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m0317624

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Everything posted by m0317624

  1. And the suicidal tendencies don't seem to be restricted to IFVs either. I've just noticed Humvees eagerly opening up with their machineguns against both tanks and IFVs at long range, once again resulting in nothing more than their immediate deaths.
  2. That's exactly the problem: 25 mm banging off the turret of a T-90 gets its attention, and the very last thing an IFV should want is to get the attention of a MBT. The small chance of breaking some outside equipment on the turret is not worth the massive risk of getting shot at by a 125 mm cannon. In the WW2 titles this was somewhat useful, as the suppressed tank would have trouble spotting, but with modern optics and laser warning receivers it's quite simply suicide that achieves nothing. From my limited experience about 1/5 of launched TOWs will actually kill a T-90AM, the rest gets spoofed, destroyed or fails to penetrate. I tried following the briefing, which stated: "best to keep the Russians at long range". A platoon of Bradleys with Javelin teams in overwatch on each flank, ready to take on the Russians before they entered the valley. Spotting was indeed intermittent, which caused some missiles to miss. But this was caused more by the T-90s' smoke launchers thanks to the Bradleys helpfully lasing them (and the Bradleys' smoke launchers from the return fire caused by said lasing) than due to the range. I ran this part of the scenario 5 times, and each time the Bradleys were far more eager to fire their cannon than their TOWs. Maybe it was the change in Bradley TacAI from patch 1.1 that caused this, if you found it functioning well during testing?
  3. I've been playing the Valley of Death scenario as the US, and I've come across a major frustration. Without spoiling too much, in this scenario a bunch of Bradleys in hull-down defensive positions under tree cover get rushed at high speed over a few km of open terrain by Russian T-90AMs. Moving at high speed these Russian T-90s lack the optics to spot my well-hidden Bradleys at such long ranges. One would think that a bunch of tanks charging headlong into such a decent defensive position would take some serious losses, but apparently most of my Bradley crews are actually Russian undercover agents hell-bent on committing suicide for the Motherland. You see, instead of using their rather stealthy (SACLOS means no warning to the target) and effective TOW missile launchers upon spotting a Russian tank at a range of 2 km, most of my Bradley crews insist on firing their 25 mm cannons. Not only do those cannon rounds barely scratch the paintwork on a modern MBT, but aiming a cannon at such long ranges is hard. So my Bradleys happily use their laser rangefinders, at which moment the Russian laser warning receiver will happily point that nice 125 mm cannon straight at my Bradley. And that 125 mm round will do more than scratch the paintwork on a Bradley. Oh, and the Russian tank will also happily fire its smoke launchers now, messing up the aim of the occasional Bradley which did manage to launch a TOW. This really makes Bradleys near useless in an anti-tank ambush role. In the Valley of Death scenario I've had 8 Bradleys simultaneously engage a column of 10 Russian tanks from excellent ambush positions only for them to mess it up every single time. The end result is always the same: 2-3 dead Bradleys, the rest of the Bradleys retreating under smoke cover because they got lased by the Russian tanks, 2-4 launched TOW missiles, at most one dead Russian tank. Can we please get some adjustments to IFV targeting logic so they don't consider giving away their position just to scratch the paintwork of a MBT a good idea? Especially not when they have far more suitable weapon systems available to them.
  4. Same problem here. Several hours of downloading at ridiculously low speeds and then the download just aborts itself in the last 5 minutes. And now a new download won't even start anymore. At least throw up a torrent or make a dedicated downloader with auto-resume next time, this is a really amateuristic way to make your customers download files of this size.
  5. No offence taken if that was your intent, and no offence meant either. But there have been certain commenters in this thread who tried using both the "age" and the "behaviour" interpretation of immature to simply dismiss posts made by the Steam supporters here. And I don't see Steam as less freedom, at least not in the case of Battlefront. If these games were on Steam, we would no longer be limited to a handful of DRM activations without having to beg BF support for more. We would not have to go through complicated installation and licensing procedures to update our games, it would happen automatically. We would not have to search patches on third-party websites. We would have unlimited downloads of the latest game version at far faster speeds than BF provides and would continue having so even if BF went out of business, while in the current case all CMx2 titles become uninstallable without BF's activation servers. That in my opinion is a lot more freedom than we have today.
