Professional.

[Vanir Ausf B]

12 hours ago, semmes said:

About the LMG... I was talking about "effective", kills per round.

Well of course the MG42 has lower lethality per round. It's extreme rate of fire makes a lower efficiency inevitable, in reality and the game.

[Vacillator]

If the game was only single player I can just about understand wanting to tinker under the bonnet - so my Panther takes too long to load, too long to rotate the turret etc. etc. and I've googled it to death and want to fix it (random example, no facts were involved in the making of this).

But when players play against other players we need everyone on the same page.  I'm with Steve and John on this one.

[MikeyD]

The WWII German army squad was largely saddled with bolt action rifles, the MG42 integrated into the squad was meant to make up for the lack of infantry 'oomph'. The Americans fielded a larger squad with semi-auto Garand so the firepower was more evenly distributed. Americans taking out an enemy MG42 meant your work was half finished. Germans taking out an enemy BAR only improved things marginally. Not because the BAR was so much worse but because it made up a smaller fraction of the squad's aggregate firepower.

[Battlefront.com]

Throughout the years of discussion on this Forum there is a very common occurrence of someone saying "your game is broken and you don't do anything to fix it", rambles off a bunch of vague stuff, is pressed for details, provides slightly less vague, gets challenged on the claim that something is indeed "broken", and then the discussion (often) ends there.

Most of the time I think this is the result of someone having an opinion/conviction that isn't supported by others or (in the case of something more empirical) facts.  Either the game doesn't actually produce the negative results claimed or the person's perception of the real world is off the mark.  And so this "broken" thing never gets "fixed" because it was never broken in the first place.  Unfortunately, that doesn't stop the unfounded criticism.

As I've said since for a long time... the argument for game data modification based on "the game is broken and Battlefront doesn't fix things" is extremely weak.  The argument to modify game data "for the fun of it" is not.  I wish people who advocate for game data modification capabilities would just admit that there really is no practical need for it and instead they just want to mess around with stuff for the fun of it.  The answer is still "no", but at least I'd have more respect for their opinions

Steve

[Artkin]

People really just want to add models to expand the TOE. They really dont want to wait. I think a wise business strategy would be to maximize the amount of creativity a user can have in the editor while still building a cost effective game around that. It might be a conflict of interest (As you probably want to reserve the right to charge us for models), but it propelled games made by no name (In the US market) developers to ridiculous popularity. 

Just saying... Men of War sold a ton of copies from the first game to now. 

That's just one example. People want to be creative.

Edited October 17, 2021 by Artkin

[BFCElvis]

4 minutes ago, Artkin said:

People really just want to add models to expand the TOE. They really dont want to wait.

TO&E can be partially changed by purchasing a formation and, adding what you'd like to the TO&E/OB,  purchasing single vehicles and teams. But remember, keeping as accurate to historical TO&E is a massive feature, not bug, of Combat Mission games. Getting away from that weakens the integrity of the game. 

Quote

I think a wise business strategy would be to maximize the amount of creativity a user can have in the editor while still building a cost effective game around that.

I think still being in the gaming business after 22 years is a good way to believe that our business strategy is appreciated by more than it puts off. These are the kind of tough decisions that create the longevity. That sounds like a good business strategy to me.

Quote

It might be a conflict of interest (As you probably want to reserve the right to charge us for models), but it propelled games made by no name (In the US market) developers to ridiculous popularity. 

Just saying... Men of War sold a ton of copies from the first game to now. 

That's just one example. People want to be creative.

The great thing about war games is that if you're not getting the ability to change the TO&E out of one game there is another out there that you can. You can have and enjoy both games. #winning

[Artkin]

I think it's pretty obvious to most of us that there isnt another game like CM, hence why we pay premiums for a game that is technically very old. 

People want Nato in CMBS. If that was accessable by modders it would have been done years ago. This is my point. 

I would argue a business strategy like this might actually be hurting your audience. 

[Artkin]

I do like CM games for what they are, but it would be sick to be able to finagle with things in second exe. or something. Nobody is trying to undermine the integrity of the game. People understand what a mod is by 2021. 

