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Immersion and gaming


c3k

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Originally posted by Battlefront.com:

Oh, and to answer BigAlMoho's question about where this "other place" is, here's a link:

It's 45 pages of mostly bitching between people who are all of a like mind. There are some fair posts mixed in with the calls for me to suck dick and questioning my sanity, but I'd say the mix is decidedly not favorable to me :D Mostly it is a few people reinforcing their own convictions and expressing hostility to anybody who doesn't think exactly like them. Warning to you people that actually like CM:SF... you're generally thought of as empty headed fanboys.

The funniest thing about this thread is there were IDENTICAL threads on the Steel Panthers and CC3 forums when CMBO was fresh. The only difference is that the ones who used to be labeled fanboys are labeling others instead.

As the old saying goes, same stuff, different day :D

Steve

http://dosomefink.com/phpbb2/index.php?topic=2851.0

Fixing the link for you, Steve. It's not a private club; you're welcome to join in there; you always have been. I don't see any reference to dicksucking as of late, just some concerned friends and customers of yours talking about stuff that interests them.

To those that don't know about the Annex, it was started when the General Forum here shut down after 9/11, as a place to discuss current events without disrupting the GF here. Mostly BFC forumites there, a few outsiders. Not as much traffic by far. Definitely not a secret by any stretch.

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c3k,

I'm trying to keep this on topic too :D

The issues I'm speaking of revolve around pathfinding and TacAI. I believe there are examples posted several pages ago...

Steve has mentioned that CMSF will continue to be refined. What would you, Steve, LIKE to refine? What do you think CAN be refined?

In theory anything can be refined. It's just a matter of identifying specifics and then putting in the time to addressing them. This is getting much easier now because there are much fewer circumstances that are suboptimal. Enhanced LOS has also made things much, much easier because we have more fidelity with LOF/LOS than we've ever had before.

If I understand the mechanics, every 8 meters is an action spot. The exception being buildings. It seems the movement grid is broken into 8 meter spots as well. Is that true?
True.

If so, how about an adjustment in action spot locations. I mean a parallel to what has been done with buildings. Buildings are tactically useful terrain. You have coded the game to increase the simulation fidelity around these pieces of useful (and often fought over) terrain.

Why not do the same for elevation changes?

Not possible. Buildings are a predictable entity and are either on the map as a whole element or not at all. This is not possible with terrain because terrain is inherently flexible.

However, keep in mind that the TacAI is capable of using terrain within an Action Spot. It does understand concepts like better cover, poorer cover, and even elevation changes.

Where a hill crests is VERY important. Likewise the bottom of a ravine.
This is one of those tricky concepts to "teach" a computer. The difference between a tactically meaningless elevation change and a meaningful one is pretty easy for a Human to detect, but very difficult to get the computer to understand to the same degree.

The TacAI currently does have the ability to recognize ridgelines, gullies, etc. The issue is, I think, that it isn't possible for it to do it in all situations equally well all the time. The problem is players expect it to be right all the time, even if that isn't necessarily realistic (soldiers do some mighty stupid things in real life, as the soldiers here keep reminding you all). So there will probably be some amount of disconnect between player expectation and the TacAI's performance forever. All we can hope for is to reduce this as much as possible as we move along. But to expect it to always get it right is pretty much an expectation that will only lead to disappointment.

Again, I have to remind everybody that as good as the TacAI was for the CMx1 environment, it definitely did things that people found annoying/wrong/stupid. And that was after 6 years of coding for a far, far simpler environment to deal with.

Steve

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Dorosh,

Fixing the link for you, Steve. It's not a private club; you're welcome to join in there; you always have been.
For practical reasons I do not post in any other Forums than this one. That's been my policy since about 1998 and it will not change. I don't have time to keep discussions going in a dozen places simultaneously. I also never, ever, post in secret. I do occasionally lurk when I think there is a reason to.

I don't see any reference to dicksucking as of late, just some concerned friends and customers of yours talking about stuff that interests them.
Apparently speculating on the possibility that I'm insane is something that interests them today :D That seems to be the most common theme, with dicksucking being an apparent one time reference. I don't know who exactly you think is a friend in that thread, but for the most part with friends like that my enemy dance card would be quite full. I dunno about you Dorosh, but in real life I doubt most people would put up with 1/10th of this sort of abuse in person from "friends" without getting into a fist fight.

