ComradeP
Posts: 7192
Joined: 9/17/2009 Status: offline
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quote:
I'm dumbstruck that someone can argue that the +1 odds shift might not have 'macro' implications. OF COURSE it has macro implications, because of the retreat casualties routine. It does not have implications by itself, because the odds themselves don't do anything. They cause various kinds of results, but those achieved with the odds modifier are no different from the results from natural 2:1 and higher odds results. If you'd remove the odds modifier, things like the casualties caused by retreats would be completely unaffected. In my opinion, that's where the problem is. If the casualties become less brutal and there's perhaps some chance that a unit won't take a morale hit upon losing a battle, the odds modifier immediately becomes much less of a problem, although I'm not happy with it myself. quote:
I'm deeply fatigued that a game which is 33% more expensive than other computer games, which is now 8 months old, is being sandbagged from logical improvements (like ending the +1 at some point in 1942, and the BS Soviet brigade ZOC/fort-building routines) through forced waiting on AARs from the public at large on its website (so not only do we have to wait for someone to play the game and write an AAR, we have to wait for someone at Matrix to READ them and compile quantitative data from them). Maybe Matrix should have anticipated ways to easily exchange data from games between players and databases. The reason when it comes to the speed of some kinds of changes is not lack of data or a lack of a will to change things. We had a pretty large list of suggestions pre-release as well. The reason is that the programming team consists of Gary, who has a company to run, and Pavel, who has a regular day job and does this part-time. If 2by3 was some big developer with a dozen programmer, obviously things could be changed much faster than they can be changed now. I understand it can fatigue you, it fatigues the testers and the developers too in a way, because we all want to be the product to be as good as possible, but it's just what the situation is like currently. The capabilities for more than gradual changes are just not there currently, also because really big changes need extensive testing. I'm sorry if you feel like you've been mislead in some way, but I don't think it was a secret that 2by3 is a small development team and thus has its limitations compared to the huge more mainstream development teams. quote:
And when someone gives a specific AAR, it seems to me at least that someone from Matrix or the Alpha/Beta testers inevitably proclaims "This AAR is an outlier." Fancy jedi mind trick, that... As difficult as that might be to believe, it is true in many cases. Only recently have public games that are being AAR'ed gotten close to the tester AAR's in terms of the experience of their opponents and thus what both players achieve, simply because people had to slowly get used to the game and become more experienced. As such, many AAR's initially came down to one opponent turning out to be much better than the other or one player making a series of crucial mistakes. Changing things based on extremes is a bad idea, things should be changed based on the average. Now that the overall experience of the community has increased substantially since the period directly after release, it's much easier to collect results of the average game and make adjustments based on that.
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SSG tester WitE Alpha tester Panzer Corps Beta tester Unity of Command scenario designer
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