[BFCElvis]

Just now, Artkin said:

 People understand what a mod is by 2021. 

As the person who runs the Help Desk I can tell you, with a high degree of certainty,  that there are a ton of things that people don't understand in 2021.

[Artkin]

2 minutes ago, BFCElvis said:

As the person who runs the Help Desk I can tell you, with a high degree of certainty,  that there are a ton of things that people don't understand in 2021.

Well your current audience is not youthful. As soon as you appeal to more, maybe advertise some (After being a wargamer for 10+ years I stumbled on this game by a thorough google search of wargames), you will find ppl more tech savvy. I would think.

[Grey_Fox]

12 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

Throughout the years of discussion on this Forum there is a very common occurrence of someone saying "your game is broken and you don't do anything to fix it",

Really I'm just disappointed that CMCW hasn't been patched in several months despite there being a number of bugs such as campaign scenarios with missing units, .50 gunners on M113s being able to see and shoot through smoke, etc. We know that there are a series of bugfixes completed and ready to be released, but for some reason haven't been.

Edited October 18, 2021 by Grey_Fox

[ZPB II]

While I do understand where a lot of the complaints are coming from and I don't judge people for wanting things, I find it amusing, in a cute and innocent fashion, to read year after year. CM has always been artesanal and boutique in nature. It's the original indie game. Mainstream is mainstream but CM is a counterculture institution. So many businesses have sold out and lost their way when expanding. 

Something happened to Games Workshop and Warhammer. The original crew created a nihilistic, fatalistic counterculture hobby with some decent social and philosophical commentary. Now it's a soulless, faceless corporate juggernaut that churns out bland Disney-tier material. They became a parody of themselves. A similar thing happened with the Simpsons. Counterculture became mainstream.

CM is an amazing game but the slightly anachronistic "stick it to the Man" attitude is what elevates it to such a special place. But then again I'm a weirdo, so there's that.

 

[domfluff]

1 hour ago, ZPB II said:

Something happened to Games Workshop and Warhammer. The original crew created a nihilistic, fatalistic counterculture hobby with some decent social and philosophical commentary. Now it's a soulless, faceless corporate juggernaut that churns out bland Disney-tier material. They became a parody of themselves. A similar thing happened with the Simpsons. Counterculture became mainstream.

You're not wrong about what it became, but I'm less sure that's an entirely fair summary of early GW.

GW was started by three guys with a market stall, and were the first importers of D&D (and later other RPGs) into the UK. For a while they managed to convinced people that they were the *only* importers of RPG material into the UK, and signed a lot of exclusive contracts. When these expired, most of those suppliers went elsewhere, meaning that GW was left with miniature lines that it couldn't legally sell.

Rather than dump these, they threw together a generic fantasy rules system around the miniatures and moulds they already had. A clear example is Runequest, for they had models representing the Broo:




This line of Broo miniatures was then renamed into "Beastmen", so that they could continue to be sold. That's extremely dubious legally and morally, since they had lost the licence to the intellectual property, and certainly the first edition of Warhammer wasn't the setting that it would later become - that didn't really happen until third edition, and the launch of WFRP.

Equally, a lot of the early GW business was about publishing other people's titles, and alongside them making their own, simpler versions, which they would heavily promote. Battletech became Adeptus Titanicus, Car Wars became Dark Future, etc.

I'm not sure that GW has ever really been a punky upstart with a strong moral compass - they've always been a corporate entity, it's just that the scope and scale have shifted quite a bit.

[Redwolf]

I have a too hard time parsing the opening post here.

What part of CM is being bashed/defended here, specifically?

There seems to be a trace of "losing sight to a previously spotted unit too easily", which I could get on board with. A didn't notice the BAR to be overpowered as such, but of course Garand equipped US troops can wipe out most other squads at most ranges easily.

[Vergeltungswaffe]

15 hours ago, BFCElvis said:

As the person who runs the Help Desk I can tell you, with a high degree of certainty,  that there are a ton of things that people don't understand in 2021.

