Hey, thanks for the clarification. I want to clarify some stuff as well then. I am not the only one making decisions in Bytro's Call of War Team. Most things are a team effort and there are also more stake holders who have to give their ok, or who sometimes decide something shall be done in this or that way. While I certainly have influence not all decisions are done by me alone. Still, Bytro is a small company and we don't have so many employees that everyone can just focus on one narrow thing. Often times we have many topics on our plate and actually I like it, it gives you more perspective and leads to care for the whole product. So I see no problem that I also can give feedback on the priority of bugs or give feedback on unit graphics. But don't worry there are also people here dealing primarily with these things, artists do the images, QA manages the bugs and so on.Hans A. Pils wrote:
Concerning the discussion about feedback on feedback on CoW1.5: First of all, it's a gift to us players in Bytro games to have the option to discuss game features. That we sometimes get replies is the second gift. And that we get the chance to test changes before they're released is another one. I wouldn't know any of that is the case in any other game. So we're not in the position to complain.And freezy, nobody doubts you do a lot. I bet you're occupied with the game for more than 40 hours per week. But I guess what @Newbss had in mind or at least what he should have meant is that the apparently leading game designer shouldn't have to care about what the tanks look like and other front-end stuff. Can't that be taken over by somebody else from Bytro team? Deciding about game mechanics, balancing and so on is already a full-time job (taking into consideration that for proper decisions the game designer should read all those tons of stuff in the forum, be up-to-date with other Bytro games and also with games from other companies, gather a lot of historical knowledge, stay in close contact with the devs, sometimes play the game himself and so forth). The game badly needs someone who can fully focus on that.
In other words we're concerned that CoW isn't being improved, because the apparently leading game designer is overloaded having to care of pretty much everything (except for coding) and thus sometimes doesn't notice obvious aspects(?) Like it was obvious to many or most players immediately from reading the respective news articles that the fire control changes or the removal of resource trade outside coalitions can't be good. And now I state it's similarly obvious that CoW1.5 is a big step in a wrong direction.
Anyhow, please don't take this as criticism (of course distribution of tasks in the Bytro team aren't our business anyways) but only as my opinion that the leading game designer of CoW shouldn't have to worry about frontend stuff, bugs and anything that doesn't have to do with functional decisions.
OK, but almost all of these were about rather superficial balancing questions. Whereas if somebody questioned the fundamental principles in CoW1.5, such posts remained widely unanswered (at least until four days ago). I admit that when I did so, I had a very provocative tone. But I think that's not reason enough not to consider the content. And there were others who wrote their 1.5-criticism more soberly - for example I think I didn't see a single answer to the posts of @Chimere(?)Wouldn't it make much more sense to first debate the underlying principles in 1.5 - before getting the balancing straight?freezy wrote:
For fun I checked my post history and counted more than 60 posts by me in 1.5 topicsAs an example: When somebody wrote the capital of Iceland should be an urban province in 1.5, this was immediately answered and noted, but when several players said it's bad for strategy that buildings in 1.5 have only one purpose and no more upkeep costs AND explained their reasoning, this remained unanswered.
So I do see the objection from Newbss as justified.
We can certainly discuss the design reasons of the underlying principles of 1.5, to get a better understanding of eachother at least. During the test, when we had so many forum pages of feedback to go through daily, there simply was no time to have a big fundamental discussion, because we were focused on improving what is already there. Therefore noting/commenting on a bug was certainly easier. I also have to say that not everyone is of the same opinion - while for example you think some changes go totally in the wrong direction, I also read opinions of players who think the opposite is true. There is also a quiet majority who does not post at all. And then there are our own design vision and goals as well, and not everyone agrees to them. For example you probably won't agree to our philosophy that we want to make certain things easier or more streamlined, but still we will do it because it is important to us. With the discussions we want to focus more on things where we can see that compromises are possible, like the balancing. Also there is sadly not enough time to have big long winded 1on1 discussions on deep topics, but if you want to get quick fire answers from me on smaller questions you can feel free to ask. The forum is of course also there for players to discuss among themselves, I think not every discussion needs a game designer to chime in. Sometimes we deliberately don't answer immediately because we want to see how discussions turn out. So please also feel free to discuss those 1.5 principles with other forum users.
