First i want to say is that i really do want this game to succeed.

But for it to even have a remote chance of suceeding i hope you guys have some reworks planned. I dont even know where to start when it comes to the problems that the game has in the PVP area. BFGA is a good Single player game but a poor Multiplayer game and this is coming from someone that played it like a chaos fanatic and was playing it at "higher level". Im afraid throwing another coat of paint on the game simply wont cut it cause i heard you guys are going to be building upon the first game.

I hope the gamplay footage will show some promising changes and i wish the team best of luck.

Not to rain on the multiplayer guys' parades, but the multiplayer crowd accounts for very little of the pie in strategy games. Ashes of the Singularity found that a little less than 2% even bothered touching the multiplayer button, let alone played. This correlates fairly close to what the first game was like back when I checked, which had thousands of active players on Steam spy, but the multiplayer guys were still struggling to find people.

I'm sure they'll try a little harder on balance, given what happened with the T'au, but making the perfect multiplayer experience is likely not their priority.

@romeo While its true multiplayer tends to see less publicity in some RTT or RTS games it is no less important to a games health. Most players that finish the story are gonna want to have a look at the multiplayer and if it isnt good the players are going to just move on or continue playing Campaign or compstomps until they get bored. Not gonna pull up steam charts but i can garuntee you had they done a better job with the overall game and made the right decisions there would be alot more people playing the game still.

We will see what tindalos has planned. Will they double down and focus on single player/ coop at expense of multiplayer which i can see working very well. Or try to please both pve and PVPers?

@canned_f3tus Not sure which way they'll go, to be honest. But I hope they're wise enough to not over-correct and focus too much on multiplayer. Chances are it'll doom them.

@romeo said in Not jumping on the hype train. (Concerned):

Not to rain on the multiplayer guys' parades, but the multiplayer crowd accounts for very little of the pie in strategy games. Ashes of the Singularity found that a little less than 2% even bothered touching the multiplayer button, let alone played. This correlates fairly close to what the first game was like back when I checked, which had thousands of active players on Steam spy, but the multiplayer guys were still struggling to find people.

I'm sure they'll try a little harder on balance, given what happened with the T'au, but making the perfect multiplayer experience is likely not their priority.

You can't quote a single games' MP vs SP figures, especially when the games allows mods in MP games.

@romeo Yeah. I think what would help MP better is a good QA team or testers that are good. Not this whole debacle we had with the first game. Just dedicating their resources correctly can make a world difference. But as bosie said Multiplayer is still a feature that has to be supported correctly if it gets featured.

@bosie said in Not jumping on the hype train. (Concerned):

You can't quote a single games' MP vs SP figures, especially when the games allows mods in MP games.

...Ashes of the Singularity didn't get mod support until a couple months back, and that data was brought from last year. And it's very difficult to get accurate data from most companies, because most don't track or don't share it. I'd seen community polls from Starcraft forums that showed a singleplayer bias, but didn't consider them "concrete" enough, nor did I think it'd be fair to weigh Steamspy average user stats of multiplayer-only games against singleplayer-only ones. All I can do is look at the data I've got from a fairly similar strategy game, and compare it to the multiplayer community of this game weighed against its average user amounts.

Again, not saying I think we should axe multiplayer, or pay them absolutely no mind. But people are acting as though the game will live or die based upon the multiplayer experience, whereas the current market very clearly doesn't rely on the multiplayer crowd, given that all five of the top-selling strategies in 2017 were predominantly singleplayer games (XCOM 2, Total Warhammer 2, Stellaris, Civilization 6 and Galactic Civilization 3). So while I'm hopeful that things will be balanced out for the multiplayer crowd, it's nowhere near correct to be acting like it's top priority.

@canned_f3tus said in Not jumping on the hype train. (Concerned):

@romeo Yeah. I think what would help MP better is a good QA team or testers that are good. Not this whole debacle we had with the first game. Just dedicating their resources correctly can make a world difference. But as bosie said Multiplayer is still a feature that has to be supported correctly if it gets featured.

Agreed, I think even a "community Beta" would've absolutely highlighted the gross imbalances of the Tau release, and they would've got the QA work for free! Same thing goes with the Eldar nerf. I'm sure if the community had been given the chance to try that before release, they could've alerted Tindalos that they were absolutely killing the Eldar off.

