Testing WITE (Full Version)

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bdtj1815 -> Testing WITE (2/27/2011 1:27:03 AM)

I have posted these comments on a number of threads and, probably quite rightly it has been suggested I should start a new place of discussion.

"I bought this game on the day it was released and I think it has many things going for it. What I did not realise when I paid my £70 was that I was not buying a finished product. So far I have had to download six patches and still I read that the "game will only be balanced" "possibly in a year" when enough people play it who can point out its faults.

35 years ago my first wargame, bought as a present for my fifteenth birthday, was "Drang nach Osten" by GDW. In real terms it probably cost in 1974 more than WITE today but worked "straight out of the box" and is still playable today without amy major modifications.

When I bought WITE I wish someone had written on the Matrix website that "this game will be great when you all find what is wrong with it now".



Senno -> RE: Testing WITE (2/27/2011 1:35:51 AM)

All right. See, rather than have a disjointed conversation across multiple threads you can now have your say in one location.

I wasn't trying to shut you up, rather get you to express yourself in the appropriate location.

So with that, I shall say goodnight as you await your official response.



bdtj1815 -> RE: Testing WITE (2/27/2011 1:42:00 AM)

Senno, thank you. Probably just on a bit of a role this evening because England beat France today, as usual!



Zort -> RE: Testing WITE (2/27/2011 1:45:25 AM)

I will disagree with you that DNO was that good.  Don't want to get into a Europa discussion here.  WitE is a large game and the few testers did what they could.

I for one am having a blast playing the game knowing that fixes were/are going to be done.  Very few computer games are released 100% done, most after it gets into the hands of the players find lots of things that could be better and are patched.

WitE let's you have settings on handicapping etc.  No one that I have seen on the forums (except one AAR) has attempted to change the settings to what they think the other side should have or not and played it and reported back.  Yes the game needs tweeting in some areas.  The designers decided on doing things a certain way and they are now hearing that some players don't like the WAD, ie weather.  Will the game be improved, yea.  You have stated in numerous areas the above, thanks.

To me even though I have whined to my opponent about how bad things are it still is a challenge.  If you don't want to play it don't, same with me and the Europa series (oh yea I was a play tester for Total War that hasn't come out yet).



cookie monster -> RE: Testing WITE (2/27/2011 1:48:58 AM)

send an email to 2by3@2by3.com, best place for customer feedback



bdtj1815 -> RE: Testing WITE (2/27/2011 2:23:40 AM)

"I will disagree with you that DNO was that good. Don't want to get into a Europa discussion here. WitE is a large game and the few testers did what they could.

I for one am having a blast playing the game knowing that fixes were/are going to be done. Very few computer games are released 100% done, most after it gets into the hands of the players find lots of things that could be better and are patched.

WitE let's you have settings on handicapping etc. No one that I have seen on the forums (except one AAR) has attempted to change the settings to what they think the other side should have or not and played it and reported back. Yes the game needs tweeting in some areas. The designers decided on doing things a certain way and they are now hearing that some players don't like the WAD, ie weather. Will the game be improved, yea. You have stated in numerous areas the above, thanks.

To me even though I have whined to my opponent about how bad things are it still is a challenge. If you don't want to play it don't, same with me and the Europa series (oh yea I was a play tester for Total War that hasn't come out yet)."

This is not an answer to my question, in fact in many ways it supports my problem. I paid £70 for a game that in its original form is broken. How many people, unlike myself, check for new patches every day, I like the game that much, but am annoyed that for that amount of money I , and the people I am playing against by pbem. seem to be viewed by 2by3 and Matrix as playtesters!

I also play extensively, and have released some very well received scenarios, for the John Tiller Panzer Campaign series of games and whilst they are updated to "ADD" new tweaks the original games are sound.



cookie monster -> RE: Testing WITE (2/27/2011 2:27:33 AM)

Which part of the game is broken?

Do you mean the First Winter Rules of the 1941 Grand Campaign?



bdtj1815 -> RE: Testing WITE (2/27/2011 2:29:24 AM)

In many ways which part is not! Control of air units, or lack of, the lack of political imperatives on the Soviets in 1941, the many misfunctions in the game pointed out in the "Tech Forum".

Please do not get me wrong, I think many parts of this game are brilliant, but I am questioning paying £70 for a game that "we", the players, are supposed to put right by reporting things that happen in our games. I am only questioning whether I bought "the finished product", which I obviously did not, and should that not have been made clear to me when I paid my money.



TulliusDetritus -> RE: Testing WITE (2/27/2011 2:32:22 AM)

quote:

ORIGINAL: bdtj1815

"I will disagree with you that DNO was that good. Don't want to get into a Europa discussion here. WitE is a large game and the few testers did what they could.

