ORIGINAL: scout1
Tristanjohn,
Are you lawyer IRL ? You certainly come across as one who likes to debate for the sake of argument only. Out of curiosity, how many WitP games are you currently running ?
What game has lived up to your expectations ?
Sorry, I'm not a lawyer.
Two PBEMs going, though I'm quite a bit tardy with both.
Many board wargames have lived up to my expectations--too many over the years to list. One of my favorites was
Terrible Swift Sword.
I'd say of all of Gary's games I've played,
Second Front probably jazzed me the most. It certainly lived up to my expectations. (From that same period, David Landrey's
Battles of Napoleon worked for me, too.)
It could be the case that the developers of games I have interest in just can't cut it today, or maybe I should say can't cut it in today's marketplace. Matrix/2by3 might be a good case.
I really think the overarching problem with
WitP, now that Frag has admitted several things re the project, was its lack of developmental direction. Not enough money for it? The volunteers jacked off? Big surprises there.
We'll deal with those fast:
Not enough money? Then you either 1) get more money or 2) don't get into the project to begin with. If it's the case that the project's budgetary projections were seriously off the mark, then that only proves my point re bad developmental direction.
The playtesters were crapola? Or at least many of them were? Huge surprise there. I watched as these people, or many of them, were "chosen" out of the forum. And I shake my head. Now this far down the road we're told that, alas, the work didn't get done, that many of these people, as it turned out, only wanted a t-shirt.
I'd ask up front and directly: how many of these people, even had they worked their butts off, could have made, likely
would have made any appreciable difference in the end quality of this product? The people chosen were basically the same people posting in this forum today, with the same curve at work regarding their "leanings." I'm talking about the same people who insist today that there are no problems with
WitP, that it's "good enough" for them. Sure, Mike Scholl was asked, but that's one in a hundred or so, and I seriously doubt his ideas would have been incorporated anyway--he has good ideas, ideas which run diametrically opposed to Gary's so how far off on that score could I be?
Ron/Dirk got in somehow, but that was before they found out Ron/Dirk was willing to open his mouth in public, before they got a load of Ron/Dirk's ideas of what a proper wargame should be.
Which brings us approximately to . . . NDAs.
For anyone in doubt, NDA stands for Nondisclosure Agreement. These can be worded however one wishes, but basically it boils down to a member of the playtest team agreeing to keep his mouth shut about the product during the test period or even after the test period. Nothing new there. Testers were signing NDAs going back many years. Some game companies are more anal about these contracts than others.
What I wonder is how relevant, how useful NDAs are when it comes to product of this kind.
Let's take Ron/Dirk as our working example.
I don't know the details, but let's be fair to the company and accept at face value all that Ray and Russ (Frag and Mogami) have told us on this score (the thread's up there somewhere if you care to look for it), that Ron/Dirk reneged and went public with this, that it had nothing whatsoever to do with Ron/Dirk's other contributions to the project.
Does that make any sense? I mean, does it make any sense over and above the contractual wording of the NDA? To put it yet a third way, did this decision to let Ron/Dirk go
help the project?
We already know the project was starved of good playtesters. Ray admits as much now. I knew that right away, of course, and told the company such--three years ago now, two and half years ago now? Whatever. I forget. But the handwriting was clearly on the wall for anyone to see who wanted to see it, and reaction of the company when I told the company that is easy for me to remember. The reaction was to kill one thread outright and pretty much deny my opinion across the board on the other. Oh yeah, and ridicule me every chance they got in an attempt to make me go away. Yet here we are, down the road with a dysfunctional game system and no immediate or even far-off remedy at hand, and now it turns out that even the company, a company not given to revealing much of anything of its inner workings, is willing to admit, for whatever reason, that its recruitment process essentially paid no good dividends.
Does that make sense to you?
Did it make sense, I ask again, for the company to let Ron/Dirk go just because he divulged one thing or the other re the project in the public forum?
Isn't the public forum, a place where these volunteer testers were recruited to begin with, a logical place to go for more and better ideas, especially if the project is already admitted to be starved of good tester talent, good tester attitude? Where else would one go to find more talent? A corner down on Main Street?
I don't know what input Ron/Dirk afforded the company behind the scenes. It could be that "all" he offered was conceptual of nature, something which I doubt was valued much by the company, based on feedback re that question that I've read from Ray over the years. (Ray's real big on controlled tests, and while I admit these have value as wel, tests are not the end-all of development, or at least shouldn't be.) I'd guess the input of Ron/Dirk wouldn't have very much different than what we read of him here in this forum. Why would it be?