  6. The comments of that RPS article would prove otherwise. In a quick glance I counted at least 5 different people who used to play CM titles (even the original CMx1 titles), who used to be Battlefront customers, and who are no longer because BF "is a trainwreck", "is run by dinosaurs", "has an atrocious webstore",... (their words). All claim they would gladly become customers again if BF went to Steam. Are you going to dismiss them as immature just because they disagree with you, as so many others have already tried in this thread?
  7. The number of Steam accounts is currently around 65 million, with a daily peak of nearly 8 million online at a single moment. The difference in exposure would be immense.
  8. Obviously that is complete nonsense and those people are clearly figments of our imagination. Steve and his decades of savvy business experience have proven decisively that everyone who will ever be interested in Combat Mission is already buying it from this site. Good to see Tim Stone butting in on this. His articles also played a pretty major role in convincing Matrix to join Steam.
  9. Ah, yet another convenient excuse to dismiss the argument. I don't need to post my achievements here, as my arguments tend to revolve around more than simply saying "I've got years of experience, so I automatically know better than you". I've posted numerous examples of companies overcoming their Steam reluctance and profiting from it, they get dismissed and ignored. I've generally discussed possible low-risk avenues to test out the Steam waters, I get insulted for them. Nobody is demanding you to prove yourself, but if you mingle in a discussion you'll get called out if your argument is nothing more than "I'm automatically right simply because I say so, now everyone else shut up". The relevant part is that he was forced to eat those words when it proved exactly how much bull**** they really were, just like you'll probably have to do in a few years time. I'd like to see some examples of that "intellectually balanced discussion'" you claim to want here, because you certainly are not providing it. The first page alone contains how many posts simply trying to shut down discussion based on the line "It's been asked before, the answer will eternally be no, so stop talking about it"? I have in his entire thread done nothing but present argument upon argument, doing my very best to ignore the people insulting me for it. And you are right, that does appear to be behaviour you are discouraging on these forums. If it's an echo chamber you want, just come out and say it openly. Here's another tip for the clever businessman you think you are: it does not reflect well upon a company for its public face to get personally involved in a public discussion like this, no matter who else is involved or what is being said. It reflects even worse on them when the public face actively picks sides with his favourites and revels in them insulting newcomers. No matter how this thread ends, it's pretty obvious to anyone with even the slightest PR experience that it has cost your company money and maybe even customers.
  10. Except there are very easy ways to incentivize the current user base to continue purchasing directly from Battlefront, leading Battlefront's revenue to end up at $53.500 instead of a mere $50.000. (Steam's cut is well-known to be about 30%).
  11. And the question is again asked, how could going to Steam in addition to your current setup possibly lead to lower sales? But you've ignored pretty much every other question or fact inconvenient for your argument so far, so I don't expect an actual answer to this one either. The hilarious part is that I remember Erik over at Matrix saying pretty much the exact same thing to dismiss Steam a few years ago. It was countered numerous times in this thread, but once again that was all completely ignored. As are the insults being thrown around by some of the Battlefront fanboys. Guess this forum's reputation for moderator favouritism is as well deserved as its reputation of aggressively attacking unpopular opinions. I can see why I was warned not to bother coming here.
  12. But in each of those cases the publisher or developer involved is selling something on Steam. Even in the case of f2p titles there typically is some monetary aspect where Steam is getting its cut. Mods are only on Steam for games that can be bought on Steam. Third-party stores selling Steam keys pay Steam somewhere in the process. Battlefront isn't selling anything on Steam, and in your proposal would merely use Steam as a free advertising service to lure customers to their own competing store. Valve gains nothing at all from your proposal, so why would they allow something like that? If Battlefront wants to try this, it'd be a great step in the right direction but I just don't see it happening. Valve has already long won the competition for mindspace. They've become so big, they rarely bother competing with other online stores anymore which is why third-party stores tend to give better deals on Steam keys than Steam themselves these days. They're in it for the profits now.
  13. This has never been done before, and gains nothing for Steam themselves, so will likely be impossible. Steam is still a store, they want products to sell. They are not a free advertising company to direct customers to other stores. Hence my earlier suggestion: put Shock Force on Steam to test the waters. It's got an extensive demo, and its age means it's probably not selling much here on Battlefront anymore. But that suggestion probably got lost between all the insults and white noise generated by certain regulars here.