I for one am having a blast playing the game knowing that fixes were/are going to be done. Very few computer games are released 100% done, most after it gets into the hands of the players find lots of things that could be better and are patched.

WitE let's you have settings on handicapping etc. No one that I have seen on the forums (except one AAR) has attempted to change the settings to what they think the other side should have or not and played it and reported back. Yes the game needs tweeting in some areas. The designers decided on doing things a certain way and they are now hearing that some players don't like the WAD, ie weather. Will the game be improved, yea. You have stated in numerous areas the above, thanks.

To me even though I have whined to my opponent about how bad things are it still is a challenge. If you don't want to play it don't, same with me and the Europa series (oh yea I was a play tester for Total War that hasn't come out yet)."

This is not an answer to my question, in fact in many ways it supports my problem. I paid £70 for a game that in its original form is broken. How many people, unlike myself, check for new patches every day, I like the game that much, but am annoyed that for that amount of money I , and the people I am playing against by pbem. seem to be viewed by 2by3 and Matrix as playtesters!

I also play extensively, and have released some very well received scenarios, for the John Tiller Panzer Campaign series of games and whilst they are updated to "ADD" new tweaks the original games are sound.


I'm playing a PBEM game and am having a lot of fun. I have to be a weirdo [&:] But needless to say the customer is always right [:D]



Zort -> RE: Testing WITE (2/27/2011 2:34:40 AM)

Hehe.. so show me wargames that are finished products... none that I can think of, all have problems and over time have gotten better.  So you should have been aware that you were not getting something totally perfect.  So I will stop now since you seem to be a troll.  Don't play the game if you don't like it your choice.  



Templer_12 -> RE: Testing WITE (2/27/2011 2:35:18 AM)


quote:

ORIGINAL: bdtj1815
This is not an answer to my question, in fact in many ways it supports my problem. I paid £70 for a game that in its original form is broken. How many people, unlike myself, check for new patches every day, I like the game that much, but am annoyed that for that amount of money I , and the people I am playing against by pbem. seem to be viewed by 2by3 and Matrix as playtesters!

I also play extensively, and have released some very well received scenarios, for the John Tiller Panzer Campaign series of games and whilst they are updated to "ADD" new tweaks the original games are sound.


Question? What question?
Your first post does not contain a single question mark. [:-]



bdtj1815 -> RE: Testing WITE (2/27/2011 2:38:58 AM)

Please do not get me wrong, I think many parts of this game are brilliant, but I am questioning paying £70 for a game that "we", the players, are supposed to put right by reporting things that happen in our games. I am only questioning whether I bought "the finished product", which I obviously did not, and should that not have been made clear to me when I paid my money.



Wild -> RE: Testing WITE (2/27/2011 2:48:39 AM)


quote:

ORIGINAL: bdtj1815

I have posted these comments on a number of threads and, probably quite rightly it has been suggested I should start a new place of discussion.

"I bought this game on the day it was released and I think it has many things going for it. What I did not realise when I paid my £70 was that I was not buying a finished product. So far I have had to download six patches and still I read that the "game will only be balanced" "possibly in a year" when enough people play it who can point out its faults.

35 years ago my first wargame, bought as a present for my fifteenth birthday, was "Drang nach Osten" by GDW. In real terms it probably cost in 1974 more than WITE today but worked "straight out of the box" and is still playable today without amy major modifications.

When I bought WITE I wish someone had written on the Matrix website that "this game will be great when you all find what is wrong with it now".


The more people playing the game, the faster bugs will be discovered and fixed. It's also the best way to get the balance issue right.
If they didn't release the game until it was perfect we would be waiting till 2020 for it. A small company simply does not have the resources to perfect a game of this complexity in a short period of time.
I for one much prefer to play the game now and to have a hand in the perfecting process.



FredSanford3 -> RE: Testing WITE (2/27/2011 2:50:57 AM)

SO 2x3 shouldn't have bothered gathering customer feedback and made improvements?  The game worked out of the box, afterall.  Whether is was "balanced" (an eye-of-the-beholder thing really), or had the features people wanted wouldn't have mattered.  As to the number of patches, they are issuing BETA patches as they make improvements so people don't have to wait for the "official" patch.  To me, that's a good thing, but I guess some people count it as a negative.

And comparing a board game to a computer game is like comparing apples and toasters.



cookie monster -> RE: Testing WITE (2/27/2011 2:56:57 AM)


quote:

ORIGINAL: Franklin Nimitz

And comparing a board game to a computer game is like comparing apples and toasters.


It was nevertheless amusing though.



bdtj1815 -> RE: Testing WITE (2/27/2011 2:59:57 AM)

How ridiculous are your responses, have you actually read my comments? I am not questioning the brilliance of the game but the fact that we are, I suppose, play testing it. For £70 I would have expected a "polished" product, not one that needs patching every few days to make it work right.