And so I'm confident Ron/Dirk went into the project and took a look at what was going down and, some time before noon, say, blew a gasket. At that juncture he most likely would have begun to write his all-too-familiar messages on the boards that the rest us of cannot see, the boards behind the scenes. Consequently, I'm equally sure, he began to irritate people at the company. He wasn't a "team player" as it turned out.
Why?
Because most people don't want to be told they don't know what they're doing. And if you tell most people that, their reaction will not be civil but heated. If you keep telling them that they'll strike out and hurt you if they can.
At some point in time Ron/Dirk "hurt" too many people, and I'm sure it was thus decided, perhaps tacitly decided, to get rid of him. After all, he didn't perform all these controlled tests that Ray's so fond of, but instead kept telling the powers that be that the project at its core made no good sense in too many areas to work correctly no matter how many controlled tests were conducted. Or something like that. (In fact, Ron/Dirk says he did run controlled tests when it came to ASW at least, and I've no reason t doubt his word.)
Anyway, Ron/Dirk's approach makes good sense to me. It would likely made no sense at all to Ray, as well as other members of the development team.
Finally, Ron/Dirk went public with his frustrations, seeking the "weight" of public opinion, as it were, to help him in his effort to get the company (mostly Gary, I'd guess) to see the light of day. And right away the company had the perfect excuse to jettison Ron/Dirk.
See ya later!
The company was technically justified in this action, but it was stupid nevertheless to let Ron/Dirk go. This is why.
Concepts are important. Few people have the mental capacity to think conceptually. They just don't. At least not in any meaningful way. Ron/Dirk can think conceptually, and that the company could not find good use for such a person speaks volumes for just how incompetent this development team and the resultant process was. You don't get rid of genius. You find use for genius. No matter how hard it is to get along with a very bright person, intelligent people find a way to do just that. This development team failed to find a way to get along with Ron/Dirk and make best use of his talent. And that's on the development team.
And so now, with Ron/Dirk gone, who was inside the workings of this project to continue to offer good input along critically conceptual lines? That is to say, who was there to point out that this model and that model made no sense, would never make sense because they
could never make sense, and so ought to be scrapped and rethought and remodeled before yet more development time and resource was wasted trying to make the proverbial silk purse out of the poor sow's ear?
I don't know, but I'd guess no one like Ron/Dirk was available. Ron/Dirk is one in a thousand, maybe one in ten thousand. That's how rare these people are. He's bright
and is not afraid to speak his mind no matter the cost. He obviously did not join the project for a t-shirt but rather to get the best game possible. For Ron/Dirk it was literally a labor of love. Plus he was capable.
It is hard, if not utterly impossible, to replace people of that ilk. They don't drop off trees.
Yet the company let Ron/Dirk go with a shrug. That should tell anyone with interest how badly, how incompetently the project was managed.
Someone needed to be there to clean up the mess, straighten the furniture and get the show properly back on the road. That person didn't exist, or didn't have the juice. Either way, Ron/Dirk was gone, though the clowns were still there in rounds numbers (says Ray now) doing nothing or next to nothing worthwhile. The thing is nobody was left to point out how mistaken Gary's various models are, not that Gary was listening to begin with, and so the project went nowhere very useful. And here we all are, at v1.5, working on v 1.6 or whatever they'll call that, and the project, what's left of it, continues to spin its wheels.
No big surprise to me. And now I'm repeating myself.
Well, with or without Ron/Dirk, a lot of time, we're told, was invested in the AI. To do what? It doesn't even move supplies intelligently--indeed, it seems to move supplies in the
identical unintelligent fashion that supplies were moved (allowed to bleed from one base to the next, a sort of osmosis) in PacWar. Did you play PacWar, and isn't this so? If not, take my word for it. And same same for
UV of course.
The auto-convoy system?
Exactly what could Gary have possibly imagined that work, that investment of time (and thus project money) in the AI to eventually accomplish? Well, it allows the computer player to play, sort of. But that's it.
Joe Wilkerson tells me that you need a good AI to properly test a product of this kind. I'm not sure I agree with that completely, but Joe has experience I don't have, he does this sort of work, or related work, for his living, so I'm willing to accept at face value for the moment what Joe says on that score. I'm a big believer in experience.
