New Changes are BAD(Beta)

Call of War has thousands of players, 15 votes are not even representative. Furthermore me being one of the 3 that only plays a year, I have more than proven myself. Unless you value the oppinion more of a level 40 with 200 games.

Do you truly claim to know all the little secrets this game had/has? After 1 year?

I only discovered so many new ones after seeing through some other in the past 2 years....and that is years after I started playing s1914 and CoW...

And it is this depth and variety that are bing killed off, while you defend that, but knowing half of them.

A dumb game is not what I or others wan to play.

There are many dumb games out there which I do not play.

But those dumb games have a marketing budget which is bigger than the entire revenue of Bytro...I guarantee that.

Again, feel free to dumb down the game again and again. Make it as dumb as the others. And see for yourself how well Bytro will do with this game after that.

I still have a multi-player version of Making History somewhere in a box and will just enjoy myself with a few friends playing that.

How often did anyone meet an opponent with a super-stack?

How often do backstabbers win games?

How often were resources successfully hidden in the market?

And the above were done successfully how often AND mattered for the outcome of the game?

We all know the answer: AN INSIGNIFICANT NUMBER OF TIMES!

Bad changes are what they are: bad changes

Bogus reasons are what they are: bogus

Dear CoW:

Please undo trade restrictions outside coalition and 10% mark up on market. I'm totally confused as to the purpose of these changes. These policies resemble old colonial Spain's mercantilism and similar policies by Soviet Bloc nations during cold war. Thank you and have a nice day! ...

_Pontus_ wrote:

Do you truly claim to know all the little secrets this game had/has? After 1 year?

I only discovered so many new ones after seeing through some other in the past 2 years....and that is years after I started playing s1914 and CoW...

True that, i'm coming up on two years and yes because mostly of game updates, i am always still learning to skills, tricks and strategies. However after starting COW I got into a group of people that had already been playing years. They new the game freely taught me the ins and outs and then let me loose on the rest of you.

BMfox wrote:

Well if you are a member of a top alliance with players who know the game inside out. If you are a moderator in a team where you can ask any question you want to other mods, GO's and dev's. If you see a lot of info passing by in both forum, mod chats and GO chats. Yes I'm pretty sure one can have a high level of knowledge within a year. If one can know everything well that is a whole other question. When can one claim that he knows everything?

It is not where I learned my successful strategies and tactics nor the games' secrets.

(And if that were so, as you say, why do I keep explaining to you where you go wrong quite often?)

BMfox wrote:

_Pontus_ wrote:

Do you truly claim to know all the little secrets this game had/has? After 1 year?

I only discovered so many new ones after seeing through some other in the past 2 years....and that is years after I started playing s1914 and CoW...

Well if you are a member of a top alliance with players who know the game inside out. If you are a moderator in a team where you can ask any question you want to other mods, GO's and dev's. If you see a lot of info passing by in both forum, mod chats and GO chats. Yes I'm pretty sure one can have a high level of knowledge within a year. If one can know everything well that is a whole other question. When can one claim that he knows everything?

Alphared wrote:

So... if you have all the advantages of being connected with the "team" you can learn all the secrets of the game in a year. How many players get that, just by joining the game?!?!

BMfox wrote:

I would like to give you some background info on what some of these changes are supposed to tackle, as I am sure that some of these are likely to be discussed quite a bit.

Changes AI to act like a coalition if you do something historical, like surprise attack your neighbors. Requiring you to always officially declare war, or potentially face every non-player nation in a battle royale. Doesn't do enough, should require a cool down period of 7 days between the declaration of war and actual fighting... so the victim can have plenty of time to call in all the help they can get and attacking any AI, declared or not, puts you at war with all AI.

Market Overhaul -

Charges you fictitious money to both buy AND sell items on a commodities market that has never worked like a commodities market anywhere in the real world. Ruins the strategy of buying all the commodities, that other nations might require. AND, prevents any idea you might have had about free trade (diplomatic trade) instead of just killing all your neighbors (only after declaring war, of course) because of built in commodities deficits. Much better then; sell orders going into a pool, letting the size of the pool set the price, buy orders coming from the pool, letting buy orders modify the price - like how REAL commodities markets work.

