Some additional AE information...

[GaryChildress]

YIPEE!! Three cheers for the AE development team!

[rroberson]

ORIGINAL: Erik Rutins

First, please write down your Members Club login and password so that you don't lose it.

If you have lost it, contact us through our Help Desk at www.matrixgames.com/helpdesk and we should be able give you a new password.

Which one? As I believe I have had 3 separate ones of the years of purchasing games from Matrix. I am assuming I have to dig up the one I have for Vanilla WITP? (shudders)

[viberpol]

ORIGINAL: rroberson

ORIGINAL: Erik Rutins

First, please write down your Members Club login and password so that you don't lose it.

If you have lost it, contact us through our Help Desk at www.matrixgames.com/helpdesk and we should be able give you a new password.

Which one? As I believe I have had 3 separate ones of the years of purchasing games from Matrix. I am assuming I have to dig up the one I have for Vanilla WITP? (shudders)

BTW: Is there a way to unify/combine Members Area login with Matrix Forum login?
I just realized I have two different users in these areas... [&:]

[Erik Rutins]

ORIGINAL: rroberson
Which one? As I believe I have had 3 separate ones of the years of purchasing games from Matrix. I am assuming I have to dig up the one I have for Vanilla WITP? (shudders)

Why in the world would you have created three separate accounts?

[Erik Rutins]

ORIGINAL: viberpol
BTW: Is there a way to unify/combine Members Area login with Matrix Forum login?
I just realized I have two different users in these areas... [&:]

No, those are completely different systems. I do agree it would be nice to just have one login for everything.

[Zebedee]

Given the amount of time I've spent messing about with WitP (solo player - ill-health prevents PBEM), and given what has so far been released about the amount of work the AE team has put into the project, I'm happy to pay for a full price game. For a solo player, the AI scripting alone, never mind the potential for further work by modders, makes it very worthwhile.

Concerned that the price for both games will put off any new gamers who may have an interest perked by AE being released, but that's Matrix' decision and I'm figuring that they know more about such stuff than me.

Really looking forward to getting the game now. Many thanks AE team.

Just a question, if I may - will there be patches if/when necessary should anything which has eluded the testers comes up? All this talk of 'final' etc makes me nervous, although I guess I shouldn't be

[Erik Rutins]

AE will absolutely be supported after release. The team is already debating what will go in the first update.

[Zebedee]

ORIGINAL: Erik Rutins

AE will absolutely be supported after release. The team is already debating what will go in the first update.

Thanks Erik. Bit of a daft question really to ask about a Matrix supported game, but was niggling at me

[sprior]

ORIGINAL: ggm

Erik Rutins,

with witp-ae being matrix games "flagship" game, are there going to be any special preparations for the increased download load on the system. will you be buying additional bandwidth. Will there be a choke on the downloads or will the system be able to handle it? what about pre-orders.

looking forward to the release of witp-ae.

ggm

The downloads are from Digital Rivers servers, not Matrix. Having bought games within hours of their release and donloaded them they seem to have the bandwidth available to deal with such "surges". It would be interesting to see how big a deal a niche game like AE is to their bandwidth usage.

[eastwindrain]

The price does'nt worry me as it's great value considering the years of campaigning which loom on the horizon.

But to save time with Digital River am I correct in remembering they require your card number without any spaces, ( thus XXXXXXXXXXXX and not XXXX XXXX XXXX ).

Pass on my regards to everyone involved in enhancing this wonderful game, thanks again.

[rroberson]

ORIGINAL: Erik Rutins

ORIGINAL: rroberson
Which one? As I believe I have had 3 separate ones of the years of purchasing games from Matrix. I am assuming I have to dig up the one I have for Vanilla WITP? (shudders)

Why in the world would you have created three separate accounts?

Over the years, I have had to switched email accounts as the spam would become to much in one or the other.

[Erik Rutins]

Re-posting this here from another thread:

Ok, I had a night to sleep on some of the feedback here. Let me try to approach this again, because we do most definitely care what you all think.

War in the Pacific is, in our opinion, a unique game. We looked at that game and made some unique decisions on how to proceed with developing, marketing and pricing AE. Unfortunately, these decisions don't fit neatly into one of the existing marketing "boxes" that you've seen before. I think the key misunderstanding in all this though is that from our point of view, everything we did was with existing owners of WITP in mind. New customers who did not own WITP were a secondary concern. This may seem strange, but again WITP is unique and for a number of reasons we feel this is the right way to go. The decisions we made were intended to make things as convenient and affordable as we could for existing owners of WITP.

First, having AE share files or not share files with WITP is a minor technical issue. We could easily have it share files or not. We decided early on to have it not share files so that customers could continue playing their modded or unmodded WITP games without any disruption. We didn't see how it would be a good thing to have AE share files and create possible issues for WITP game continuation. Having AE share files and having it not disrupt WITP in any way would be a bigger technical issue.

Every "expansion" you've ever bought could have been a stand-alone game, it's just a technical issue to do it one way or the other and not a particularly difficult one. For those of you who see it as a big difference ethically, I want you to understand that the reason we made the decision way back when to do it this way was specifically because we did not want to inconvenience existing WITP players.

Second, the pricing. We could have priced AE as a stand-alone game and not had it require WITP. This would have increased its price significantly and also required us to offer a discount to owners of WITP. The only way to offer a discount is to check serial numbers, create a discount coupon unique to each serial number (only one per serial number) and then have customers use that in the store. We've done this before, it's not a technical challenge.

