Slitherine

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Frag

Other then his style and prose Zoomie has a legimate concern that many of us who just play the AI share.

I _really_ don`t want to invest 1000+ hours of my life on the full campaign to find out that I need to re-start in 1944.

Neither do I, hence why I spend all my time trying to get things fixed instead of playing.

Matrix needs to be more forthcoming about the Patch plans and how it will effect Games In Progress.

They have been completely open. We have a dedicated programmer (Mike) working on the bugs.

It looks like " C " level fixes will require a restart., yet we don`t know if that Bug is unit specific, or any unit, like a complete TF or Division can "vanish" which will screw the Game in Progress.

There are two known type (C). One was fixed already (air transport) in the patch you have. The remaining one is caused by merging transport TF's where only a single ship is loading a unit. This is about as simple to work around as you can get. Use 2 ships, no bug.

I`m also concerned that " A " level OOB fixes ( requiring a restart ) are being worked on because it`s been discovered by the testers that the Game has issues due to lack or, or the inclusion of, these units down the road.

Changes to the OOB which is 90+% correct is not really going to make a restart level offence. Changes of *errors* in the OOB such as bases being set wrong are more serious as they affect how the AI works. Pry is working around the clock on these. This is the number one area people can help out in. Instead of running off and creating your own scenario, you could be working with Pry to get errors fixed in the main scenarios. Each scenario has 80,000 database entries with each one having up to 50 pieces of data. Thats a hell of a lot of checking

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ORIGINAL: Mogami

Hi, If you have 500 Franks in Pool and 15 depleted Oscar groups you screwed the pooch production wise. You knew the Oscar groups needed Oscars but produced Franks instead.
And your saying that is the games fault? It required perhaps 30 minutes at some point to see where this was heading and what was required. Then you had to watch turn after turn of your Oscar groups decreasing size. A 30 second check of the pools and production would have fixed it. But no. It's 2by3's fault because they did not provide some sort of warning devise or pie chart. If you can't see your own airgroups condition how would a pie chart help?

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ORIGINAL: Mogami

Hi, If you have 500 Franks in Pool and 15 depleted Oscar groups you screwed the pooch production wise. You knew the Oscar groups needed Oscars but produced Franks instead.
And your saying that is the games fault? It required perhaps 30 minutes at some point to see where this was heading and what was required. Then you had to watch turn after turn of your Oscar groups decreasing size. A 30 second check of the pools and production would have fixed it. But no. It's 2by3's fault because they did not provide some sort of warning devise or pie chart. If you can't see your own airgroups condition how would a pie chart help?

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What I have a problem with is being condemned by history to have 1/3 of my air force flying worthless IMO a/c.

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ORIGINAL: ZOOMIE1980
First off, condolences to whatever tragedies have been endured.

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But the notion that so many key people of one firm are off "convention-hopping" that we have a month long fire-storm of controversy brewing that cannot even warrant a single staff person to take the time to periodically post a "we're working on it post", if for nothing else, to calm it all down, is a bit hard to imagine. Forgive my surprise, but this whole operation comes across as being a bit.... "strange".....

Erik Rutins
CEO, Matrix Games LLC



For official support, please use our Help Desk: http://www.matrixgames.com/helpdesk/

Freedom is not Free.

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ORIGINAL: Mr.Frag

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What I have a problem with is being condemned by history to have 1/3 of my air force flying worthless IMO a/c.

Sorry, but you are in fantasy land once again. 1/3 of your air force is not condemned to worthless aircraft because you are again thinking spreadsheet and pretending that 1941, 1942, 1943 don't exist and somehow you are magically going to still have all those aircraft not having taken a single loss in 2+ years of having the Allies kick the crap out of you.

You will find out that in reality you'll be lucky to have any Oscar groups left forget about 1/3 of your entire air force. You will be forced between producing some Oscars to fill in your losses OR trying to build some of the newer "last gasp of japan" aircraft to fill in some of their groups. You will not be doing *both*.

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To complain that you can over produce Franks all the while knowing you can't use them and you need Oscar II is not the games fault.

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It is not "War in the Pacific; Japanese Alternative Production Schemes"

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There are reasons beyond the control of Operational Planners for what ships get built and what type tank is used and what aircraft are built and then flown by your forces.
Consider this. The Allied player has less control. I can see the day when because of feedback and appeasment the Japanese fly nothing but their top line aircraft and the allies do the same. The players will think it a fine game. It will have lost most of the connection to the actual events by then. All Japanese shortcomings in the war will be recitifed by built in game routines rather then player Operational planning. We'll call it a Production Optimizer Game instead. Operational planning will sit on the curb while the player rides Production Solutions, Training increases, fights carrier battles in wonderfully distant places prior to invading Madagascar, the Panama Canal and Jersey City.