Still, it is useful to see what is said, otherwise I wouldn't lurk. Pretty much confirms various opinions about Grogs and their general lack of objectivity and their fickle nature. Grogs are a nasty bunch when they don't get exactly what they want, and they aren't afraid to make that very well known. Fortunately it doesn't bother us or we'd be spending our time doing something else other than making wargames.

Steve

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The bottom line is the bitching will continue until 1:1 is done properly. As long as players like the OP are getting turned off by what they see on the screen, you have a problem.

If you cannot get 1:1 to make sense on the screen, the series will die, and maybe so will BF.C.

I support your decision to innovate. Nobody despises John Tiller's decision to squeeze 50 games out of the same tired and ugly game engine than I do.

However, you've also bitten off quite a lot in the attempt to put 1:1 combat on display. I wish you luck, but CMSF has handled the jump rather badly so far.

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Here are some of my thoughts on immersion and how it relates to CMx2 now and into the future.

Immersion is a relative feeling of affinity for a particular game environment. The higher the inherent affinity the higher the starting point for immersion. For example, if one has no like of wargames then they are likely to reject the environments we offer, no matter how much wargamers love it. Meaning, the inherent level of predisposition to liking the game as a whole (setting, genre, particular design emphasis, etc) is the single biggest factor in how immersive the environment will be to that individual.

The more the game, as a whole, overlaps with the player's inherent predisposition the higher the player's tolerance for things which are not optimal in their opinion. For example, we had a lot of people tell us over and over how much they loved CMx1 but hated the camera controls. Over time they got used to the controls and simply accepted them "as is" because the rest of the game gave them what they wanted. Someone who was not all that interested in WW2 warfare might have found the camera controls too clunky and put the game aside because the inherent desire to be immersed in that environment was much lower. Likewise, many hardcore WW2 gamers found it difficult to deal with a 3D environment after a lifetime of thinking in 2D and therefore didn't even try CMx1 demos despite a near perfect overlap of the features, setting, and attention to detail they expect from other games.

More relevant to my point are the CM customers who have LOVED one of the CMx1 games but have no interest in buying one of the other games because of the setting. To the hardcore CMx1 fan, who has bought all, this is extremely hard to understand. But it is fact and many posts by the people I speak of prove it, as do the sales numbers.

The point here is that to the degree that someone doesn't want to be immersed dramatically affects their ability to be immersed no matter what the game does, or doesn't, have to offer. I think of this in terms of subconscious "opposition" to being immersed, which therefore has a significant impact on the ability of the player to be immersed, whether they consciously are aware of it or not.

I think we can all agree with this point, yes? OK then... we move on :D

Many of you guys are lukewarm to the idea of contemporary warfare to start out with. We knew this would be the case long before any of you knew about the Syrian setting. Once we did make it known there was quite an uproar on the Forum (roughly 2+ years ago) which still can be seen to this day. Therefore, a fairly big chunk of the existing CMx1 fanbase was predisposed to some degree of "opposition" to immersion.

This should be a fairly obvious truth, but I'm curious to know if anybody disagrees with this statement?

CM:SF basically had to come out of the gate like skyscraper to be seen as even a moderate sized hut in some people's minds. The fact is, and we do not denny it, that CM:SF came out with some significant issues that had to be worked through. Therefore, a pretty sizable chunk of CMx1 fans were, uhm, disappointed :D Since they weren't predisposed to liking the setting, at the very least, their inherent ability to be immersed was already fairly low, and the problems with CM:SF's initial release pretty much killed off what little chance we had of them finding it less than crap. We take responsibility for that, but only to the extent of knocking down their enjoyment level from "willing to put up with it until WW2 comes out" down to "this game sucks". And of course the people that didn't buy CM:SF at all, simply because of the setting, had a field day with this since Grogs basically have an attitude of "if I can't enjoy a wargame, nobody should". Call it a personally quirk, if you will ;)

Hopefully you all will recognize that the above comments are fair and do address some of the people who have voiced their inability to be immersed by CM:SF.