Coalition Cooldown -

Punishes you for leaving a coalition, whether you left or you were kicked out. Also prevents you from engaging in the time honored and historical practice of forming secret alliances, and/or backstabbing. (Italy/France - World War I - Why should I even have to point this out in a historical strategy game!!!) As Punishment you are prevented from joining another coalition, or even trading diplomatic favors (I.E. Share Map) for a period of several days - during which time you will be vulnerable to attack from every coalition/nation, including the one you were just in, without the possibility of allies. Again, Bytro is being to timid here - Why not give every player an opportunity to join a coalition only ONCE per game, and if you get kicked, it's your lose (in every way!)... or better, just assign everyone to a coalition at the start of the game, and they can never leave it.

BMfox wrote:

Alphared wrote:

So... if you have all the advantages of being connected with the "team" you can learn all the secrets of the game in a year. How many players get that, just by joining the game?!?!

I have been privileged, I admit. However there are a lot of good alliances where their members learn and the forum is a big resource of information too. It doesn't matter how long you play the game, it's how you play the game that matters.

Alphared wrote:

or better, just assign everyone to a coalition at the start of the game, and they can never leave it.

Pls pls pretty please....no forced coalitions! We have team games for that.

Anyways, any thing that is forced upon players is bad, so instead of doing that, all changes that force or limit p;ayers should be undone ASAP

_Pontus_ wrote:

Alphared wrote:

or better, just assign everyone to a coalition at the start of the game, and they can never leave it.

Pls not... I hardly ever join coalitions and when as late as possible and even then half of them still go inactive or die.Pls pls pretty please....no forced coalitions! We have team games for that.

Anyways, any thing that is forced upon players is bad, so instead of doing that, all changes that force or limit p;ayers should be undone ASAP

The addition of official diplomatic functions were all we wanted, or needed. Coalitions only added the complexity of organized alliances, which resulted in the requirements; limiting themes (no nazi symbolism) for flags, mottoes, etc., then limiting sizes (because actively visible memberships promote larger memberships, who wants to be the lonely nation in the path of a monstrous killing machine(?)), then limiting sizes again, then protecting the institution of coalitions (the update currently discussed) by preventing members from working against them. The natural next step is to force coalitions on everyone, to level the playing field.

I certainly am not attempting to promote the path we are on. I would like it if the players could go back to sorting it out for themselves! I think player retention would be higher, if the system were diplomatically more complex and the rules for diplomacy were not universal across games. But, who am I, a simple decades long player of games, designer with few credentials to show, to question the wisdom presented?!?!

Alphared wrote:

_Pontus_ wrote:

Alphared wrote:

or better, just assign everyone to a coalition at the start of the game, and they can never leave it.

Pls not... I hardly ever join coalitions and when as late as possible and even then half of them still go inactive or die.Pls pls pretty please....no forced coalitions! We have team games for that.

Anyways, any thing that is forced upon players is bad, so instead of doing that, all changes that force or limit p;ayers should be undone ASAP

I was actually being sarcastic, .../...

The natural next step is to force coalitions on everyone, to level the playing field.

I certainly am not attempting to promote the path we are on. I would like it if the players could go back to sorting it out for themselves! I think player retention would be higher, if the system were diplomatically more complex and the rules for diplomacy were not universal across games. But, who am I, a simple decades long player of games, designer with few credentials to show, to question the wisdom presented?!?!

Also agree to it that the game's complexity was its attraction amongst a large number of competing strategy games.

Removing options, limiting interaction, etc. will dumb down the game to the level of the competing games which we did NOT choose to play.

And my humble opinion is that this game - once dumbed down to that level - will not survive the battle with the more flashy competition with their huge marketing budgets.

Isn't it actually a perfect contradiction that the publisher of the best strategy game around by far, is choosing such a bad ... strategy?

I have not made my mind up on the Elite AI. After all, it could be a step in the right direction- though I often declare war without embargoing that nation. However, Alphared hit the nail on the head when he said,

Alphared wrote:

Market Overhaul -

Charges you fictitious money to both buy AND sell items on a commodities market that has never worked like a commodities market anywhere in the real world. Ruins the strategy of buying all the commodities, that other nations might require. AND, prevents any idea you might have had about free trade (diplomatic trade) instead of just killing all your neighbors (only after declaring war, of course) because of built in commodities deficits. Much better then; sell orders going into a pool, letting the size of the pool set the price, buy orders coming from the pool, letting buy orders modify the price - like how REAL commodities markets work.