  14. Steve has earlier in this very thread pretty much admitted that he does not know the terms or requirements for a current-day Steam partnership, and that their reluctance to partner with Steam is based primarily on their past experiences with Gamersgate and Paradox, dating back to 2007 and earlier. So I would say my assumption is pretty much correct. My agenda is merely twofold: primarily I would like to see this company prosper, since that means more and better games for me to enjoy. Secondly I'm bored and like a good discussion now and then, and some of the people here actually offer that.
  15. Being outnumbered isn't a problem. Having one's argument constantly ignored in favour of stupid insults is. The arrogance you perceive in my posts is nothing more than a mirror of the arrogance every unpopular opinion is treated to on these forums, as the behaviour of the forum regulars in this thread so aptly demonstrates. At least Steve is willing to engage in actual debate in between his dismissive posts. And just because Steve's company has survived for a few decades does not make his opinions infallible or correct today. The market has changed too much too quickly, and every other gaming developer or publisher that I've seen using the same "decades of experience" argument against Steam has been forced to admit they were wrong once they actually tried it. Battlefront does not appear to be growing despite the general gaming market and indie developers seeing record sales, their games no longer get mentioned in the gaming press, the last third party developer they sold on their store has left them for a more successful competitor (with upcoming Steam release of SC3). They survive, and that is good, but they could be thriving if only they took the same minor risk thousands of other small development studios have taken in the past 5 years.
  16. The evidence had been posted several times already, but it gets conveniently ignored by the fanboys in favour of such high quality discussion as "lol, what is wrong with you" and "ignore him, he's just soms marketing nerd".
  17. And would he have known he liked the game if you hadn't introduced it to him? Because that's what Steam does: it introduces new things to gamers who otherwise would never know those things existed. 1/15 times 65 million is still a hell of a lot of sales. And having it on Steam wouldn't make any difference to him. With Battlefront, he has to download the game and be online once to activate. With Steam offline mode, he has to download the game and be online once to enable offline mode. Same amount of internet traffic required. And nobody here is asking Battlefront to become Steam exclusive either, so your friend could still simply buy the Battlefront version and be done with it.
  18. Do you occasionally actually add anything to discussions, or do you just always troll?
  19. Not a scrap? Really? You must have missed the list of developers and publishers I posted on page 1: Matrix Games, Illwinter, Paradox,... All of them started out with the exact same lame excuses as you give: "We are industry veterans with decades of experience, we sell niche games that have no mainstream appeal, therefore our opinion to dismiss Steam is right and you are wrong." And yet all of them are now happily selling on Steam, because as soon as they actually tried it (thanks to customers like me who kept pushing them to), it turned out they had to admit all their decades of "industry experience" were quite simply wrong. The industry has changed radically the past decade, most of your experience is quite simply outdated. I've already posted my proof. I'm still waiting on your proof that wargames can and will never succeed on Steam. Please quote the part where I made this claim, or stop putting ridiculous strawmen into my mouth. Citation required. You are still merely passing your opinion off as fact, without any factual evidence to back it up. Any businessman who doesn't think increased exposure will lead to increased revenue is a very poor businessman indeed. As far as the gaming industry is concerned, Steam is reality. And a businessman can either work with reality, or hide from it. And which opera will sell more tickets to opera lovers, the one that plays in the world's most famous venue with a lot of advertising or the one that's performed in the spare room above a bowling alley in some backwater town? But the production is getting made anyway, so what's so scary about trying to maximize ticket sales? To know if you like something, you first have to try it. And step one in that process is knowing about its existence. Right now, very few people even know that games like these even exist, so how can they know whether they will like them? No, but then again I merely pick the side the vast majority of people who do have a sound view of the market have chosen. And unless you think you are perfect and all-knowing and everyone else is just stupid, you should spend a very long time thinking very hard why all those people who know as much or even more about the market as you do are all deciding to do the exact opposite of what you're doing. So tell me, what exactly will going to Steam cost you? How exactly will expanding your markets cause you to go out of business? Nobody is asking for you to make different games or cut your prices, the additional cost of making the games Steam-compliant is negligable (and don't try to argue otherwise, there are plenty of developers actually selling on Steam who have disclosed the process) and you can even keep your current online store and its outdated DRM system. So what exactly is the massive risk you'd be taking here? And if you're wary of throwing your newest title out there, try it out on the older ones first. How much revenue is Shock Force for example still bringing in? Put the entire Shock Force collection on Steam, try it out. Strip out the DRM, price it at $50 or whatever it's in your own store right