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All this because players "Expected" it. I can't see in any AAR posted by any player of Japanese where such notions were entertained or expectations planted.

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If 2by3 includes too much detail it's their fault. If they leave out obscure items it's their fault. Very few seem able to just install the game and play it as designed and intended. (The AI plays much better if you play the game as designed)

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If you try to use a motorcycle as a fighter jet you'll crash going off the mountain. It's not the motorcycles fault. Motorcycles can be fun and safe if used as designed. But they can't be more then a motorcycle and they require practice to get the most out of.
Does anyone think that a detailed game of this conflict can be programed into a game of 10 minute turns, war fights it's self while you have fun massing forces for unprepared operations?

I've been here before. Where a poster questions the testers and was aghast we did not force the designers into rewritting the game. I felt then and still feel that my job is to test the program to see if it does what it is designed to do. Chase bugs and try to break it yes. Rewrite or change the format no. Where the interface caused problems I reported it. However I did adapt to it. I feel players are trying to go to fast. They are not learning the game. Then they are reporting that the game is bad. There are posters who are not playing because something "might" be found that requires fixing. To speed up the final version of the product everyone should be playing and only reporting bugs. (There are fewer then you think. Most complaints are not bugs. Most complaints are people trying to rewrtie the game rather then play it)

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ORIGINAL: 2ndACR

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ORIGINAL: Mr.Frag

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What I have a problem with is being condemned by history to have 1/3 of my air force flying worthless IMO a/c.

Sorry, but you are in fantasy land once again. 1/3 of your air force is not condemned to worthless aircraft because you are again thinking spreadsheet and pretending that 1941, 1942, 1943 don't exist and somehow you are magically going to still have all those aircraft not having taken a single loss in 2+ years of having the Allies kick the crap out of you.

You will find out that in reality you'll be lucky to have any Oscar groups left forget about 1/3 of your entire air force. You will be forced between producing some Oscars to fill in your losses OR trying to build some of the newer "last gasp of japan" aircraft to fill in some of their groups. You will not be doing *both*.

Then change the name of the game to "Do not play the Japanese they can not win". I have played BTR alot (not as much as some here) and I was told it was a lost cause to play as the Axis when I first bought it. I have managed by having and using the amount of control over my production (streamlining production to maximize returns) to do better than history.

Yes, with the current system you are correct. I have NO choice but to put Oscar groups into combat. I am not looking for an all Frank in 43 air force. Would be nice, but like I said "hidden roadblocks". But what if I could equip 4 additional air groups with Tojo's, another 8 groups with Tonies. Both of these a/c enter in 42. Before even the Oscar II.
What if (I know it irks the pure history crowd) is the key phrase. As it stands now, we do not have the luxury of that phrase. I have no CHOICE in the matter.

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ORIGINAL: bradfordkay

It appears to me that most of the complainers do not understand why the production system was made to be open ended. I believe that you have been allowed to alter production at particular plants not to create an Uber-air force for the Japanese, but rather to be able to refill airgroups after excessively heavy losses in particular aircraft types. At first I felt like the others here, that it doesn't make sense to allow the player to change production at a particular plant if I can't change the aircraft upgrade path for particular air groups. It took me a little while to realize that this was given us so that we could assure that our air groups would continue to have replacement aircraft available.

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ORIGINAL: Mogami
I've been here before. Where a poster questions the testers and was aghast we did not force the designers into rewritting the game. I felt then and still feel that my job is to test the program to see if it does what it is designed to do. Chase bugs and try to break it yes. Rewrite or change the format no. Where the interface caused problems I reported it. However I did adapt to it. I feel players are trying to go to fast. They are not learning the game. Then they are reporting that the game is bad. There are posters who are not playing because something "might" be found that requires fixing. To speed up the final version of the product everyone should be playing and only reporting bugs. (There are fewer then you think. Most complaints are not bugs. Most complaints are people trying to rewrtie the game rather then play it)

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I can see the day when because of feedback and appeasment the Japanese fly nothing but their top line aircraft and the allies do the same

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ORIGINAL: Erik Rutins

Zoomie,

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ORIGINAL: ZOOMIE1980
First off, condolences to whatever tragedies have been endured.

Thanks. Suffice it to say that Dave's family has been turned a bit upside down for the last week, he can post details if he likes. Things should be mostly back to normal this week.

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But the notion that so many key people of one firm are off "convention-hopping" that we have a month long fire-storm of controversy brewing that cannot even warrant a single staff person to take the time to periodically post a "we're working on it post", if for nothing else, to calm it all down, is a bit hard to imagine. Forgive my surprise, but this whole operation comes across as being a bit.... "strange".....

