The right decision?

[Aurelin]

. If casual gamers can't tolerate this development philosophy they need to move on to something less challenging such as checkers.

Or they can not just update it.

[Lew]

This post by MFogal seems to be right on the money (with the minor note that it should be directed towards AGEOD customer relations instead of Grey Lensman the volunteer). Happily, we know that some of the AGEOD staff are great at keeping up with forum comments, so when I highlight this post it'll be read by the right eyes. Cause it's worth a couple of looks and some action.

First, figure out how most people learn a new game. For myself, I typically run through a tutorial, and then plunge right in and play a game. I usually read through the manual at night for a week or so, after I've shut down the computer. You might use these forums to do an informal poll.

An excellent idea. AGEOD did not sell as many copies of ACW as it should have. It's not seeing the traffic on the ACW fora that it should be seeing. Learning more about how the broader market of "enthusiastic, intelligent, but non-grognard" gamers approach a strategy title seems to be an great early step in making a future ACWII more popular and more profitable without in any way dumbing down the content.

In other words, effective transfer of information about how to have fun with the game - game pedagogy - is fundamental to AGEOD's success or failure.

Third, design your manuals and tutorials to reflect what you learned about how you target audience learns games. I like POCUS's suggestion to have more/better tutorials, maybe even dedicated to specific topics. ("Naval invasion tutorial").

POCUS is an AGEOD staffmember, one of the people (unlike Grey) responsible for the success of the company. To him I reply that perhaps the cooperation of

1) gamers writing and updating a wiki on each game, ideally with unofficial volunteers leading the effort and
2) a staff member - a paid professional - responsible for writing and updating player information (the manual being only one example) as well as supporting the wikis

may be able to achieve more than either could alone, at reasonable cost to AGEOD. The objective is to make available, from the first connection to the web after installing the game, easy-access manuals and tutorials that make learning the game and getting to the Fun as approachable and painless as possible.

I want to see an interface included in all AGEOD products with nice big friendly buttons that automatically checks for updates. It will take players directly to the hardware checklist and/or testing, any quick-start guides, the manual, perhaps the tutorials, the forum, the latest patch or hotfix (with indication of the game not being fully patched up), new information, and the wiki, with links updated as needed by every single patch.

Once set up, this will involve very little additional effort on AGEOD's part (just update the links) and save tremendous amounts of time now spent on answering "Where's the latest patch/documentation?" questions.

Another thought. It's not a trivial task to allow a manual to highlight new information added between any two versions of the player's choice (defaulting to previous and current patch applied to the user's copy of the software), but once you set this up, automatically pointing players to new information is a matter of a few hours spent updating the manual and adding version stamps for the software to pharse.

(A pet peeve of mine: get help with the writing. I'm not necessarily aiming this criticism at AGEOD, but there seems to be a general feeling in the world that, since every Tom Dick and Harry has written a high school term paper, they all think that they know how to write. This is nonsense -- they don't.)

Quoted for truth. I've noticed that too many programmers suffer from this "anyone can write well" mentality to an unusual and self-destructive extent. Most programmer-run companies don't treat audience/customer communication as a profession, requiring a skill equal to their own, and worthy of equal attention. They also tend to stay small and die young.

This point doesn't apply to the ACW manual itself, which I personally consider to be very well written. Its problems aren't with the writing, but with the lack of an integrated, automatically updating approach to helping players learn or stay up to date with the evolving game.

Fourth, (and I'm going to start getting controversial here) beware of continually making tweaks/improvements to the game. By all means, please get rid of bugs. But every marginal improvement made to the game will likely tick-off a casual gamer. Moreover, the time it takes to improve the manuals/tutorials/etc. needs to be incorporated into the release of the patches. Put more strongly, if you don't have the time to improve the manual, then you probably shouldn't release the patch.