now, ask Steam to make it a "Daily Deal" or "Weekly Deal" once at 20-50% off for exposure and see how much your revenue skyrockets. If it doesn't work, it's unfortunate and you'll have lost a few days programming work and some money, but it will hardly bankrupt your company and you'll finally have actual proof to support your position the next time this discussion inevitably rears its head. If it works, your company benefits immensely and you can expand your Steam catalogue, your profits and your company. All it takes is for you to abandon your fear and prejudices and take a calculated risk. It's what real and successful businessmen do, and it's what all your competitors are doing. Ah, so here is where your fear and prejudice comes from. Gamersgate and the Paradox store could barely compete with Steam back in 2007-2008 when you tried this. And Steam has grown massively since then, and made the entry process a lot more convenient for new partners. The idea that your experience on Steam today would be similar to the ones you had on two fringe stores with poor service towards both customer and partner, one of which went bust in favour of Steam soon after, is rather ridiculous. If one-man indie operations can easily handle the Steam acceptance process, so can you. You're also admitting here that you don't actually know the current Steam acceptance process, and thus your claim that it would be too much work and effort is nothing more than an uneducated guess. Again, not the conduct of a businessman.
  20. Citation required. I often hear this claim being thrown around, yet nobody ever seems to be capable of providing even the tiniest scrap of proof to back it up. The idea that a genre which is about war and combat is somehow only of interest to a tiny group of people, far smaller than the group of those interested in driving a delivery truck or a train for example, is quite simply ludicrous (and often stinks of elitism). And even if it were true, Steam access would still mean a far greater exposure to those select few and thus increase revenue. Right now you'd still only be reaching the select few of those select few who happen to blunder into this site.
  21. Just because some of us haven't wasted entire days of our lives posting thousands of comments on these messageboards does not mean we can't be long-time Battlefront customers. I've played every single CM title (except Afghanistan) since the year they were released. Yet on every forum where the Steam topic rears its head, there is at least one guy like you who dismisses the facts he doesn't like based on nothing more than the post count of those who post them. If anything, you should wonder why so many people who play these games want little interaction with these forums. They don't exactly have a reputation to be proud of on many of the more general gaming sites (at least those few who have even heard of Battlefront). I don't care about where I buy my games either. My last non-Steam purchase was Elite: Dangerous, and I happily bought it from the developer's own store. My next purchase will be Black Sea, and I'll happily buy it from Battlefront. What I do care about is exposure. A game like Elite: Dangerous doesn't need Steam, it's got plenty of attention in the press and media, even tv ads, and as a result of all that good PR it sells like hotcakes and is guaranteed a future filled with good expansions and enjoyable content for me to buy. Nobody knows Combat Mission. It gets no press, it gets no attention and as a result it gets only a tiny fraction of the sales it could have. Less money means less content, longer waits between new releases, less value for my time and money. A simple Steam launch handled well means exposure, exposure means thousands of new customers, new customers means more money and more money means more Combat Mission for us all to enjoy. As was claimed as a dismissal of Steam by one of the anti-Steam crowd earlier, 99.9% of gamers supposedly aren't even interested in these games. Well, Steam has over 65 million customers: 0.1% of 65 million is still 65.000 customers. Has any Combat Mission title ever even sold that many copies?
  22. There's two forms of Steam integration. The basic one means just selling your game on Steam, and requires nothing more than adding a single layer of standardized Steam code on top of your executable and making sure your patches are easily distributable without customers having to download gigabytes of files they already have. In Battlefront's case the patching system is already becoming compliant and the work that goes into changing the executable is trivial. This also means there is no real seperate code base if you also want to sell a non-Steam version of your game. The vast majority of titles on Steam are sold this way. The only minor problem for Battlefront in this would be having patches dependant on paid "engine upgrades", an already hotly-debated business practice. But there are programming ways to circumvent this issue. The second form is making your game a Stamworks title. It adds a lot deeper integration with the Steam platform such as cloud saving, Steam matchmaking for MP, achievements, and so on. This requires more significant code changes and basically means Steam is mandatory for the game to run. Many people prefer to have all their games in one place and with one easy-to-launch interface, and Steam is typically most suitable candidate for this. In the bottom right corner of the Steam interface is a button called "Add a Game". Click on it, and one of the options you get is "Add Non-Steam Game". With this you can add any game you didn't buy on Steam, such as Combat Mission, by pointing Steam to the executable. That game then shows up in your Steam game library, you can use the Steam overlay when playing it, chat with your Steam friends from inside the game,... It basically makes the non-Steam game equivalent to the first form of Steam integration explained above.
