.
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.
Ah yes my old idea from when I was a supporter. I believe this wasnt implemented due to it being hard to bring a game to steam with a code as unstable as AtWar's. This was before Clovis1122 became an admin however so it could have gotten patched, if it is it has my full support.
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.
You never did anything to volunteer yourself. Since late 2018 it's been code that if you're going to be a supporter you're going to need to prove yourself via the help squad. Of which you didn't. You just wanted to code if I remember correctly- in which you never involved yourself in our group for that when I PRd you in game about it. And if you look in your mail I gave you an whole introduction to the team.. and told you what you had to do next. You never really did anything after that, nor did you come to the meetings I invited you to. You then proceeded to take it as a joke. That is your fault. Don't try and blame staff for not recruiting you when you didn't try OR tried going for a position you knew you wouldn't get approved for. No offense. Offers still open, as always all you need to do is prove yourself. That's it. Be involved. Then leadership will most likely take you in, if you haven't already been involved in projects.
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.
You never did anything to volunteer yourself. Since late 2018 it's been code that if you're going to be a supporter you're going to need to prove yourself via the help squad. Of which you didn't. You just wanted to code if I remember correctly- in which you never involved yourself in our group for that when I PRd you in game about it. And if you look in your mail I gave you an whole introduction to the team.. and told you what you had to do next. You never really did anything after that, nor did you come to the meetings I invited you to. You then proceeded to take it as a joke. That is your fault. Don't try and blame staff for not recruiting you when you didn't try OR tried going for a position you knew you wouldn't get approved for. No offense. Offers still open, as always all you need to do is prove yourself. That's it. Be involved. Then leadership will most likely take you in, if you haven't already been involved in projects.
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.
Anybody's tried to ask low ranks why they lose interest in the game after a month?
There is a certain screwing around phase that most entry-level players have to get to. atWar is rather unforgiving for any screwing around, simply because it will be a giant waste of time. You have to play practically perfectly in a game where you are being relied on by other people.
