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Mission Briefings


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3 hours ago, Cabal2323 said:

I wasn't being nasty at all as a long time customer. 

Spending money doesn't excuse you from being nasty. Be constructive, not destructive with your feedback. Instead of implying the target of your criticism is a child, perhaps act like an adult and mind your manners. 

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So, because this was becoming a rather vocal issue, and I began to doubt us for a second, I exported 19 of the standalone scenario briefings (both Blue and Red) out of the commercial scenarios and cut and pasted them into Word.  That came to 20727 words in total.  Scrubbing through them all and using the Word spelling checker, we come to a grand total of 15 real spelling mistakes (not military slang or funny abbreviations) out of the sample.  This yields an error rate of about .07%, which in just about any industry standard is well below the accepted manufacturing rate errors (outside of the nuclear and space industry).  It is even lower than accepted experimental error in engineering. (https://courses.cit.cornell.edu/virtual_lab/LabZero/Experimental_Error.shtml#:~:text=Engineers also need to be,analysis techniques to get any). 

The worst offending scenario had 5 spelling errors and the writer is not a native English speaker, but we can make sure we get help with that.  So now I am going to do a grammar and punctuation check but from that I can see so far (again thank you MS Word) we are doing better than a lot of adult students I know. 

Now we will continue to try and get better in all things in order to continue a solid wargame to you all...thank you for your patience. [Note, I am sorry but I cannot share the Word Doc here as it is company IP etc.]  Oh and as an aside, I hold a Master's degree and still managed to spell "Frankfurt" wrong in Valley of Ashes, so human error happens.

Edited by The_Capt
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And a quick follow up.  So looking at grammar and punctuation (here again MS Word has a very handy "double blue line system) we are looking at 86 errors in total so an error rate of about 0.4% of the briefings sampled.  These were mostly Word disagreeing with coma placement but there were missing periods, missing hyphens and the dreaded double colon.  Plus a few spacing issues and the odd dropped 's' which makes for some weird noun-verb alignments.  So based on this, our spelling is not that bad but we could use some work on punctuation...and flossing, always getting in trouble for the lack of flossing. 

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While you're at it @The_Capt there is one error that is so incredibly egregious that I in fact lose sleep over it at night, tossing and turning in the throes of mild annoyance:

  • The scenario Killing Time at Kirtof in fact depicts a killing time at Kirtorf 👻

Anyway, you should see how bad real engineers (outside of education) are at spelling. I've seen some pretty obvious mistakes in several MS and NAS specs I've read over the years!

Edited by HerrTom
Even I can't do grammar good
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1 minute ago, HerrTom said:

While you're at it @The_Capt there is one error that is so incredibly egregious that I in fact lose sleep over it at night, tossing and turning in the throes of mild annoyance:

  • The scenario Killing Time at Kirtof in fact depicts a killing time at Kirtorf 👻

Anyway, you should see how bad real engineers (outside of education) are at spelling. I've seen some pretty obvious mistakes in several MS and NAS specs I've read over the years!

Oh yes that is true.  Word does not pick up proper name misspelling (and German towns were murder for this) so that may add to our total somewhat.  But if one is not familiar with the locale I would hope that they would not lose sleep or in-game enjoyment...except in this case obviously.  

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The scenario briefings can be very cryptic. I am not really interested in the creative writing skills of the creator of a scenario. To admire his map making skills and triggers of the AI is enough. I would appreciate if they made a situation clear. 

Edited by chuckdyke
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The briefings could need a bit of proofreading. BFC is a small company but that shouldn't need to be an excuse as the company is based in an English speaking country. If BFC was stationed in for example Mexico or China it would be more understandable if the scenarios that come with the games have broken English.

Quote

All your base are belong to us

The famous words in the game Zero Wing.

Maybe those who make scenarios which come with the games and don't speak English very good could use the spell and grammar checking option in a text program. There are free ones to download and use.

Briefings that are in the scenarios we get from the Scenario Depot are another matter as they are so called custom made and there's no need to complain about those.

Edited by BornGinger
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Got to admit I dislike reading longish mission texts and "too much" info generally. I skip these most the time, whatever the writing style otherwise. Would prefer a full screen tac map (in briefing section) instead. Most the time would suffice to me personally to have relevant data all included here (simple sketch map and few points of interest).

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1 minute ago, RockinHarry said:

Got to admit I dislike reading longish mission texts and "too much" info generally. I skip these most the time, whatever the writing style otherwise. Would prefer a full screen tac map (in briefing section) instead. Most the time would suffice to me personally to have relevant data all included here (simple sketch map and few points of interest).

The same! Sometimes briefings contain impirtant info (on enemy and its plans), but most of the time it is dull and empty text masquerading military orders. 