So, if we do need an AI to test product of this kind, surely that AI has to be completed, it must be working properly before it could be of any use for test purposes. Right? And from what I can see the AI is hardly "working" even today, so what sort of test results would you expect from it a year or two ago?
Bad test results, that's what kind.
My opinion is that proper playtesting of any wargame requires, over and above a functional AI, hands-on cooperation of skilled and experienced human players, efficiently directed by a person of great wargame experience himself, with good managerial skills on top of that. Plus, these people need to be of the let's-make-it-better-still variety. Yes-men don't count. Yes-men are useless. Anyone from the it's-good-enough-for-me school of thought is detrimental to any product development process--unless you just want to sell some price-pointed throwaway item to be stocked at K-Mart, and even in that case the co0mpetition is fierce, so you still need good people finding better ways to make cheaper product more efficiently than the next guy. And like that.
Most especially this would hold true with complicated software of this kind which you know up front is going to be examined by not K-Mart customers but by gamers who have much more on the ball. Or at least some of your customer base will fit that bill, and that portion of your customer base will be both articulate and vocal.
And this sort of testing for that kind of product takes time. And care.
I just don't see how this game could ever be made "right" until it's been played through, or nearly through, the length and breadth of the entire system any number of times by wargamers of that description. And had Gary asked me I'd have told him exactly that much. As Gary didn't bother to ask me, I volunteered this opinion any number of times on the
UV boards.
Predictably, I was studiously ignored.
It wouldn't surprise me that Ron/Dirk told everyone on the development team within shouting distance the same thing that had to be on his mind, and I'm sure Ron/Dirk was studiously ignored as well.
Anyway, to me all of this nonsense boils down to: let's get the game out in beta form at least and then test it publicly. We'll make our corrections on the fly post publication and hope for the best.
Right.
Except after year or so, when the game system is still hopelessly broken, the talk is there will not be many more patches to look forward to.
And sure enough, here we are and Matrix is telling us (Erik told us in this thread a few days ago) that it doesn't look too good for further patches, that Matrix has already done more than nost companies in that regard, etc. How that plays out eventually I don't know, but here's the rub.
We seem to need Gary to hang around to alter the model itself, or at least I'm under that impression, because no number of bug hunts will get this game to work right. Bugs are an issue, as always, but bugs are not the main culprit here.
The fundamental problem is that the game's underlying models weren't designed correctly. And Gary's already gone. So, I don't see the game getting better any time soon. And as time wears on and more and more players delve deeper and deeper and mine more of the game's secrets and the Allies begin to roll, I can easily imagine all sorts of new problems rearing their ugly heads. And by that time what? Will Matrix even be monitoring these
WitP boards, much less paying someone to pump out patches? I seriously doubt the latter, and the former really doesn't have much impact, does it?
The end result for me is I doubt I'll pop for Gary's third try at the eastern front, based on the quality of this product and the way it all shook out. The only way I would buy it is if one or two or three people from this forum (that's about how many exist whose opinions I value much--actually there are more, call them the Dirty Dozen) spoke volumes of praise for it. And even then I'd be hesitant. Not because I thought I'd waste the money. I can afford this stuff. But because I don't need the heartache. I don't need the disappointment. I don't need yet one more game from Gary that comes dysfunctional, promising much but delivering little.
A wargame, or if you prefer, an historical simulation, has one simple purpose: to allow people with an interest in the subject to experiment with what-ifs, or try and do better than historical leaders did in a similar situation. With history text and map in hand the gamer should be afforded this opportunity. That's what a wargame is.
Are there abstractions? Of course. But you don't dumb it down to the point where the OOB doesn't make sense anymore just to keep the fanboys happy, where the logistics are laughable, where one side or the other is able somehow to conquer areas of the map not even remotely possible in real life--and mind you, not with what-if OOBs but with the stock
historical OOBs.
With a wargame the purpose is to give people an historic challenge. If the public isn't up to that, if the public won't buy that kind of game, then fine, make a beer-and-pretzels game instead and be done with it. Whatever it takes to put food on your table, Gary. I have no problem with that. But don't advertise a game as being "historical" and then deliver a game that's "hysterical" instead. And then on top of that deny the game is screwed up to begin with. That's bullshit.
Enough.
WitP is not a good wargame.
WitP is something else. I'm not sure exactly what it is. A disappointment to me, for one thing, and I believe a harbinger of worse things to come. Time will tell.
And now I'm another hour or two further behind in my PBEM games.
Did I mention I'm not a lawyer?