August is simply a crazy month in terms of conventions and we do not have a big staff to begin with. I suppose we are a bit "strange" as we're scattered around the globe and working together often through the internet, but I don't think this niche supports (at present) a full "normal" company with enough staff to handle a large convention crew while still running everything else at full speed. Perhaps in another year or three...

This is not what I would call a firestorm either. We had similar discussions with Uncommon Valor. Yes, it's definitely been passionate and I'm sorry I didn't step in earlier, but reading all the opinions was worthwhile and all sides have been heard. I expected that we would have an answer last week, but events conspired and what was already a busy pre-GenCon week became even busier.

For those wondering about patches, the system is the same as with UV. Some fixes require a restart and others don't. We work to make sure that games are compatible across patches even if you don't restart. I have a campaign started just before 1.00 that's still going in 1.21 without any problems and I'm having a blast. In a game of this size, I would not wait to start until all OOB glitches are ironed out - it will take some time I'm sure, but the OOB is extremely good as is, the best of its kind to date.

Regards,

- Erik

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ORIGINAL: bradfordkay

It appears to me that most of the complainers do not understand why the production system was made to be open ended. I believe that you have been allowed to alter production at particular plants not to create an Uber-air force for the Japanese, but rather to be able to refill airgroups after excessively heavy losses in particular aircraft types. At first I felt like the others here, that it doesn't make sense to allow the player to change production at a particular plant if I can't change the aircraft upgrade path for particular air groups. It took me a little while to realize that this was given us so that we could assure that our air groups would continue to have replacement aircraft available.

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ORIGINAL: Joel Billings

Based on some of the posts here, you'd think that we've killed somebody's first born. We're just trying to make a game here, and a pretty difficult one to make, test, balance and produce. Rip us if you must, but I hope you can at least appreciate the difficulty of producing a game that takes a fast computer 10 days running 24 hours a day just to test a campaign in AI vs AI mode. If we waited for this game to be perfect, there would never be a game. We never claimed it to be perfect. A lot of people worked very hard to try to make this game as good as we could given that we are not Microsoft (nor is Matrix) and do not have the resources to test everything (even if we did, there is the issue of design choices and the difficulty in simulating history when any game is only dealing with a fraction of the true variables).

Now with that said, here's the story on the upgrades. Mike and the testers have been busy trying to fix problems that players have reported. Bugs come first. Upgrades and production were design choices and as such take a back seat. I happened to be out of town from July 31 to August 9 on vacation with my family (they haven't seen a lot of me in the past year). Matrix is busy at conventions and just trying to keep up with this forum is more than a full time job for them, and besides they can't answer regarding design decisions made by 2by3. Again, the bugs have to come first. The upgrades post first appeared on July 30. When I came home on August 9, I had an email that had come in to 2by3 games about upgrades. I sent off a response that night which promptly got posted on page 16 of the aircraft upgrades thread. I hadn't had time to read through the entire thread but saw that my reply got posted. As I haven't learned how to link, I'll copy it below:



Okay guys, this is the reply I got from Joel Billings to a e-mail I sent to 2by3.

As you said, in a big game like this there are some compromises. I can't say what was the driving force on this decision, whether it was the time it would take to provide the interface, the unrealistic nature of allowing easy changes of planes in a non-historical manner, or if it was the desire to avoid the play balance implications of allowing an anything goes upgrade path. I remember that all three came into the equation at the time we were thinking about it. There were so many issues like this that we had to deal with, that I can't remember when or how the decision got made. It's possible that Mike Wood (the patch programmer) will at some point in the future change the system, but I would bet it's pretty low on the priority list given the work involved and the more important needs to fix obvious bugs and other items that come up. Mike and the Beta testers track the Matrix forums and if it's being discussed there, it's likely to come up at some point (if it hasn't already). Thanks for the feedback.

Joel Billings



As you can see, this was before I had even read the forum posts that by this time had filled up 16 pages. When I saw this note posted, I figured I had answered the basics and went back to work. I'm sorry some of you are unhappy with our design, but it was intentional. Now as I said, bug fixing comes first. Once we have a handle on the major bugs, Mike has told me he expects to go back and review the upgrade thread and decide whether he wants to make a change. His recommendation will no doubt be based on the level of interest in a change, the specific suggestions made, and the difficulties involved in making the change. Mike and 2by3 are open to making a change here if the demand justifies it. We can't give you a quick answer as to what will happen, and since bug fixing is first priority and this is a major change, I don't want you all expecting to see a fix for this in the next few weeks. I'm sorry if our "silence" has been misunderstood as us not caring. We do care very much.

Joel

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Matrix can respond to customer concerns or not, that
is their choice, however not responding is how they join the ranks of the failed game companies.