I notice the care taken to exclude actual game-breaking bugs from this warning - they need patching regardless of any concerns about the documentation and regardless of any time available to update it. With that exception, I fully agree with the concern that over-frequent patches, that users have to hunt down on the forums instead of having them offered by the game interface itself, without timely documentation updates, asks more of players than many are willing to give.

An observation that is sure to tick-off people in these discussion boards: we don't matter. You've already got us. We love the game. To grow the market, sell more games, and get more people to PBEM, you've got to address the concerns of Captain Orso and others.

I'm not ticked off, because this also is true.

I appreciate that AGEOD is a small company, and you don't necessarily have the resources to do everything that you'd like to do to improve the product. Grey does a good job answering questions (in corporate jargon, "providing customer service") to those people who have found their way to these forums. But I suspect that there are lots of potential customers that are turned-off by the steep learning curve and who don't make it to these forums.

If AGEOD gets the player information system right, it'll be looking at a significant up-front cost, but low (or even negative) continuing costs compared to the current setup.

I suspect that, for every Captain Orso you hear from, there are hundreds of people who don't bother. I would pay very close attention to his concerns.

QFT.

[Gray_Lensman]

deleted

[Lew]

deleted flame post

[Generalisimo]

You don't run AGEOD. You don't have all the details of their accounts. You are not AGEOD's spokesman. You don't even WORK for AGEOD.

I really think Gray is trying to give you his "insight" from what he "knows" about AGEOD from being that close to "The Phils"... you really didn't needed to reply like that to him. Of course, that's just my opinion.

Every game company must pay a significant up-front cost to create a game engine. I here ask AGEOD to consider whether paying a vastly smaller cost to create a "player information engine" might or might not be a sound, practicable investment in the success of the company.

Do you know any tool that does what you suggest automatically?
Because if not, then Pocus will need to stop working on any new game to code that tool.
I personally thank you for investing all that time in suggesting what you thought was "good for AGEOD", but sadly, I do not see it as a feasible thing in the near future.
Things can be improved, surelly... and we all here at AGEOD (paid employees and volunteers) try to do our best to give the best playing experience to our CUSTOMERS.

[lodilefty]

You don't run AGEOD. You don't have all the details of their accounts. You are not AGEOD's spokesman. You don't even WORK for AGEOD.

<snip>.

...and how is it that you "know" so much about this?

[Gray_Lensman]

deleted

[Gray_Lensman]

deleted

[arsan]

You don't run AGEOD. You don't have all the details of their accounts. You are not AGEOD's spokesman. You don't even WORK for AGEOD.

Lew,
You should show much more respect for a volunteer like Gray who has spend ton of work hours improving and refining AACW for free, for the enjoyment of the community
He may not be an AGEOD PAID employee, but certainly he has WORKED a lot for AGEOD.

Regards

[PhilThib]

There are dozens of ways to improve customers service, and also to attract (and keep) new customers.

But like money is the "nerve" of war, it is true in business also...and we just don't have it. In a perfect world, we would have concentrated more on user-friendly stuff...but we just could not find the time ( = money too) for this and we have now to struggle to stay in the field.

We shall concentrate now on staying around in order to provide new interesting and enjoyable games, and, as we all hope, prepare for an AACW2 game.

If we are still in business in a few months ( ), we definitely plan to do such a game...and all suggestions will be welcome.

As a final note, I'll forward here an immense THANK YOU to Grey , because AACW would not be such a good game without the tons of unpaid hours of his talent and skill that he put in our product.

[dooya]

You don't run AGEOD. You don't have all the details of their accounts. You are not AGEOD's spokesman. You don't even WORK for AGEOD.

Every game company must pay a significant up-front cost to create a game engine. I here ask AGEOD to consider whether paying a vastly smaller cost to create a "player information engine" might or might not be a sound, practicable investment in the success of the company.

Talking about the economical success of the company, you might notice that you are talking about a game that was released in 2006, that is, 3 years ago. The majority of game developers don't even have dedicated forums anymore for games that have been released three years ago, not to speak about an active support. From this perspective, it seems futile to talk about economically smart decision to the AGEOD guys, they are guided by their hearts, not by their purses...

