RFalvo69
Posts: 1380
Joined: 7/11/2013 From: Lamezia Terme (Italy) Status: offline
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After reading the answers to my original post, I have some things thing to add. I didn't call this game Matrix Workarounds in Flames to make a joke. I have no doubts that many people had many hours of fun with this - after finding their own workarounds. I.e. by doing and still doing the work that Matrix didn't - even after paying full price for it. Would you accept to pay full price for a plumbing job only to discover that, to have warm water, you actually will have to find your own workarounds? Yes? You would? Really? How I would like to be your plumber! But I wouldn't. I do own a restaurant/pizzeria. If you come to eat "chez me" be assured that I'll serve you the dishes you order: no need for "workarounds" like going to the kitchen and personally adding and cooking the missing ingredients... ...while I'm charging your credit cards for the full price. IMHO, accepting this way of thinking means opening the door to a very dangerous possibility: what about a broken "War in the Pacific: Total Edition" which players will still enjoy because "they will find workarounds for the, let's say, broken auto-convoy system and incorrect use of oil"? Why the tutorial videos showed (and still show) a complete game with all the optional rules available whereas four years later more than one third of the optional rules in the actual product are still greyed out (and the half-map scenarios, another given, are by now synonymous with "nothing new")? Why the same videos do mention Netplay as a given? Some will pipe "This game made me learn WiF!" Good for you. The tutorials, however, are freely available on Youtube (a form of false advertising, BTW - see, for example, the internet gaming, the half-map scenarios and the optional rules shown as if they are all present and working with no mention that the game is incomplete ---> https://tinyurl.com/ydyw262f - which also means, ironically, that Matrix is false advertising the game within the game itself!) And after you watched the tutorials for free on YT, the WiF VASSAL modules are among the best available, and the online WiF community is there to help you to learn the game. As amazing as it sound, people learned how to play WiF decades before MWiF came out. This because people actually learned to play wargames and boardgamesby simply readying the ****ing manuals for almost a century now. Between August ad now I learned to play The Gamer's OCS system even if there is not a game by Matrix on it. And what have you learned anyway thanks to this wonderful MWiF? How to play another product, a cardboard one, for which you will have to shell hundreds of dollars more? (incidentally, I'll stress again how we are waiting for the completion of something that, by now, is obsolete - I Kickstarted the new Collector Edition edition and I'll get it within Christmas; something tells me that I'll not get missing counter-sheets or maps - needing for me to find "workarounds" for...) Why there were no "Status of the game and future plans" after 2015? Why there was not the decency by Matrix to refund at least the price of the books when they were no more mandatory - and the game was years away from completion anyway? And, most importantly, what would bar Matrix to behave again like they did with MWiF? If we accept what happened here (because, you know, there are workarounds, we will flatly lose any right to protest and call Matrix out every time any future game will be published while being months or years away from being completed. We will be forced to gladly accept, out of coherence, that a broken framework we paid full price for is enough for us to "have tons of hours of fun". This is something that I, personally (but also, IMHO, any person living in a World where decency is a value) cannot accept. I bought the game out of good faith. I had patience. And I'm eating the bullet I took - because, beside venting my frustration, there is nothing more I can do. But, please, don't tell me that what happened here is not unacceptable because "No! It is not so! There are workarounds!" - because the next guy who buys a game by Matrix, or any other company will not deserve this.
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"Yes darling, I served in the Navy for eight years. I was a cook..." "Oh dad... so you were a God-damned cook?" (My 10 years old daughter after watching "The Hunt for Red October")
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