So where does that leave us? Well, depending on where you personally fall on the spectrum of expectations and inherent desire to embrace the current CMx2 setting, the greater/lesser your threshold for successful immersion is. This explains why some are pretty much happy with the game as it is now, enjoying high levels of immersion, compared to others who are either struggling to be immersed or have given up and are waiting to see how WW2 shapes up.

Our job is to sort out what things we can do to improve immersion for those who currently are struggling, or have given up, being immersed. Going back to the first comment I made above... as per our plan the biggest improvement for most will be going back to WW2. On top of that we're going first to the most popular subject matter, which is NW France 1944. Without a single further improvement to the game we'll have improved immersion potential for a great many people. Game improvements on top of this will, therefore, magnify the overall immersion potential.

Steve

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The OP's post had very little to do with setting, and much more to do with TacAI and pathfinding issues.

Going back to WW2 won't make those issues go away. You've got to get soldiers to do realistic stuff, or what gets shown on the screen is garbage.

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Runyan99,

The bottom line is the bitching will continue until 1:1 is done properly.
Correction... the bitching will continue no matter what :D Bitching is the heart and soul of a Grognard, which is why they were called Grognards (= grumpy, grumbling veteran) instead of something else more flattering.

As long as players like the OP are getting turned off by what they see on the screen, you have a problem.
"OP"? Dunno what you mean by that. (edit... oh, Original Poster... got it!)

Anyway, the problem is there is no "proper" way to do 1:1. There is the impossible extreme standard that Dorosh advocates, but as I've said that is about as possible to do as building a faster than light spaceship. Of the two choices I'd rather shoot for the FTL ship myself since the payback from that long shot would be far better :D

If you cannot get 1:1 to make sense on the screen, the series will die, and maybe so will BF.C.
Point taken, however I don't worry about it. The gap between where we are now and where we probably should be is relatively small potatoes compared to the gap we had between 2003 (when we started CMx2) and now. We survived that and that's where we would have failed if we were going to fail.

I support your decision to innovate. Nobody despises John Tiller's decision to squeeze 50 games out of the same tired and ugly game engine than I do.
Thank you. There is a not-too-subtle anti-innovation movement within the CM community and they still refuse to understand that we could not go down the "regurgitated" game engine route. Not only would it have driven us out of business but it would have bored us into quitting and doing something entirely different.

However, you've also bitten off quite a lot in the attempt to put 1:1 combat on display. I wish you luck, but CMSF has handled the jump rather badly so far.
That's an opinion I don't, on balance, share, but I thank you for wishing us luck anyhoo ;)

The OP's post had very little to do with setting, and much more to do with TacAI and pathfinding issues.

Going back to WW2 won't make those issues go away. You've got to get soldiers to do realistic stuff, or what gets shown on the screen is garbage.

You overestimate what people say vs. what they do. If one believed everything that gamers wrote then no developer, and I mean NONE, would keep making games. The list of demands from the average customer, even a generally positive one, is almost always in excess of the developer's ability to deliver. Bigger budgets just make the amount of requests go up.

Having said that, of course we will continue to improve the game. My previous post was simply to illustrate that a lot of the hostility to the environment will melt away when we move to WW2 simply because they will inherently less opposed to it.

Steve

[ March 31, 2008, 09:24 PM: Message edited by: Battlefront.com ]

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Originally posted by Battlefront.com:

My previous post was simply to illustrate that a lot of the hostility to the environment will melt away when we move to WW2 simply because they will inherently less opposed to it.

Steve

That remains to be seen. There have been a lot of bad WW2 games that were unpopular despite their setting. I wouldn't rely too much on a change of scenery.
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Runyan99,

That remains to be seen. There have been a lot of bad WW2 games that were unpopular despite their setting. I wouldn't rely too much on a change of scenery.
I think you completely underestimate how much of the hostility to the game system stems from it not being WW2. Therefore, you are understandably (in my view) underestimating the impact a change of setting will have.