  23. Am I supposed to be impressed now? I started on 8" ones, so get off my lawn you young whippersnapper. The marketplace in 2000 was entirely different than the marketplace in 2015. Back then, PC games were still sold in actual physical stores. Nowadays only the very big ones or the ancient relics like Battlefront even bother with printing physical discs. What worked well in 2000 is a recipe for disaster in 2015. Battlefront has survived so far, but they're hardly thriving these days. After all, a company that has to price a small piece of vehicle DLC at $20 in order to even make a profit (and then still drops hints that they likely won't do it again because it wasn't really worth it) isn't exactly screaming "massive success story" to anyone with a bit of business sense. Over 99.99% of gamers have never even heard of these titles. Thousands of potential customers who'll merrily spend their money elsewhere. There is only one single mainstream gaming source even mentioning the name Battlefront, and that's because they've got an author on staff (Tim Stone) who is a huge fan of the wargaming genre and who, just like many posters here, is constantly urging these antiquated business models to adapt and thrive in the modern gaming market. There is a joke game where you quite literally play a goat that is raking in profits Battlefront can only dream about. Train and farming simulators sell more in a single week on sale than Black Sea will in its entire lifetime. And all thanks to the massive exposure Steam brings. I'd also be quite interested in knowing how much Strategic Command 3 will outsell its predecessors now that it's most likely going to Steam. Again, I've had this exact same discussion half a dozen times before. I've heard all these arguments before, I've been ignored for it, I've been insulted for it. And every single time I've been proven correct in the end. Paradox, Matrix Games/Slitherine, Illwinter, Longbow Games, ... They all strongly opposed Steam, they all predicted for years that going on Steam would ruin their company, they're all eagerly selling their games on Steam today. This time will be no different, so I really can't be bothered to be drawn into yet another endless debate about it. Either Battlefront will join the modern market in the next few years and we'll merrily enjoy many new Combat Mission games for decades to come, or they will stubbornly and scaredly vanish into obscurity and be replaced by someone else. Those Graviteam guys for example are going to be a really interesting competitor in a few years time, at the rate they are improving and innovating.
  24. I disagree. I've seen several other developers and publishers make the same claims BF does about Steam. I've seen their forums flooded with countless topics where their customers ask and pressure about Steam, and I've seen countless people like you dismiss those efforts. And in almost every single case I've seen those companies give in to the pressure, join the future and profit immensely from it. I think the only case I've seen where it didn't happen, the company no longer exists. Again, the choice is Battlefront's. But the people who keep asking for Steam are those who have BF's best interests in mind. And in the end, in my experience Battlefront will have to either bend... or break. Right now, very few gamers have even heard of these games. Obscurity and anonimity are never good for someone trying to sell a product, even though finding a niche might keep them alive for a while. Yes, it says that people realize what a massive amount of money can be made from Steam (by all parties involved) and want their share of the spoils. And the lack of success of these alternative services says even more.
  25. It would also mean Battlefront can get rid of its DRM system, saving the money it costs them and saving customers from the frequent problems with activations. It offers customers infinite re-downloading and possible Steam Workshop access for easy access to mods. And Steam has had an off-line mode for many years now. Yeah yeah, I've heard the same excuses a dozen times before from other companies. And inevitably, once they actually try Steam, it turns out most of the cons were bull****, profits skyrocket and those companies can't get enough of Steam. Look at Matrix Games. For years they claimed, just like Battlefront does, that their many years of publishing experience and all their sales data proved that going to Steam would only hurt their profits. Customers kept pushing them to Steam however, and now that they actually tried it, it turned out all their data and experience was quite simply wrong. Nearly every new game they publish gets a Steam release these days. If Battlefront is smart, they'll embrace the future, as so many others have done and profited by. A game like Black Sea would top the Steam sale charts for at least a week, instead of being confined to obscurity on this tiny little corner of the internet. But as so often is being said, most wargaming developers and publishers are scared of both change and success.
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