3 Hour Side Switch Timer

[Arlo]

Chess is a niche.  You don't see people campaigning to add/remove pieces or change the board dimensions and get rid of the old game.

ACES High. Four sides - four suits.



 

[Lazerr]

ACES High. Four sides - four suits.

(Image removed from quote.)

 

Good lord we dont need to spread people out anymore.  Thats big problem already.  I wont start "that" discussion though.

[Arlo]

Good lord we dont need to spread people out anymore.  Thats big problem already.  I wont start "that" discussion though.

But it fits right in with a smaller 'poker table' map! 

[CptTrips]

Chess is a niche.  You don't see people campaigning to add/remove pieces or change the board dimensions and get rid of the old game.

I don't accept your premise.  Reductio ad absurdum, are you going to say any change is the same as shutting the game down?
If you switch from 6 hour switch timer to 3hr, is that changing the game so you might as well shut it down?
If you rotate maps, is that changing the game so you might as well shut it down?
When we went from 512x512 maps to 256x256 maps should we have just shut down the game instead?
Can absolutely improvements or modifications ever be made to the game again?
Think of all the changes to the games we've seen in AH since 1999.  Could you say at each change, it's better to shut the game down than change anything?
I seemed to remember this community being a lot more open to change in the first decade.

Being a niche doesn't mean you can't every change anything.  You should always be constantly changing and exploring and trying to uncover the perfect expression of that niche.
Life is constant change.  Only dead things don't change.

You've got it right, if he's going to do anything he should just freeze AH3 and create a new game with the gameplay pretty much being redone from the ground up.

I think he should do that:
1. For fun.  A new adventure.
2. Financial diversification.  Your entire livelihood, retirement, and children's chances at a college education all balanced on the tip of a single point of failure dependent on a population of old geezers with one foot in the bone-yard, is less than ideal.   You can diversify with new games, also by bringing in new blood to your current game.  Preferably with teeth.  Or you can do both an sleep even better! 

That doesn't mean you can't every change anything in AH at all.  It's just a matter of how you balance resources.  And often, resources can server multiple purposes.

[CptTrips]

ACES High. Four sides - four suits.

That would be illogical.

A game title based on a playing card motif with 3 chess pieces and "countries" is much more logical. 

There is only one better choice...

Stooges High

[Wiley]

I don't accept your premise.  Reductio ad absurdum, are you going to say any change is the same as shutting the game down?

What's absurd about that?  If you want to play chess, you play chess.  If you want to play checkers, you play checkers.  If I want to play an FPS, I play an FPS.  People aren't hounding Gearbox to add aircraft to the Borderlands series.

If you switch from 6 hour switch timer to 3hr, is that changing the game so you might as well shut it down?
If you rotate maps, is that changing the game so you might as well shut it down?
When we went from 512x512 maps to 256x256 maps should we have just shut down the game instead?
Can absolutely improvements or modifications ever be made to the game again?

Well, what changes can be made that keep the core gameplay the same while attracting the instant action crowd?  How do you keep the large map, best with large numbers, strategic gameplay while catering to the instant action crowd?  To me, that's pretty much what it boils down to.  People aren't after ongoing battle, they're after short bitesized gameplay.  IMO the two are pretty much mutually exclusive.

Think of all the changes to the games we've seen in AH since 1999.  Could you say at each change, it's better to shut the game down than change anything?
I seemed to remember this community being a lot more open to change in the first decade.

What in your entire experience with HTC leads you to the conclusion that the community's opinion (particularly the BBS community) materially affects HT's decisions?

Being a niche doesn't mean you can't every change anything.  You should always be constantly changing and exploring and trying to uncover the perfect expression of that niche.
Life is constant change.  Only dead things don't change.

Yeah yeah, evolve or die.  Except stuff doesn't "evolve" during its lifetime.  Stuff that can't cut it in whatever conditions it finds itself in dies out, stuff that can handle the current conditions survives.

Wiley.

[Arlo]

How do you keep the large map, best with large numbers, strategic gameplay while catering to the instant action crowd? 

Like all maps, large or small, there's a front. The map could be as big as all of Europe but the fight is where 2 sides meet. As long as the map is designed to facilitate sides facing off, it works.

[bustr]

We do MNM. That is completely cracked if you like quick n dirty.

Main Arena will never be the insta pop that some of the young folks look for in today's games. Here part of the fun is getting there. That is if you have any friends.

Friends?????, I have a whole squad who on squad night have to pick the low side country because we will constitute half that country. The MA has become exactly what CptTrps has described it.