Klydon -> RE: Testing WITE (2/27/2011 3:06:50 AM)

I don't know enough about the original release of DNO to know if it was truly done or not upon release. For starters, board games and computer games are two totally different animals. Computer games have a tendency to be far more complex, so it is easier to have something "wrong" with them.

I would point out that there was probably errata from DNO and I have heard there are several "house rules" conversions to try to address some of the issues some players thought the original game had. Obviously DNO was remade in a huge way when FITE/Scorched Earth came out and there was certainly errata for that game. In addition I am aware of at least one totally different rules set that was published to address what players felt were short comings in the original game (sound familiar?). The game series has undergone yet another remake with new maps and rules rewrites, etc.

As far as WITE being released in the condition it was, from what I have seen, the staff should get a huge round of congrats and applause. Very, very few crashes reported. In general there have been very few issues as far as the game running, etc. If you want recent examples of how not to release a game, I refer you to Civ5 and Elemental. Now, that is not to say that you (or any other user) may not feel there are issues with the game (don't like how the weather goes, how the blizzard works, etc). While people may have a point about these, you move from working/not working to an opinion. You may not like how weather is modeled in the game, but that does not mean it isn't working.

Having been a member of many play testing groups for board games, there can still be issues after release that the designers/play-testers never caught or considered. It doesn't mean they were not thorough; but rather it means someone else came up with something that was never thought of. I can personally tell you that I was one of the people responsible for a change to GDW's game Pearl Harbor that specifically forbade amphibious invasions of Pearl Harbor in turn 1, because I figured out a way to do it and it broke the game and this was after it was published. (Essentially, the US lost their base 66% of the time). The same is obviously especially true for computer games because of their increased complexity.

Sorry for the book and I don't mean to be a shill for the WITE crew, but they did a good job with this game despite some of the current issues.



Templer_12 -> RE: Testing WITE (2/27/2011 3:07:32 AM)

No matter how much money you pay, today, on the software game market, you will never find a perfect game, dealing with no errors. [:-]

In the case of Gary Grigsby's War in the East, wich I also already purchased immediately after the release, I can assure you that despite the "bug's", I found since 7 December fun, a lot joy and a many hours of excitement and tension.

From my side:
yes, the game is very expensive.
But Matrix, with I am a long time, with many games customer, matrix itself and others accountable show outstanding support for their products/games.
We are customers and Matrix takes serious care of us. [:)]

With other words, the games are getting better and better and here for you don't have to pay one more additional cent!
I know not one game released by Matrix that would not have been playable from the beginning because of the bugs.

So calm down now and enjoy the game, the patches and the improvements - maybe in a perfect world... [;)]



Wild -> RE: Testing WITE (2/27/2011 3:07:47 AM)


quote:

ORIGINAL: bdtj1815

How ridiculous are your responses, have you actually read my comments? I am not questioning the brilliance of the game but the fact that we are, I suppose, play testing it. For £70 I would have expected a "polished" product, not one that needs patching every few days to make it work right.


Well i tried to explain it to you but all you seem interested in is whining.
It's your own fault if your not satisfied. You could have waited to see the reviews of the game or read the forums to find out peoples views on the state of the game before you bought it.



bdtj1815 -> RE: Testing WITE (2/27/2011 3:08:09 AM)

Just found this comment as I "troll" the forum: "I have to agree with the consensus here that something is deeply broken with the winter campaign. The soviet side is grossly overpowered."

But seems to support my argument.

And never heard of these " If you want recent examples of how not to release a game, I refer you to Civ5 and Elemental" because they are not Eastern Front games and unlike the blurbs for WITE are not supposed to represent accurately.



56ajax -> RE: Testing WITE (2/27/2011 3:17:15 AM)

This game is software, and as a software tester of 25 experience, I can tell you that software is never finished. There are always fixes and enhancements. Did you wait for microsoft to finish their operating system before you bought a computer? This game works out of the box for me without any crashes or hangs. Furthermore, many of the enhancements suggested are outside the scope of the original product so the developers have the moral? right to actually ask for more $$$$. As it stands the game is great fun and excellent value for money. Enjoy....



Templer_12 -> RE: Testing WITE (2/27/2011 3:21:49 AM)

On the other side.
You paid a lot of money for a product that is not free of bugs and errors.
You report to Matrix.
You are the customer, you are the king.
So Matrix take, almost immediately, care of it.

Matrix takes you seriously!

Will you seriously complaining about that? [:(]



Ketza -> RE: Testing WITE (2/27/2011 3:22:15 AM)

To address one of your points the original DNO "out of the box" actually had the same balance issues that we see in WITE. A good Soviet commander would never make the same mistakes Stalin did and when a good Soviet team played a good Axis team the results were horribly lopsided towards the Soviets. To this day I remember the look on my opponents face when I surrounded all of the 4th PZ group cutting off its supplies with mechanized divisions that I had kept in forts and wiped out all of it in 2 turns... Houserules and later Fire in the East were required to make the game balanced.