However, in our experience it is definitely a hassle for some customers. This type of route creates many possible points of failure, from customers who can't find their old serial number, to customers who lose their coupon code (or don't receive it) to customers who use it and place the order incorrectly and then can't use it again, etc. We decided that rather than make existing WITP owners jump through these hoops, if we had AE require WITP then the purchase price could already be set at the discount level and all that existing WITP owners would have to do is buy the game as they would buy any other.

Third, new customers. I've been told that we are strong-arming them, thinking for them, etc. I suppose I can see how this can come across. The truth though is that AE was always for existing owners of WITP first. That's a pretty big crowd and we felt that it's also the group that would likely be responsible for 90% of the sales of AE. We did not see AE as having a lot of appeal to customers that had already decided, over the course of the five years it's been on the market, that WITP was not for them. Still, based on recent feedback we made the decision to discount WITP for a limited time to give folks who were having second thoughts about missing out on WITP now that AE was coming out a chance to test the waters.

I am also telling you our real thoughts and discussion when I say that we really feel that AE is not a game for someone to really jump into without any previous experience with WITP. We think that for WITP players, AE is a wonderful thing, but for people who have never played WITP, AE is not just "WITP 2.0". It has a much larger map, many more units and many more rules that are based on increasing realism but that a player who is not already steeped in the real history of the War in the Pacific may not understand. It also has fewer scenarios than WITP and fewer small scenarios. It has just enough of those to help WITP vets get their feet wet before jumping into the new grand campaign, basically.

Having AE released on its own and having people jump right into it without prior WITP experience would, in our opinion, have created a potential for a lot of misunderstanding and confusion and unhappy new customers. I think existing WITP players will be delighted with AE. Someone who has not played WITP might be lost at sea though.

Finally, it is to our benefit to have both WITP and AE on the market. First, while we love AE and believe it will do well, there is always risk. Taking WITP off the market, with its smaller scale and greater initial accessibility as well as increased scenario selection didn't make a lot of sense to us. Pricing AE at $100 or more stand-alone in this economy also seemed likely to provoke a knee jerk reaction (at this point, I think frankly we were going to take heat whatever we did). More importantly, WITP and AE both fund ongoing development - WITP primarily is a help to funding 2by3 and AE primarily will help fund ongoing development of the WITP series.

This was our thought process as far as why we made the decisions we made. We're well aware of what the economy is doing now. What I think some folks here don't realize is that we really do see existing WITP players as our market and the way we set things up was deliberately intended to make new players who don't have WITP think twice about whether they want to step all the way up to AE in one jump. I think this is surprising to a lot of folks, but we felt that our primary concern should be addressing the needs of the people we think will make up 90% of AE's sales and making sure that the pricing and procedures were set to make it as enjoyable as possible for them.

Regards,

- Erik

[Przemcio231]

Erik what screen resolution's will AE support???

[Erik Rutins]

ORIGINAL: Przemcio231
Erik what screen resolution's will AE support???

Same as WITP - 1024x768 Full Screen and Windowed. While we could have changed that in theory, it would have taken enough time that things we felt were much more important would have had to be left out. The graphics engine, which development was original started on before this decade, wasn't really designed to scale and support variable resolutions. Adding more support would have been more like adding another fixed resolution or two, which was not an ideal solution. Doing more on this front will have to be left for future development.

[Przemcio231]

Cool. Thanks for the quick answer[;)]

[castor troy]

ORIGINAL: Erik Rutins

ORIGINAL: Ambassador
Great !  59/69 $ is all fine, but what about Europe ?  What will be the cost in € ?  What would the shipment costs be, if any ?  Will we be able to purchase the physical box, and get to download the game while we wait for the arrival of the pack ?

As with all our releases, pricing for the rest of the world will be set on the day of release, based on the exchange rates at that time. We have a warehouse in the UK, so shipping costs to Europe are quite reasonable as all orders for Europe are fulfilled from that warehouse rather than our US warehouse.

All our releases have a "Physical + Digital" option which allows you to download and play now while you wait for the boxed copy to arrive and AE will be no different. I think this is the best option personally.

Regards,

- Erik

this hopefully doesn´t mean that when I digitally download it (from Europe) that I have to pay a different (higher?) prize in US$ for it? Digital download should be digital download, no matter if you´re sitting in Florida or in the middle of the Alps.

Or is Matrix going to make profit out of the exchange rates? [:-]

[DuckofTindalos]

I was wondering when you'd pipe up with your usual toxicity...[8|] Buy the game or not, but if you do, don't complain about the buying process. The End.

[castor troy]

ORIGINAL: Terminus

I was wondering when you'd pipe up with your usual toxicity...[8|] Buy the game or not, but if you do, don't complain about the buying process. The End.

[Erik Rutins]

ORIGINAL: castor troy
this hopefully doesn´t mean that when I digitally download it (from Europe) that I have to pay a different (higher?) prize in US$ for it? Digital download should be digital download, no matter if you´re sitting in Florida or in the middle of the Alps.
Or is Matrix going to make profit out of the exchange rates? [:-]

I don't understand your concern, to be honest. If we set the price based on the exchange rates when AE is released, you would pay the same wherever you purchase it from. One of our policies as a company has always been to have the price around the world equal to the US Dollar price, based on the exchange rates at release and generally updated quarterly. If there are big moves in the exchange rate between updates, sometimes that helps us or hurts us.

[TheOx]

Less arguing, more releasing.