Jagdtiger14
Posts: 1686
Joined: 1/22/2008 From: Miami Beach Status: offline
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For the AI to kick butt against any human opponent, all you have to do is rig the die rolls in the AI's favor...which spoils the fun in my opinion. After a few games the AI can be figured out and become useless. I dont understand why people would rather play an AI than a human oppoent??? To get a more accurate feedback for sales, you should expand this survey to include the WiF list moderated by Devin. I know there are a few of guys on here that are active over there as well...like Patrice and Steve Balk. Over there you have the hard core WiF grognards who I think(I could be surprised though) would predominantly wish to play NetPlay, PBEM, or Hot Seat. And probably double your feed back from what this survey got. Also, its easy to do on that list since there is a voting feature. Steve or Patrice could make it happen. My vote if it still counts is: NetPlay: 80% PBEM: 7% Hot Seat: 10% AI: 1% Solitaire: 2% C quote:
ORIGINAL: Shannon V. OKeets Survey I ran a simple survey of the World in Flames forum members asking which mode(s) of play they expected to use, as a percentage of the time they spend playing MWIF. This was motivated by my conversation with Dave about how important the AI Opponent would be. My guess prior to this survey was that the break down would be 50% NetPlay, 30% AIO, 20% PBEM. I was completely wrong. The scrren shots are taken of spreadsheet that Patrice created for summarizing the responses from this survey. As I write this we have had 86 players respond; that is a healthy simple size, though perhaps biased, since the survey is of active forum members. Patrice used the word 'votes', which is imprecise. I think of them as 'responses' - since no one is getting elected. The dominant mode of play is going to be AIO (52%) with PBEM second (23%), NetPlay third (17%), with Solitaire and Head-to-head making up the rest. You can see these numbers in the first page of the spreadsheet. From the comments players made when completing the survey, Solitaire, and to a lesser extent AIO, will be used to gain experience with the game so they can play against human opponents using PBEM and NetPlay. But there are over 60% of the customers who expect to play against the AI most of the time. If you look at the bar chart, you’ll see that AIO overwhelms the other modes of play for use Predominantly (75% or more of playing time). It is also equal to the sum of all the other modes of play for use Most-of-the-time (50% to 74% of playing time). Overall, PBEM beats out NetPlay slightly, and almost 90% of the respondents had zero interest in Head-to-head play. Solitaire use is apparently expected to be a learning/planning tool rather than a means of playing the entire game from start to finish. My conclusion is that I now agree with Dave: the AIO is crucial for sales. Indeed, I see this as a personal challenge, with players saying they can play MWIF better than any AIO I can create.
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Conflict with the unexpected: two qualities are indispensable; first, an intellect which, even in the midst of this obscurity, is not without some traces of inner light which lead to the truth; second, the courage to follow this faint light. KvC
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