I think to a large part the Melee has become an old-dude-chat-room.  Worse, its a fairly insular old-dude-chat-room composed of mostly the same guys who have known each other for 25 years.

I think a lot of the guys still here have adapted to the conditions like boiling frogs.  They launch and put on auto-pilot and yuck it up with their buddies on private squad channel or have a purse fight on chan200.  Occasionally they run across a fight and have a little bit of dogfighting, or chasing, die, take off, back on auto-pilot and continue their conversation.  That's great fun I bet for some.  They have adapted to the realities of the Melee in 2020.  If it works for them, awesome.  I can tell you it is a way different experience than it was in 2002-2004.

 

POTW has been with AH since 2002 and we still do squad night and FSO. The MA old man chat room issue has caused half of the POTW "old men" to go play Planetside2. PS2 has thousands of guys playing in a three country sandbox arena just like AH. The action is exactly like the MA back in 2005 with 600 player nights. Except 3000 is an average Saturday night. Action is all the time land and air, that is why we went there. Our CO Waystin lead us there because the MA has become a boring old man chat room.

I tried for three years to improve game play with 4 terrains. Hitech allowed me room to experiment and after 4 terrains it was evident people wanted much quicker action. I suppose if Hitech looked the other way I could build a 5th terrain with all airfields 13 miles apart and GV spawns 1 mile apart with very sparse amounts of trees and it would generate lots of quick activity. Riftval and fjordma do exactly that because of the shorter base distances.

Aces High is the MA, it's not attracting anyone because it takes too much time to do anything on most terrains. Then once a new person gets to a fight, the 20 year veterans of the old guy friends club makes sure the game is no fun for a newbie in a few seconds. Shorter distances or "sooner"(quicker action) makes it possible to shrug that off and keep trying. If the newbie has to once again fly half the night to get back to a fight, the game will not attract people to stay with it.

Here is what POTW is doing in PS2. This film has our squad in some of the action, none of it is staged, just normal game activity. Remember, we still pay for accounts and show up in force for squad night and FSO. In FSO POTW is one of the largest squads in that event. On MA squad night we have to change country to try and balance ENY. And shuffler how many terrains did you build trying to help this game?


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WS4rg7VfKtI

[Arlo]

Have fun in the spacey FPS thingie.

[Wiley]

Like all maps, large or small, there's a front. The map could be as big as all of Europe but the fight is where 2 sides meet. As long as the map is designed to facilitate sides facing off, it works.

But with the amount of space in between bases, there's a lot more travel before you get to the fight than most other games.  A couple minutes before you're into the fight is the norm in popular games.

Wiley.

[Arlo]

But with the amount of space in between bases, there's a lot more travel before you get to the fight than most other games.  A couple minutes before you're into the fight is the norm in popular games.

Wiley.

More map, more bases, spaced apart evenly. If players have trouble finding a fast fight on that then they aren't really trying to do that.

[CptTrips]

To me, the primary, critical, immediate need in AH is to re-establish the gameplay cadence and pacing it had in the first 8 years of business.
That is not changing chess into checkers.  That is getting AH back to the gameplay experience that made it fun.
How you can do that is a long discussion with unknowns that will take both experimentation, but also an willing culture of openness to experimentation and change.
AH used to have huge amount of change regularly.  That was part of the appeal.  Watching it evolve and improved wondering what was coming next.  That was a big part of the allure.
 That didn't change the game to something else.  It changed the game to better versions of itself. 
 
In the meantime...
 
3 hour side switch timer!  Scratch that.....
Side switch limit based on team count not clock hands!

[Wiley]

To me, the primary, critical, immediate need in AH is to re-establish the gameplay cadence and pacing it had in the first 8 years of business.

I've only been here since 10.  What was that cadence, and what about the actual gameplay was different versus simply having more people because there were no good alternatives that had what more people wanted?

Wiley.

[perdue3]

I've only been here since 10.  What was that cadence, and what about the actual gameplay was different versus simply having more people because there were no good alternatives that had what more people wanted?

Wiley.

We could see GV's from the air for one thing, which was a deterrant to run supplies to town. Which meant shooting down airplanes was required. Which in turn meant that more people were shooting at airplanes. Which made the game fun for people who like to shoot at airplanes in a combat flight simulator.

Also, if the fight was bad or your side was hording, you could switch countries and be stuck there for a maximum of 60 minutes.

[Arlo]

Spanish Civil War. And Korea.