A game written by a few people and playtested by a few more can never match the test of hundreds or thousands actually playing it. Bugs, issues and implausuble strategies will come out of the woodwork as the work of a few talented minds are placed to the test by thousands of other talented minds.

The only real way to not be disapointed if you do not understand the concept i just outlined is to wait before you buy games that have already been put through the ringer by the masses.



pat.casey -> RE: Testing WITE (2/27/2011 3:22:57 AM)

Oddly enough, since I'm one of the advocates that the game, as currently balanced, is "broken", I'm not particularly upset. I've played enough large scale war games in my day to realize that balancing is virtually impossible without a large player base, so expecting a relatively small test team to get it "right" out of the gate is probably not reasonable. I'll be peaved 3 months from now if we still have the same balance problems mind you, but I'm not expecting that.

When you get down to it, even really small war games can be difficult to balance properly. Does anyone remember the original rule set for Ogre with its incredibly overpowered "all gev" defense? They just flat missed that in playtest because it didn't occur to the playtest team that anybody would do that.

That being said, I suspect that what happened here is that most of the playtesting was of summer 1941, since that's probably about as far as you can get if the developers are shipping you a new, incompatible, build every week.

So you test turns 1-10 over and over again with progressively improving builds, but take relatively few games through to the end.



FredSanford3 -> RE: Testing WITE (2/27/2011 3:23:00 AM)

I have a closet full of old AH/SPI titles.  I can come up with criticisms about the gameplay and historical accuracy of every one of them.  Did you know that in Avalon Hill's Panzer Leader, the artillery mechanics are completely backwards- it's better to mass in a hex b/c the firing factors are divided by the number of units in the hex!  Utter Nonsense!  When's Avalon Hill going to fix this!?!?!?  I paid a lot of money for that game you know!

Actually, they did 'fix' it in Arab-Israeli Wars, which was the next "patch" of the old Panzerblitz game 'engine'.  But it was something like 3 years after Panzer Leader.  Ahh...the good ol' days...



bairdlander2 -> RE: Testing WITE (2/27/2011 3:34:57 AM)

I know a title of this complexity and detail cannot be relied on beta testers alone(not that they didnt do a good job).I have no problem getting free patches and as time goes on and the dev gets more feedback from us the game will become better.



bdtj1815 -> RE: Testing WITE (2/27/2011 3:35:59 AM)

From Matix's own site "Gary Grigsby’s War in the East represents a truly epic representation of the Second World War on the Eastern Front and is unparalleled in its scale, detail, and ambition! but unfortunately in its original form, which cost me a lot of money, it is flawed as proved by many threads and comments on this forum. All I am saying is that Matrix, or 2by3 games, should have have said this is a not fully developed and possibly flawed product on release and asked those of us who bought it to help in its testing, not sold it to us as a "finished product".



Ketza -> RE: Testing WITE (2/27/2011 3:38:28 AM)

I loved Panzer Blitz and Tobruk. As a 10 year old Tobruk was a little hard to grasp but I eventually got it.



pat.casey -> RE: Testing WITE (2/27/2011 3:40:02 AM)


quote:

ORIGINAL: bdtj1815

From Matix's own site "Gary Grigsby’s War in the East represents a truly epic representation of the Second World War on the Eastern Front and is unparalleled in its scale, detail, and ambition! but unfortunately in its original form, which cost me a lot of money, it is flawed as proved by many threads and comments on this forum. All I am saying is that Matrix, or 2by3 games, should have have said this is a not fully developed and possibly flawed product on release and asked those of us who bought it to help in its testing, not sold it to us as a "finished product".


By that logic blizzard should never have shipped starcraft II since their playtesters missed the generally overpowered terran side at release and the very specific way a good terran could abuse early reapers as an "i win" against even pro level zerg.

Fact is multi-player games are hard to balance. That's why the standard for developers is to strive to release bug free and as balanced as they can manage and then *plan* for balance patches once a large player base develops.



Ketza -> RE: Testing WITE (2/27/2011 3:40:07 AM)


quote:

ORIGINAL: bdtj1815

From Matix's own site "Gary Grigsby’s War in the East represents a truly epic representation of the Second World War on the Eastern Front and is unparalleled in its scale, detail, and ambition! but unfortunately in its original form, which cost me a lot of money, it is flawed as proved by many threads and comments on this forum. All I am saying is that Matrix, or 2by3 games, should have have said this is a not fully developed and possibly flawed product on release and asked those of us who bought it to help in its testing, not sold it to us as a "finished product".


My wife was a finished product 21 years ago. Well thats what I thought. She has gotten better over time.



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