Coalition Cooldown -

Punishes you for leaving a coalition, whether you left or you were kicked out. Also prevents you from engaging in the time honored and historical practice of forming secret alliances, and/or backstabbing. (Italy/France - World War I - Why should I even have to point this out in a historical strategy game!!!) As Punishment you are prevented from joining another coalition, or even trading diplomatic favors (I.E. Share Map) for a period of several days - during which time you will be vulnerable to attack from every coalition/nation, including the one you were just in, without the possibility of allies. Again, Bytro is being to timid here - Why not give every player an opportunity to join a coalition only ONCE per game, and if you get kicked, it's your lose (in every way!)... or better, just assign everyone to a coalition at the start of the game, and they can never leave it.

I placed this in The market overhaul thread, but actually it belongs here:

Today I saw something play out in a 4x speed event map - which I entered when half full - and here the unit and other trading and diplomatic limitations from the BAD CHANGES played out in a horrific counter-productive way...

This concerns yet another example of event-mobbing by an Alliance, which profited heavily from the new trade limitations, diplomatic limitations etc. resulting from the recent BAD CHANGES.

When the map was half full there were 2 members of an alliance present in the list. Nothing wrong with that.

As the map filled up, the number of players from that alliance increased to 6-7 and possibly more.

Keeping an eye on it, I saw the various members of that group form 2 or 3 coalitions with other players, all over the map. So far so good, though I warned a few players that this might just be a trick (which ofc no one understood).

So wars are started and won or lost and only 3 major alliance members survived, the rest perished... almost. These exterminated members, however, received a province from a coalition and Alliance member in a safe place. Not so weird yet either.

Until the already feared moment of truth and them all banning together to mob the map with 1 or 2 collaborators (those simply hoping to survive).

Now, at the more advanced stage of the map, these 1-province alliance members joined another alliance member in a coalition, suddenly revived with a number of provinces in peripheral war zones and armies they could never produce.

The other players on the map were forced to join in a coalition too, but these ofc consisted of only 1 player that mattered and 0.5 that had tagged along with the one that mattered and then some cannon-fodder.

Long story short:

Event-mobbing or Map-mobbing alliances clearly profit enormously from the new trading and diplomatic limitations, while other (non-aligned) players are now limited in their possibilities to help another player.

Joining an event-map will now become a game itself; something of the very last moments, so one can see whether a mob is present or not. But that is what the mob did too....the majority joined last moments.

Concluding:

Bytro tried to eliminate some minor issues - which did NOT bother anyone really and hardly ever influenced the map outcome - and introduced a number of BAD CHANGES, therewith clearly creating much worse ones, which DO significantly influences a map outcome.

I am very curious if and how this game changing effect will be dealt with.

Suggestion of how to mitigate the (hopefully) unwanted effect of the BAD CHANGES: revert to as it was in market trade, diplomatic options and trade between non-aligned players.

Suggestion for GOOD CHANGE: do not allow more than 3 alliance members to enter the same event map.

OR ...scary thought...is it actually the intention to favor alliances over non aligned players?

(PS: this is the 3rd time I noticed an event-mobbing, on a total of 91 games joined, which is a significant percentage of games, especially when counting only event maps. Probably a far higher percentage than the 'perceived 'problem' with resource and troops trading addressed by the BAD CHANGES, which solely aim to prevent insignificant and none-game-outcome changing occurrences.)

A possible solution to prevent or limit map-mobbing would be to limit the number of players of 1 alliance joining 1 event or regular map (while ofc excluding alliance battles from this rule; remarking this in case this suggestion would be taken up and the dev involved would forget about alliance battles and would disable them ...)

freezy wrote:

Reasons for these changes were given plenty already by BMFox, thanks for that

One of the most important reasons, which was not mentioned yet, is that these changes make it harder for multi accounters, wolf packers and account pushers. Of course the changes won't prevent it completely, but cheating that way is now a greater hassle and can't be done as effectively anymore. There would be much more drastic options to prevent it even more (e.g. removing trading completely like in CoN), we already went with a compromise solution to still keep parts of those beloved features in the game.

The other important reason was, which was mentioned, that we want to make it harder for players to circumvent our game & map balance and to prevent certain exploits. One example would be the circumvention of SBDE by trading units of different levels, which we don't want anymore. Another example is players completely neglecting investing in certain buildings/researches/resource production and still getting the resources/units from someone else. With this change we can predict better which resources a player has available, which helps with our balancing efforts, and it makes it less unfair for players who do not have these kind of connections or master plans.

Yes certain countries have more of some resources than of others, meaning your strategy will most likely change each time you pick another country, adding replay value.

The problems described above, as well as reasons given by BMFox all point to issues which are totally insignificant as I and many others have described well and supported with infallible arguments.