@romeo

@romeo said in Not jumping on the hype train. (Concerned):

@canned_f3tus said in Not jumping on the hype train. (Concerned):

@romeo Yeah. I think what would help MP better is a good QA team or testers that are good. Not this whole debacle we had with the first game. Just dedicating their resources correctly can make a world difference. But as bosie said Multiplayer is still a feature that has to be supported correctly if it gets featured.

Agreed, I think even a "community Beta" would've absolutely highlighted the gross imbalances of the Tau release, and they would've got the QA work for free! Same thing goes with the Eldar nerf. I'm sure if the community had been given the chance to try that before release, they could've alerted Tindalos that they were absolutely killing the Eldar off.

We had the Testing Team for such things, but the Tau were sprung on us at such short notice and pushed through before we really had a chance to check things properly. Hopefully this time around we are given the time to thoroughly test things and have them working "Just As Planned" prior to release, but as it is we have to wait and see.

@romeo Yeah but these games are so successful because they have an established fanbase. Also the content they provide is top notch. Totalwar has a crap ton of replay value BFGA doesnt. You play the campaign maybe once twice and than you move on to comp stomping ships in elite (which i can imagine gets repetitive and boring) or mess around in multiplayer game dealing with rediculous imbalances, cheezes, stale metas that are really strict for some races for X Y and Z reasons and a rapidly declining playerbase.

With tindaloses limited resources they kinda need to figure out what the focus of the game is. Because they wont be able to please everyone. They can go all out with the original formula and make a bangin single player/ coop experience with tons of campaign DLC in the works cause it would work fairly well. They wont have to worry about imbalances and flawed game mechanics because the singleplayer guys most likely wont care because it wont affect their gaming experience as much. But if they want to make a good multiplayer as well on top of that it is going to require some reworks and more time and i dont know if tindalos can do both.

@bosie said in Not jumping on the hype train. (Concerned):

You can't quote a single games' MP vs SP figures, especially when the games allows mods in MP games.

Some games have achievements for playing your first multiplayer match. When a game is distributed exclusively via Steam, that allows for a reasonably accurate determination of the number of game owners who do or do not participate in multiplayer. BFG:A, however, does not have such an achievement so the figures he's quoting are nothing but supposition.

@romeo said in Not jumping on the hype train. (Concerned):

All I can do is look at the data I've got from a fairly similar strategy game, and compare it to the multiplayer community of this game weighed against its average user amounts.

Not a reliable method.. nor are the numbers from Steamspy reliable. On another game I compared the number of people who had played multiplayer that day (from actual play records obtained from the game's own servers) with the steamspy activity numbers, and it showed that more people had played in multiplayer that day than steamspy showed having played the game at all on that day, which is clearly impossible. It was the last time I wasted any time on Steamspy for anything but general trend data.

@archmagos-alexi said in Not jumping on the hype train. (Concerned):

We had the Testing Team for such things, but the Tau were sprung on us at such short notice and pushed through before we really had a chance to check things properly. Hopefully this time around we are given the time to thoroughly test things and have them working "Just As Planned" prior to release, but as it is we have to wait and see.

Ah, that explains it. Hopefully with every race already available at launch, it'll be less of a concern this time around anyways.

@canned_f3tus said in Not jumping on the hype train. (Concerned):

@romeo Yeah but these games are so successful because they have an established fanbase. Also the content they provide is top notch. Totalwar has a crap ton of replay value BFGA doesnt. You play the campaign maybe once twice and than you move on to comp stomping ships in elite (which i can imagine gets repetitive and boring) or mess around in multiplayer game dealing with rediculous imbalances, cheezes, stale metas that are really strict for some races for X Y and Z reasons and a rapidly declining playerbase.

With tindaloses limited resources they kinda need to figure out what the focus of the game is. Because they wont be able to please everyone. They can go all out with the original formula and make a bangin single player/ coop experience with tons of campaign DLC in the works cause it would work fairly well. They wont have to worry about imbalances and flawed game mechanics because the singleplayer guys most likely wont care because it wont affect their gaming experience as much. But if they want to make a good multiplayer as well on top of that it is going to require some reworks and more time and i dont know if tindalos can do both.