But your basic point is not lost on us. Fortunately, it was never our intention, ever, to simply churn out different settings with only minor tweaks to the game engine (like Tiller, for example). That's why we're not concerned. Between a major attitude shift because of the change in setting, and the game improvements we intend on adding, I think we'll be fine. Especially considering that sales of CM:SF are within expectations (still). And by that I mean we aren't starting off from the sort of unmitigated disaster some believe we've created, therefore we don't have to worry about our continued existence as much as some people think we do.

Steve

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Runyan99,

Fair enough, but in my estimation your back is against the wall right now to improve 1:1 as much as possible.
Nah... no back against any wall. That implies that we are desperate and if we don't get this one thing "right" (see next comment) then we're out of business. That's not true at all.

What is true is that we won't get some of the CMx1 guys that hate CMx2 to start loving it unless we make some major improvements to the game system itself. We may make some of those changes, we may not. Fortunately for us, when we embarked on CMx2 we had to write off a certain percentage of our existing customer base because they wouldn't want to make the transition, for one reason or another. The way we look at it is any of these type we get to buy CMx2 anything is a bonus, not a necessity.

Now, the problem with doing 1:1 "right"... there is no such thing. As I've said many times, over and over again, there is no B&W solution to anything in game development. It's all about satisfying the most amount of people within your targeted market as possible, not making everybody happy since that's impossible. So we will improve the 1:1 treatment as much as we feel we need to. This is why Dorosh's expectations are doomed to keep him disappointed since nobody, and I mean NOBODY, will ever make the sort of game he insists CM:SF should already be. It's fine to have an ideal in mind, but it is rather pointless when it comes to enjoying what is really there. I'd rather play a game that exists and enjoy it for what it offers than to wait endlessly for a game that will never ever be made.

Steve

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Originally posted by Battlefront.com:

Fortunately for us, when we embarked on CMx2 we had to write off a certain percentage of our existing customer base because they wouldn't want to make the transition, for one reason or another.

Yes but what percentage? I don't know what BF.C's business situation is, but in my opinion it appears you have lost far more of a following than you have gained with CMSF. It seems to me you have got to 'turn a corner' at some point to win back the community.

The grogs may be the most vociferous complainers, but they are likely the mouthpiece for thousands more silent customers who may be thinking along the same lines, but never post here. You won't know they are gone until the sales drop.

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Runyan99,

Yes but what percentage? I don't know what BF.C's business situation is, but in my opinion it appears you have lost far more of a following than you have gained with CMSF.
Incorrect, though I can understand why you perceive that. This Forum, in particular, is the home of the core CMx1 crowd. Therefore, it is natural that this would be the primary spot to see discontent or praise. However, the number of people posting here has never been but a small fraction of our total customer base. The majority of the customer base isn't that interested in spending as much, if not more time, discussing the game as playing it. Hence the majority of customers either post infrequently or not at all in this particular spot (or any other, for that matter).

What this means is that you're seeing a self selected sample that is disproportionally weighted towards one particular type of customer compared to their representation of the whole customer base. Therefore, taking what goes on here too seriously gives one a distorted picture of the whole since this Forum is itself a distortion.

The grogs may be the most vociferous complainers, but they are likely the mouthpiece for thousands more silent customers who may be thinking along the same lines, but never post here. You won't know they are gone until the sales drop.
Grogs are generally not good salesmen for any game since even the ones they like they bitch about endlessly :D Check out CMx1... you'd think that most of the people who bought those games disliked them, yet their post counts were in the thousands and they claim today that they still play them. I can keep this in perspective because I know that Grogs always, ALWAYS, complain no matter what. The average customer, the ones that are thinking a wargame might be interesting, are generally scared off by Grogs. In fact, I've heard more than one wargame maker describe Grogs as the single biggest limiting factor to a wargame's success. Which is why the most successful wargames were not aimed at Grogs but a wider audience. Grogs are, as many wargame makers will tell you, their own worst enemies. Fortunately, they are also an extremely small bunch so their ability to swing a wargame's sales one way or another is not nearly as significant as they think.