[Armorgunner]

20 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

Throughout the years of discussion on this Forum there is a very common occurrence of someone saying "your game is broken and you don't do anything to fix it",

I Would rather say: Your game is the most realistic tactical strategy game out there. And you improve it all the time. Though not in the time, we (the shortfused lovers) demand 

Edited October 18, 2021 by Armorgunner

[ZPB II]

5 hours ago, domfluff said:

I'm not sure that GW has ever really been a punky upstart with a strong moral compass - they've always been a corporate entity, it's just that the scope and scale have shifted quite a bit.

You're right. I jumped from thinking about business into simply losing edge. Warhammer was supremely bleak, dark and depressing. All the characters and all the factions sucked, there were no good guys anywhere. Now they talk about how "it's important to write likeable chararacters for everyone" and everything they produce just feels like fan service. Total Warhammer 3 is coming out with new re-imagined Russia and China-esque factions. Since GW wants to make money on emerging markets, they will likely not dare to make any kind of parody or mockery. The end result will likely be boring with no edge. Grumble.

Got a massive headache so my rambling is more incoherent than usual.

[danfrodo]

wow, this thread is a complete f-ing waste of electrons.  And now I have added to it. 

[Battlefront.com]

22 hours ago, danfrodo said:

wow, this thread is a complete f-ing waste of electrons.  And now I have added to it. 

Heh   Well, to further waste electrons, I'll address (for the 100000000th time) the so-called "bad business decision" to keep the system closed from end users making their own models, data, etc. to create new content without waiting for us to do it for them.

This is an often repeated mantra of the open system fans and it's not wrong when it's in the correct context.  For Combat Mission, it is in the wrong context.  Like anything complex, applying the wrong tool to a particular problem rarely ends well.  In our case we'd be out of business if we opened the system up, which is not a good thing.

People point to huge games and say "it works for them, it should work for you".  No.  What works for big companies with huge target audiences rarely works for niche companies, and niche products rarely work for big companies.  That's a pretty universal law that applies to any supply/demand situation.  Customers often don't care about such things as sustainability and market realities, but we do.  I'll give you an example.

Let's say the typical CM customer purchases 3 different Base Games and 3 Modules over the course of 3 years.  That's about $285, or just under $100 per year per person.  Now let's say the engine is opened up for free modification.  We might still release new content that is of superior quality (at least that's the way we market it!), but obviously sales will be harmed by the competition with free stuff.  Let's say that $285 drops in half to $140.  Not only do we see a huge drop in revenue, but we also don't have a nice and steady cash flow like we once did.  Think that's too drastic a drop off in customer purchasing?  Pick any other reasonable number and the end result is the same... we're out of business or shift our business strategy because the margins for making and supporting games is not very high.  Eventually it will catch up with us.

OK, so the argument is that if we open the game system up we'd get a lot more sales, thereby making up for a lower per person purchase amount with lots more people purchasing.  Not going to happen.  We make a niche product and that by definition means we don't have a huge new market to make up for the loss of sales from our traditional base.  Will we get some new sales?  Sure, but not enough.

On top of all of this we have the arguments about keeping the quality high and the vision for the game system focused.  I already covered that earlier in this thread, but it does have an impact on our viability.  People come to us in part because we keep the standards high.  Lower standard stuff made by end users won't interest them, high quality stuff takes away from our sales.

This is why for 22 years we've said "NO" to opening up the engine to end user modification.  Which, ironically, is why I've been here for 22 years to say such a thing.  The two are not unrelated. 

Steve

[Commanderski]

3 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

This is why for 22 years we've said "NO" to opening up the engine to end user modification.  Which, ironically, is why I've been here for 22 years to say such a thing.  The two are not unrelated. 

+1

[Artkin]

I do believe Men of War (To beat an example to death) was made by a very unheard of company.. I never heard of their previous game (Soldiers of War or whatever). 

The massive mods for it (German Soldiers Mod) actually made the game significantly more enjoyable. 

I understand splitting a small community isnt a wise move. But I would argue the only thing that keeps your community together is this forum. Remove the forum and what happens? There is barely a multiplayer in the game as is (By todays standards). People would never, ever find each other, or they would resort to other forums (They already do). So I would argue that adding some kind of mod support in the future would certainly do no harm. People stray away from unmodifiable games. What do you think about the success of the Arma series for instance? 