[Franciscus]

(...)
From this perspective, it seems futile to talk about economically smart decision to the AGEOD guys, they are guided by their hearts, not by their purses...

...and this, although maybe noble, is unfortunately not a easy way to success...
The elitistic and somewhat petty idea of a small and very talented team, working hard for a niche, hardcore group of grognards, disregarding "shine" and "polish" in their products, and struggling with lack of sales has a way of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Mind you, I am not talking about AACW. The level of care, refinement, from the map to GUI, attention and support this game had since the beginning, specially the astounding involvement and dedication of Pocus, is unparallelled. But the success of AACW deserved to be even greater, and the other recent releases had much less success, at least if the forum number of posts has any correlation with sales.
That's why I think the posts by MFogal and Lew are extremely important and the ideas expressed by them constitute valid, positive and constructive criticism that Ageod should take due note. And I am pretty sure they will, flak or no flak .

I wish the best for Ageod. Specially Philthib deserves all the success in the world. I must say that recently I am having a kind of gaming epiphany . I have returned to Great Invasions and more recently to Pax Romana. Despite several faults in finishing, in terms of game design IMHO they are works of a visionary and genius. I would even dare to say that, and again in terms of design, they far surpass AACW. They deserved a better luck at time of release, and Philthib future games need all the care possible to have all the success they will sure deserve. I am specially looking toward to VGN.

Regards

[Lew]

<previous content deleted>

[color="Red"]edit> from Gray_Lensman:

I'm no longer going to passively sit back and read this garbage, Lew. Your post has been expunged.

Anymore like it will be reported as harrassment.

All of the above posts from me were to try to give you insight information from my experience of working directly with Pocus and PhilThib for well over 2 years now. I may only be a volunteer, but we (Pocus and I) have spent many hours in back channel direct communications via ICQ and I have even had an internet phone conversation directly with PhilThib. I think I am knowledgeable enough to try to give you answers to support questions. If you don't like the answer, that's your problem, I'm only the messenger.

I strongly suggest you move on to another topic.

<end edit>

[/color]

[Generalisimo]

I might have been factually mistaken. But authoritarian snarkiness, from anyone, to anyone, is uncool. It has no place on these forums. No one, not the callowest noob on the scene, has to put up with it. The higher the rank, the greater the deserved respect, the greater the obligation to stay civil.

I WILL slap back if anyone fails to grant me a little public dignity.

I will just repeat myself...

I really think Gray is trying to give you his "insight" from what he "knows" about AGEOD from being that close to "The Phils"... you really didn't needed to reply like that to him. Of course, that's just my opinion.

Do you know any tool that does what you suggest automatically?
Because if not, then Pocus will need to stop working on any new game to code that tool.
I personally thank you for investing all that time in suggesting what you thought was "good for AGEOD", but sadly, I do not see it as a feasible thing in the near future.
Things can be improved, surelly... and we all here at AGEOD (paid employees and volunteers) try to do our best to give the best playing experience to our CUSTOMERS.

I really think we are all here to have fun, in this case, playing AACW... not discussing AGEOD business strategies... leave that to the ones that are in charge.
Let's focus on OUR game...

[gekkoguy82]

I just wanted to say that I'm a far more "casual" gamer than a "grognard" (I can go from playing Halo one minute to AACW the next then back to halo to shoot aliens and rid myself of the stress that Athena gave me :w00t and I love this game and company and community. It's awesome the devs even still care about this game, unlike those at many other companies This is probably the only game I've ever truly stuck with and enjoyed for more than two years solid. Anyway, I don't have much to add to this increasingly touchy thread other than I a basically average gamer who loves this game despite its complexities and I wish cooler heads would prevail sometimes...it is a GAME after all

[Gray_Lensman]

deleted