Do bear in mind, Stellaris was a brand new IP, and Galactic Civilization hadn't had a release in so long that it no longer had the name behind it. Plus Ashes of the Singularity was also a mammoth success, and that had no name behind it. Even then, even if we want to say all five were only successful because of their names, it's worth remembering: They still built those names through singleplayer-dominant releases. The point still stands.

Agreed, and that's my big concern too. If they pull it off - awesome, I'll be thrilled for both Tindalos and the multiplayer crowd. But Games Workshop themselves haven't pulled it off after decades of effort, and they're absolutely colossal compared to Tindalos. I think the "safer play" is to focus on the singleplayer stuff first, lock that down, and then work on the multiplayer ongoing after release. Because it's never going to be perfectly balanced - it can't be - but if they're working with the community they can at least try to get close (See: Starcraft).

@voodoomike said in Not jumping on the hype train. (Concerned):

@bosie said in Not jumping on the hype train. (Concerned):

You can't quote a single games' MP vs SP figures, especially when the games allows mods in MP games.

Some games have achievements for playing your first multiplayer match. When a game is distributed exclusively via Steam, that allows for a reasonably accurate determination of the number of game owners who do or do not participate in multiplayer. BFG:A, however, does not have such an achievement so the figures he's quoting are nothing but supposition.

@romeo said in Not jumping on the hype train. (Concerned):

All I can do is look at the data I've got from a fairly similar strategy game, and compare it to the multiplayer community of this game weighed against its average user amounts.

Not a reliable method.. nor are the numbers from Steamspy reliable. On another game I compared the number of people who had played multiplayer that day (from actual play records obtained from the game's own servers) with the steamspy activity numbers, and it showed that more people had played in multiplayer that day than steamspy showed having played the game at all on that day, which is clearly impossible. It was the last time I wasted any time on Steamspy for anything but general trend data.

The figures I'm quoting, for about the 223934745985th time, are from the developers of Ashes of the Singularity. Not supposition in the slightest there. Here's their post about it, if you're curious (https://forums.ashesofthesingularity.com/478991/page/1/#replies). It's the fourth bullet point.

As for Steamspy not being reliable, you're going to have to provide proof of that, because their data comes from the Steam SDK itself. For it to be unreliable, Steam itself would have to be unreliable. Literally every time I've had to compare it to what developers have posted, it has always been accurate.

Frankly though, I'm not even sure what possible argument there is to be made. The multiplayer was always small in the game. There were numerous threads about how dead things were in the old forums. Look up BFG:A on 1D4Chan and it's described as a great game with a non-existent multiplayer crowd. Hell, Google "Battlefleet Gothic Amarda Multi" and the first suggestion will be "Battlefleet Gothic Amarda Multiplayer Dead". People can dance around and try to skirt the issue all they like, but the simple fact of the matter is multiplayer typically a small part of any RTS, and BFG:A was very clearly not an exception to that.

I never stated your source was bad, or wrong. I stated that you can't use one game where 5% of the population played MP as a benchmark. For all we know that game could be the anomaly. Perhaps most other games only see 0.0001% of their populations player MP, or only 5% play single player. One source is not enough.

We've no idea of how big, or small, the MP side of BFG:A was when the game was at it's peak. So we also can't make the claim that MP was always small in the game. It may have been, then again, it may not have been. The devs have that data, and will have used it when making BFG:A2.

To add, when I was streaming during the peak I never waited very long for a game either ranked or normal.

I think what was clear about BFG A was that they intended multiplayer to be more than it was as evidenced by the lack of single player based content that came out afterwards.... they could have easily opened up the main campaign to the other races and took some creative license to do it. My bet would be they could have sold it easily for 10 a piece and made a killing... instead they just introduced races. It appears that when fixing multiplayer was out of reach for them weather it was code or just to much effort in general. I choose to believe they just messed up on the foundation coding and that will be fixed this time around... that said i would like the game probably 10x more if they just focused on single player and cranked out them campaigns as the last one was by far the best dawn of war campaign if played on a pc format.