If the above given reasoning should have any value, then it should not be difficult to stave those arguments (like we stave ours

- Multi-accounters: they win how many of the maps they play because of it? Numbers in context pls!

- Wolf-packers: How often does this occur? How often the wolves are from 1 alliance? Indeed...rhetorical questions, aren't they? But if you insist, provide the numbers.

- Hiding resources: How many resources and cash were lost to a single victor due to hiding in the market how frequently?

Now compare this to 20% of cash disappearing from the game economy on EVERY trade by every player in every map!

Which does more damage?

- Circumventing SBDE/super-stacking: How often? And how often did it change the outcome of a map?

- Neglecting investing in certain buildings/researches/resource production: Percentage of winners because of this pls!

Btw, this is now an exclusive feature for map-mobbers. THANK YOU! ... not really...

Fact is: multi-accounting should be discovered by the system (have been a GO and know the system) and if not by the system, an active team of mods, GO's and SGO's should catch the majority easily if spending 1hrs a day each on it (it is not so difficult to recognize i.e. MasterOfWar1 through 10 as a multi even when he is hiding his IP...especially if you care to look at the maps he plays, which is super easy in the system).

But Multi-accounting should not be fought over the backs of 1000's of players and punish them to prevent some low level players from multi-ing.

Much fairer and easier way to battle wolf-packing: limit number of players from 1 alliance per map... 90% of it will be solved, leaving 10% of what already was rare = not worth worrying about!

But, if you insist wolfpacking is the reason, is that why the changes in diplo and trade favor event- and map-mobbing alliances over non-aligned players? Not very logical.

And, honestly, does anyone DARE to say that the INCIDENTAL hiding of resources in the market caused more losses than 20% of cash from all trades just disappearing???

Of course not! Not ever ever ever did the map economy lose by hiding even a fraction of the 20% cash lost now in every trade in every map. But if you insist on saying so, then PROVE IT WITH NUMBERS!!

When you impose rigorous measures, than the underlying statistics must be there to prove the necessity, so show it...if you are adamant about these points: show the numbers of how many times these occurred and how often this has swayed the outcome of a map!

In 91 games I have met how many of that? A totally insignificant number of times!

Now ask your own team members who have played more than 1 year and gathered some experience. You will get the same answer!

But map-mobs? In >3% of all of my games and over 15% of my event maps, but that is not being addressed at all. NO,conversely, your changes favor these parasites!

If, and that is a BIG IF, those are indeed the reasons for the drastic and disastrous measures imposed on the player community and ruining so many good aspects of the game, than the arguments to impose such horrid changes must be solidly supported by data, which must be so shocking that the imposed changes are really a necessity!

IF that is so, than gives us real answers instead of a series of platitudes that have already been dismantled and refuted 1 by 1 by the talking forum dwellers here.

Until the necessity has been proven and solid reasons have been given, the conclusion remains:

- that you have failed at tackling any of the mentioned problems which you claim made the changes a necessity!

- that you promote map-mobbers, who are put at an even greater advantage by these changes.

- that you have dismantled options, player interaction, variety, play styles, strategies, RP, and so much more and therewith wrecked a wonderful game with one swoop of ill-thought-through and above all ineffective measures, achieving NOTHING but discontent with your loyal player base!

If you cant take the player community serious, why should we take you serious still and play this game of a publisher who shows nothing but disregard for his loyal player base by serving non-supported platitudes as reasons?

I and so many here are infuriated with this! You were on the road to success, introducing 4x, 6x and 10x speed rounds, introducing new features and (albeit imperfect) units. YOU WERE IMPROVING THE GAME!

And now this slaughter of options, variety, player interaction, playability...

Bytro, what the heck happened????

Which false prophet got on board of your ship?

BTW, we are furious because we care! If we didn't give a shyte, you wouldn't hear from us on the forum!

Silly taxes and trade restrictions outside coalitions are killing this wonderful game! ...

Which went almost unnoticed: according to Freezy the BAD CHANGES are apparently necessary because of the use of the same coding for 'CoW 1'...

I went looking for CoW 1... There is no CoW 1... But there is a Supremacy 1.

Found it in a press release on the Bytro website. Weird though that the loyal players of CoW did not get a message about this.

Also weird: the press release does not even contain a link to the game.

Edit: and though it seems to have been released in August, I can't find it anywhere.

Which proves my point: when Bytro dumbs down the game further and further, it will sink to the level of 1000's of other dumb strategy games out there, but their marketing is in order and they have bigger budgets => end of CoW