Stoat
Posts: 37
Joined: 9/20/2011 From: Toronto, Canada Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Encircled Pelton does know that Germany lost the war, doesn't he? Hell, if you are going to play an Eastern Front game, you do tend to have at least read some info on it, and even the really basic stuff mentions the Soviet success at industrial evacuation. I know I take the p**s out of a lot of your posts, but any good points you make (and you do) are buried in a mass of irrelevent or inaccurate information, which kind of destroys your point. Whatever anyone argues about this game, the big problem is that you are not going to get any Soviet player to make Stalinist mistakes, or a German to make Hitlerist mistakes, so you have to make do with what you have got. German players will have to get used to playing a fighting retreat from about mid to late '43 onwards (judging by the AAR's we are seeing now). I'm not as learned as some on here, but that seems pretty realistic to me. Enjoy the game for a while, play it to the end, and then we can see what needs tweaking If I can try to answer your general point using the terms I described yesterday, I do not believe Pelton & FlaviusX actually have very different views on what the "mean outcome" of the game should be. If we could observe a sufficient sample of games where the mean result was German surrender around May-45, I think think they would both be happy with that and we all should be. I name Pelton & FlaviusX, not to call them out or subject them to any particular deep personal scrutiny, but because I view them as the leading proponents of the Axis & Soviet "sides". Pelton (always?) plays Axis and consistently advocates for changes which would, on balance, benefit the Axis player. FlaviusX (always?) plays Soviet & consistently advocates for changes which would, on balance, benefit the Soviet player. Both seem to me to be capable & active competitive players. Naturally (or un-naturally), I think about things in my own terms, so when I consider the changes that each proposes, I think that generally, Pelton's changes would increase the dispersion of results whereas FlaviusX's changes would decrease the dispersion of results. While any particular point or feature can be debated on its history, any particular algorithm or dynamic can be altered to broaden or narrow the distribution of likely outcomes. The decision to do the latter is NOT one grounded in history, but rather a game design decision as to what range & likely frequency of results should be possible to make the game pleasing for users. When I look at AAR's & so many players describing frustrations & failures to finish, sure, from the perspective of an individual game, it's easy to start & finish your analysis with, "well, that guy's a bad fellow because he quit the game", or whatever (I am not btw speaking in favour of quitting here). But with hundreds of thousands or millions of man-hours in development and now, almost a year after release, I don't doubt millions of hours of gameplay, on this board we can observe exactly ZERO games played through to the final turn. This is absolutely shocking to me. Absolutely shocking. And very distressing. After all, this is not some piece of crap we're talking about. This is the Best Wargame in the History of Mankind. I truly believe this. But it's not working for the user base. You can blame any single guy for his shortcomings and may be correct on an individual level, but if that is where you stop, I think that's not good enough. You (not you personally Encircled, just "you" instead of "one") have got to get some perspective. I think the Silent Majority of the user base is speaking loud & clear, and the silence is deafening, even though the messaging of the dominant force on these boards is entirely otherwise. This colossus is FlaviusX and his many supporters, together to whom yesterday I referred as the "Thick Brown Line" and to whom I'll so refer to today, 'cos I think it's nicer than "Soviet fanboys" and is hellafunny. The Thick Brown Line (TBL to its friends) is the dominant force due to the energy & zeal with which they congratulate each other on the uniformity of their views and the energy & zeal with which they chasten those who dissent, They dominate through the strength of their numbers, not the strength of their ideas. It's not hard to see who they are: all's ya have to do is check Pelton's head, neck & body for boot prints (& he has fresh ones every day, God love him), & match those to the various guys in this here mess of ours. Now I think a lot of these guys are pretty smart, and bet they're all actually pretty good fellows, more or less, so I don't really mean to accuse them of heinous crimes or anything really nefarious. But I do not like what they are doing, because I do not think what they are doing is good for the game. My core belief about the state of this game is that it is frustrating its user base, because it must always turn out the same. Not because it it too complicated, but because it is no fun in the late game (say 1943-1945). I say this admittedly never having seen 1943 myself, never having seen a Panther tank, never having seen an Me 262, never having felt the loving caress of a PanzerGrenadier Division. My 3 CG's vs. normal Sov AI are (or will be) all over in '42. The TBL will respond, "well, this is pretty much the story of the late war, so this is the way it should be". I say that is not good enough. The game has wonderful, beautiful rhythms in the first couple years, woven together with threads of supply, weather, reinforcements, morale & other dynamics. I sense, without knowing, that these rhythms kind of turn to suck thereafter. I wonder if a lot of players don't feel, "Hey, this is has turned from awesome into suck. Why spend a few hundred hours of my life doing something unpleasant?" I say this not to excuse poor sportsmanship or quitting but because I think there is some truth to it, and as a creator, I don't think your design goal is to inflict a few hundred hours of suck on your users. Maybe this is not the case. But zero, in its own way, is a very big number. The Thick Brown Line, many of whom play largely of exclusively Soviet, have the natural institutional inclination to defend the interests of their side. Pelton & I, as Axis players have the opposite tendency. Of course, as a single player noob, I play Axis since playing 1P Sov is no challenge at all. Although on top of that, given the current game balance, I do feel it is a character flaw for anyone to play Soviet against an opponent he considers anywhere near his equal. Pelton's proposals in general, I feel, will broaden the range of possibilities and make the game more interesting. FlaviusX's proposals, in general, I feel, will narrow the range of possibilities, and make the game dismal. Maybe dismal is actually æsthetically pleasing from the Soviet perspective; I wouldn't know. So the way I see it, reduced down to the crux of it, Pelton is the greatest champion of making the game better, and FlaviusX is the greatest proponent of destroying the game. I think they're both smart and I like them both. But this is why I stand with Pelton & why I stand against FlaviusX.
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