The only reason they got big were thanks to mods. ACE mod, ACEX for us milsimmers. And everyone knows what happened when DayZ hit.  Mods made the most realistic shooter on the market even more realistic. Granted that isnt a simulation. 

And I understand the cmx2 system is full of code that wouldnt make sense to screw with... but it was done for CMPE. 

Edited October 19, 2021 by Artkin

[Battlefront.com]

2 hours ago, Artkin said:

I do believe Men of War (To beat an example to death) was made by a very unheard of company.. I never heard of their previous game (Soldiers of War or whatever). 

Perfect example.  They were published by 1C, a company with massive reach, and appear to have gone out of business after their second release with 1C.

2 hours ago, Artkin said:

The massive mods for it (German Soldiers Mod) actually made the game significantly more enjoyable. 

You'll notice I never once said that opening up the engine wouldn't make some people happy.  Giving the game away free would make even more people happy.  But we'd be out of business and that should make people unhappy.

2 hours ago, Artkin said:

I understand splitting a small community isnt a wise move. But I would argue the only thing that keeps your community together is this forum. Remove the forum and what happens? There is barely a multiplayer in the game as is (By todays standards). People would never, ever find each other, or they would resort to other forums (They already do). So I would argue that adding some kind of mod support in the future would certainly do no harm. People stray away from unmodifiable games. What do you think about the success of the Arma series for instance? 

$50,000,000 development budget, millions of players, a game engine that needs replacing every couple of years...  what's your point?

2 hours ago, Artkin said:

The only reason they got big were thanks to mods. ACE mod, ACEX for us milsimmers. And everyone knows what happened when DayZ hit.  Mods made the most realistic shooter on the market even more realistic. Granted that isnt a simulation. 

No, what made Arma big is it's aimed at a HUGE market and has always been backed by more marketing money for a single release than we've probably earned after 22 years in business.  Modding didn't make the difference between it being a niche game and a massive game.

2 hours ago, Artkin said:

And I understand the cmx2 system is full of code that wouldnt make sense to screw with... but it was done for CMPE.

It was done for Professional Edition because a) it was limited enough in scope to be feasible (i.e. NOT what you're talking about), b) we only have a couple of points of contact to support (i.e. NOT thousands and thousands of individuals), c) the points of contact are truly "professional" (i.e. NOT people who feel the world revolves around them and that we must do what they say), d) it's not a threat to our core business (i.e. NOT capable of undermining our financial stability), and e) they paid us to do the work (i.e. NOT demand that it be standard feature at no extra cost).

Remember, we've thought a lot more about this than you, over decades, and with our livelihood hanging in the balance.  If you think you've got something to say that we not heard, considered, and rejected a couple thousand times already... well, you might want to reconsider because you won't.  No personal offense intended, just stating an opinion that is unlikely to turn out to be wrong.

Steve

[Artkin]

1 hour ago, Battlefront.com said:

Perfect example.  They were published by 1C, a company with massive reach, and appear to have gone out of business after their second release with 1C.

Correct me if I'm wrong but it seems that 1C Company is still in business, along with Digitalmindsoft who has taken over the series after Best Way (Though I'm not sure who did the development work for the game). Best Way has another "Men of War" title in the works. They seem to be based out of Luhansk so I wonder if the conflict had anything to do with it. Who are you referring to? Best Way? In that case then Digitalmindsoft seems like they know what they're doing kinda sorta.

1 hour ago, Battlefront.com said:

$50,000,000 development budget, millions of players, a game engine that needs replacing every couple of years...  what's your point?

Why does the engine need replacing? What makes it any different than CMx2 which is just as old? By that logic I would think CMx2 would be considered an engine that needs replacing as well. The budget was huge, and I don't know how people wound up making mods for the game, but I don't think that was the developer's original intention, so they probably didn't spend time or money giving people any sort of tools to work with. But IDK. I'm just an end user.