Someday I'll write down a list of "rules" that describe Grogs. But the top two, without a doubt are:

1. Rarely, if ever, pass up an opportunity to gripe about something.

2. Overestimate their collective importance to a wargame's success or failure.

Having said that, we are interested in pleasing the Grogs to a certain extent. Otherwise we wouldn't be so anal about the details and getting them right as opposed to RTS games. So it is false to say that we don't care about Grogs at all.

All I'm saying is that we understand, very well, where they fit in the Big Picture and they generally don't factor into calculations in terms of success/failure of us as a business. If we wanted to live off of Grogs we would churn out 2D rehashes of a single engine ad infinitum. We'd have to, in fact, since there wouldn't be enough income to do more than that.

Steve

[ March 31, 2008, 10:45 PM: Message edited by: Battlefront.com ]

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Hmmm. Okay.

I recall I was doing beta for Talonsoft when they started publishing games about rabid monkeys riding motorcycles in a post nuclear future or something. This as I was working on scenarios for their new East Front games, and I thought their departure from pure wargaming marked a misguided loss of focus at the time.

In retrospect it wasn't long after Talonsoft lost 'their grogs' that the company had totally gone astray and soon went out of business.

If you hold to pattern, CMx2 WW2 will flop, then you'll publish Space Lobsters to pay the bills for a while, and you will be a history by 2010.

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Originally posted by thewood:

Unless I missed a post somewhere, I haven't seen Dorosh post anything I would call "bannable". I have seen some of BFC's testers post more confrontational stuff than Dorosh, and I don't even think that was bannable.

Me either, though I don't come into the CMSF forum much. He makes excellent points I happen to agree with a lot of the time.
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Steve,

I'd like to ask a simple question, which no doubt has a complex answer, not just at the cording level, but likely at the intercorporate level, too.

Is there anything that TOW, or for that matter even Drop Team, does well that could be used to help solve some of the issues causing so much heartburn in CMSF? If so, how difficult would it be to arrange such use of the relevant code in your CMx2 engine?

Regards,

John Kettler

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Originally posted by Battlefront.com:

My previous post was simply to illustrate that a lot of the hostility to the environment will melt away when we move to WW2 simply because they will inherently less opposed to it.

Just to voice a different opinion: I have been playing WW2 wargames for roughly a decade (CC2, CC4, CC5, EYSA, CM:BO, CM:BB, CM:AK) and I notice that I am pretty saturated by the theme at this point.

There are only so many times one wants to invade Normandy in his/her life time!

Of course I will play the heck out of it, but I am not sure whether it will be like "meeting an old friend" or "watching a movie for the tenth time"!

Best regards,

Thomm

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Going back a page on this fast moving thread.

Since then, I've posted every issue I've found. I try to post solutions where I have the wherewithal to think of one
While not nearly a frequent poster I have a related but different issue. That is if you think something is worthless, or not worth much, say so. Generally the gamer attitude is 'if it can go in, why not'. Of course the why not is that for everything that goes in some other things have been left out.

Recently for me this was the right-click/spacebar issue which I tried to say was unnecessary. Even now, and being it is an opinion probably always will, do not see see how this can be remotely helpful to people. But there clearly where a large number impressed by its addition.

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Originally posted by Battlefront.com:

Immersion is a relative feeling of affinity for a particular game environment. The higher the inherent affinity the higher the starting point for immersion...Meaning, the inherent level of predisposition to liking the game as a whole (setting, genre, particular design emphasis, etc) is the single biggest factor in how immersive the environment will be to that individual...The point here is that to the degree that someone doesn't want to be immersed dramatically affects their ability to be immersed no matter what the game does, or doesn't, have to offer. I think of this in terms of subconscious "opposition" to being immersed, which therefore has a significant impact on the ability of the player to be immersed, whether they consciously are aware of it or not.

Steve,

While I agree with you to a certain extent, but I think that truly great games overcome any initial indifference or even opposition to the setting.

Two examples which spring to mind are some of the Total War series and Madminute's civil war games. I don't think there were initially many gamers jonesing for a samurai or medieval warfare game, but the series got the balance right and they were a big hit and quite immersive (although rather simplistic). And while there is a big base of Civil War fans, I'm not one of them, but found MadMinute's games very enjoyable even though I have virtually zero interest in the Civil War.