Every man to his taste, but I generally prefer tactical map to briefings.

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2 hours ago, The_Capt said:

And a quick follow up.  So looking at grammar and punctuation (here again MS Word has a very handy "double blue line system) we are looking at 86 errors in total so an error rate of about 0.4% of the briefings sampled.  These were mostly Word disagreeing with coma placement but there were missing periods, missing hyphens and the dreaded double colon.  Plus a few spacing issues and the odd dropped 's' which makes for some weird noun-verb alignments.  So based on this, our spelling is not that bad but we could use some work on punctuation...and flossing, always getting in trouble for the lack of flossing. 

I hate misplaced comas. Next thing you know you've got ESP and you're the main character in "The Deadzone"

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3 hours ago, The_Capt said:

 Word does not pick up proper name misspelling (and German towns were murder for this) so that may add to our total somewhat.

Play around with Word there are more languages to choose from apart from English. Kind regards. 

word.png

 

Edited by chuckdyke
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4 hours ago, The_Capt said:

Oh yes that is true.  Word does not pick up proper name misspelling (and German towns were murder for this) so that may add to our total somewhat.  But if one is not familiar with the locale I would hope that they would not lose sleep or in-game enjoyment...except in this case obviously.  

Just want to highlight again that scenario has a duplicate paragraph. In case you ever want to fix the briefings. Again, don't mind. The briefings are not better or worse than the other games.

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34 minutes ago, stikkypixie said:

scenario has a duplicate paragraph

If you mean this

Quote

Mission

Team Papa is deployed to delay the expected enemy advance across the KIRTORF plateau by 60 minutes

Team Papa is deployed to delay the expected enemy advance across the KIRTORF plateau by 60 minutes

That was just me being too clever by half. When I was in the British Army it was (and likely still is ) convention when giving orders that the mission paragraph was always repeated for emphasis. Apologies it caused confusion

P

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5 hours ago, The_Capt said:

Oh yes that is true.  Word does not pick up proper name misspelling (and German towns were murder for this) so that may add to our total somewhat.  But if one is not familiar with the locale I would hope that they would not lose sleep or in-game enjoyment...except in this case obviously.  

While we're at the German city names, there's a spelling error in the briefing map (should read "Würzburg", not "-berg")

j6Op4tc.png

Also, there's this road sign in the flavor objects, I'm not sure if "Hunfield" is a kind of inside joke among American soldiers and was put there deliberately, but the real town is called "Hünfeld", of course. 😊

87wsCNV.png

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10 hours ago, Cabal2323 said:

I wasn't being nasty at all as a long time customer. I was pointing out a definite quality control issue. For a company that wants their games to reach as a large of an audience as possible (steam), they have to do better.  To say you didn't have enough times to even open up and read the briefings says everything. You should be embarrassed to admit that in a  public forum. To use the excuse that is was rushed is also lame. When the restaurant F's up your meal because they were rushed, I am sure you don't take the same attitude. I could have proofed all those briefings in a single evening. Sorry, not buying it.  I can read 30 students papers in a hour and their grammar and spelling is atrocious. By the way I do enjoy the game. The graphics engine is at the end though. Can't see myself investing in another game after this if it is the same engine.  

30 student papers in a hour, not a very good Teacher then. Would not trust any grade you gave, unless all you asked your students was to write Cat. Anyway the more you write, the more nasty and trollish you appear. 

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On 5/10/2021 at 1:33 AM, Cabal2323 said:

I have been with the company since some of their first games.  I will start by saying this is the sloppiest release I have ever seen. Has anyone at Battlefront actually played this game? I mean really played it. Like read the briefings start to finish? Who proofed the briefings? Certainly not a grown adult. I feel like some of the briefings are [story] being told by a 4th grader. Not the level of excellence we have seen in all previous briefings in games. They are full of grammatical errors and incomplete sentences. I get the impression they were written by a non- English speaker. I teach 4th grade writing and math and I just couldn't shake that I was reading a very novice [writers] writing. Take some pride gentlemen.

 

 

11 hours ago, Cabal2323 said:

I wasn't being nasty at all as a long time customer. I was pointing out a definite quality control issue. For a company that wants their games to reach as a large of an audience as possible (steam), they have to do better.  To say you didn't have enough times to even open up and read the briefings says everything. You should be embarrassed to admit that in a  public forum. To use the excuse that is was rushed is also lame. When the restaurant F's up your meal because they were rushed, I am sure you don't take the same attitude. I could have proofed all those briefings in a single evening. Sorry, not buying it.  I can read 30 students papers in a hour and their grammar and spelling is atrocious. By the way I do enjoy the game. The graphics engine is at the end though. Can't see myself investing in another game after this if it is the same engine.  

I proofed a bit. 

I wasn't keen on the tone either. 

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