1 hour ago, Battlefront.com said:

No, what made Arma big is it's aimed at a HUGE market and has always been backed by more marketing money for a single release than we've probably earned after 22 years in business.  Modding didn't make the difference between it being a niche game and a massive game.

The strategy wargaming market was just as big back in those days. Company of Heroes... World in Conflict... it died out because the games got old, CoH had a terrible engine to modify (Lots and lots of crashes). Modding is what made the community EXPLODE. None of us ACE boys were happy about it, but the community essentially did a ton of work for the developer (Which in turn sold tons of copies).

1 hour ago, Battlefront.com said:

It was done for Professional Edition because a) it was limited enough in scope to be feasible (i.e. NOT what you're talking about)

I'm not asking for an arm or a leg, but an expansion of what we could do in general with CM would be appreciated by the masses. Not sure what you think I'm talking about...

1 hour ago, Battlefront.com said:

b) we only have a couple of points of contact to support (i.e. NOT thousands and thousands of individuals)

Any Combat Mission veteran will tell of how BFC's customer support is the best of the best. But that is because game developers don't really do that kind of thing. Which is great, we all appreciate it. This now diverts resources to support a minuscule minority. I understand the price must be right.

 

1 hour ago, Battlefront.com said:

c) the points of contact are truly "professional" (i.e. NOT people who feel the world revolves around them and that we must do what they say)

Nobody is telling you this. But people definitely want the features in their games. If they aren't vocal then perhaps it would never be known.

1 hour ago, Battlefront.com said:

d) it's not a threat to our core business (i.e. NOT capable of undermining our financial stability), and e) they paid us to do the work (i.e. NOT demand that it be standard feature at no extra cost).

I can see how allowing new models into the game could hurt sales. Maps too. But we port maps from title to title anyway, because if they didn't the games would get stale (For me!). I probably play more often than most, I have 15 active PBEM in my manager across four different titles right now. So it really helps to have the kind of flexibility I am talking about. If we weren't able to port maps that would be a huge, huge bummer.

Nobody is asking for anything for free either. Nor is anybody demanding it.

1 hour ago, Battlefront.com said:

Remember, we've thought a lot more about this than you, over decades, and with our livelihood hanging in the balance.  If you think you've got something to say that we not heard, considered, and rejected a couple thousand times already... well, you might want to reconsider because you won't.  No personal offense intended, just stating an opinion that is unlikely to turn out to be wrong.

Steve

I understand, and I'm not trying to come off arrogantly. Everyone wants to see this series succeed, Battlefront to expand in their staff and capabilities, and get these modules rolling for us already. It's been five years since I bought CMBS, and it has yet to have a module. I'm not dragging you down for that, but it really would have been nice to play with the nato units from SF2 during this time. It would have made the game so much more enjoyable.

I'm not trying to demand things, just be vocal about how I feel about the series. Which should be taken into consideration at the most.

Edited October 19, 2021 by Artkin

[Sgt.Squarehead]

I'm happy enough with the current format TBH.....There's nothing new about CM Pro that I wouldn't swap for a couple of Modules (CM:BS & CM:CW) and a patch or three (CM:SF2, CM:BS & CM:CW). 

@Battlefront.com  You could use the units from Pro for a CM:BS Module.....There, I did half the work for you! 

[holoween]

8 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

Let's say the typical CM customer purchases 3 different Base Games and 3 Modules over the course of 3 years.  That's about $285, or just under $100 per year per person.  Now let's say the engine is opened up for free modification.  We might still release new content that is of superior quality (at least that's the way we market it!), but obviously sales will be harmed by the competition with free stuff.

Id say thats just a fallacy that has been proven invalid quite often.

Just because there is free stuff doesnt mean it competes with you. They still need to buy your games to play the mods and having more content makes it far more attractive to actually purchase the game at all. And while some might not buy as many games and modules that is offset by others buying it at all. I have personally bought several games specifically because of mods and know several others who did the same. Ive also bought CM basegames and expansions to take part in campaigns and turnaments so extra content does certainly generate sales.

But obviously its not my risk so easy to say you should allow it.