So I would say lack of interest in a particular theater or era is more of a "speedbump" than a "roadblock" to immersion.

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I don't think there were initially many gamers jonesing for a samurai or medieval warfare game
Let me put it this way; I think you hang out with a much different bunch of nerds than I do. No interest in samurai? No interest in Mediveal? Those two probably share with WWII status among top five thematic settings for a game.
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C'Rogers,

I don't use it either. I usually forget it is even there.

As for the issue of Grogs and the Computer Wargaming Economy, they have never had any influence on my decision whether or not to buy a game. I consider myself fairly groggy on modern warfare and am on record about my basic opposition to the entire Stryker concept. I still bought the game and enjoy it, especially now that it has been patched far beyond its original state. Similarly, I am absolutely a Grog on medieval warfare. I am writing my MA Thesis and will write my dissertation on it. In fact my entire research focus is on showing how wrong the basic assumptions that Medieval II: Total War is build on are. Doesn't stop me from buying the game and enjoying it. My numerous posts on their forums about how mistaken the game is don't seem to have had any effect on the sales of that game. Grogs are not the chosen representatives of the silent masses. The masses by things and are either entertained and buy more or they aren't and go away. Grogs are like most blog posters, sound and fury signifying nothing. Unless you believe that the guy who posts about child porn is representing the thousands who just can't bring themselves to post.

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Forgive my attempts at selectively quoting. Steve, you wrote, in part;

Originally posted by Battlefront.com:

This Forum, in particular, is the home of the core CMx1 crowd. Therefore, it is natural that this would be the primary spot to see discontent or praise. However, the number of people posting here has never been but a small fraction of our total customer base. The majority of the customer base isn't that interested in spending as much, if not more time, discussing the game as playing it. Hence the majority of customers either post infrequently or not at all in this particular spot (or any other, for that matter).

What this means is that you're seeing a self selected sample that is disproportionally weighted towards one particular type of customer compared to their representation of the whole customer base. Therefore, taking what goes on here too seriously gives one a distorted picture of the whole since this Forum is itself a distortion.

Grogs are generally not good salesmen for any game since even the ones they like they bitch about endlessly :D Check out CMx1... you'd think that most of the people who bought those games disliked them, yet their post counts were in the thousands and they claim today that they still play them. I can keep this in perspective because I know that Grogs always, ALWAYS, complain no matter what. The average customer, the ones that are thinking a wargame might be interesting, are generally scared off by Grogs. In fact, I've heard more than one wargame maker describe Grogs as the single biggest limiting factor to a wargame's success. Which is why the most successful wargames were not aimed at Grogs but a wider audience. Grogs are, as many wargame makers will tell you, their own worst enemies. Fortunately, they are also an extremely small bunch so their ability to swing a wargame's sales one way or another is not nearly as significant as they think.

Someday I'll write down a list of "rules" that describe Grogs. But the top two, without a doubt are:

1. Rarely, if ever, pass up an opportunity to gripe about something.

2. Overestimate their collective importance to a wargame's success or failure.

Having said that, we are interested in pleasing the Grogs to a certain extent. Otherwise we wouldn't be so anal about the details and getting them right as opposed to RTS games. So it is false to say that we don't care about Grogs at all.

All I'm saying is that we understand, very well, where they fit in the Big Picture and they generally don't factor into calculations in terms of success/failure of us as a business. If we wanted to live off of Grogs we would churn out 2D rehashes of a single engine ad infinitum. We'd have to, in fact, since there wouldn't be enough income to do more than that.

Steve [/QB]

At what point does a customer who posts here become a classified as a grog? If you discount grog complaints, and then point to any other complainers as a non-representative minority, the only posters you have left are supporters.

I would submit that the supporters are the ones you should ignore. Sure, take the pat on the back. You've worked hard. Accept a bit of thanks and take pride in your accomplishments. But the path to decay surely starts by ignoring criticisms and only valuing accolades.

I know you've mentioned the value of constructive criticism, but where is the line?

At what point do you take the postings here seriously?

Regards,

Ken

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