Steel Division attracted quite a different group of players vs Wargame

[Person012345]

This is a forum for a videogame where i gave my reasons for not playing the said vidyagame. Judging by the diminishing pool of players, I may not be the only one sharing these thoughts.

Edit: you also quoted the wrong guy (LegioX)

I don't know why it did that I just hit the quote button.

And I understand, I just took issue with the way you phrased some things. Its ludicrous to say it "took away player skill", if it did that there wouldn't be such noobstomping going on. I have no problem with the certain things that aren'tto your taste which is why I spent no/not much words on them.

 

[Partizaan]

I tend to agree with Sleska, but I'm willing to accept that one is not better than the other. It's just a matter of taste. But it's basically the answer to OPs question. It's quite obvious why not all RD players switched to SD. They are really different games in the core mechanics. RNG and the moral system makes them hugely different. They look quite similar but they are not.
What annoys me the most apart from the stuff Sleska mentioned is the stupid retreat mechanic especially for infantry. It should be possible to tell them where to retreat. Its just so stupid to watch them sqatter into random different direction often into another line of fire. Thats a rout. Most retrats historically were maybe not in good order but at least into the right general direction. Watching inf in SD "retreating" just hurts.
But yeah, different core game, different players.

 

[Kampfmeerschwein]

I have been lurking on the forum for a longer time now and just wanted to add, why I love SD. I own all Wargame titles, but my overall playtime across all the titles is at roughly ~25 hours in total, whereas SD is now raking up 95 hours already...

1. I did like Wargame, particularly the campaigns (or the idea of it). But the A.I. was lackluster. However, SD A.I. is the best I have encountered in any strategy game yet.

2. I am mostly a compstomper. Since I have virtually no experience in beating humans in strategy games, I am happy to see that SD is extremely funny and challenging concerning the skirmish A.I.

3. I am addicted to the WW2 scenario and personally prefer it much more than any other scenario.

4. I like the approach towards realism and the game fills a niche no other game could. It is fairly accesible (at least if you are familiar with WW2, like I am) and still hard to master. I cant play CoH because it is rather dumb and dull in my opinion and pretty unauthentic (e.g. a tank should NOT have a health bar, any shot that penetrates is critical bc. the interior is so crammed that basically any spot has a critical function inside.)

This is why I am really happy with the game and could persuade 2 of my friends to buy the game and enjoy it regularly with me. None of them played W:RD before by the way, but they were driven off of other games like CoH for the same reasons as me.

So far my only issues are the balancing: Axis vs. Allies, Planes vs. AA, some arbitrary income decisions for some divisions (I am looking at you, 3rd Armored...). Apart from that, SD is hands down my favourite strategy game so far and I hope it wont cease to exist too soon.

 

[Harold Alexander]

The reason why I didn't get into SD despite a lot of time in all of the wargames is mostly due to the game taking several steps back in many different gameplay mechanics. The setting doesn't matter too much, but I do prefer post ww2 stuff because it adds up more mechanics into the game like missiles, helicopters and so on.

Some removed, some added. Nothing critical. Thanks to God we have game without cluster arty and helicopters.

Replacing a perfectly functional damage table/health system with random number generation. This mechanic basically replaces skill based gameplay with luck on whether a expensive tank lives after it gets shot. As a further problem this also makes offensive play a lot riskier, as in wargame you could often try to save your tank by spotting missiles coming in, reversing to safety after taking a hit and so on. in SD this is all replaced with a chance to die instantly whenever the tank gets shot at. I cannot emphasize how retarded of a decision this was, as replacing player skill with luck based systems is never a good idea, unless you're trying to create a mobile game. This more or less completely killed any enthusiasm I had for the game.

That's show how bad you know the game actually, you have many different ways and tools to minimize randomness to 0%, because stunned and falling back vehicles can't open fire. Here you just need to use your skill in another way. Also WG have not that much less RDM than SD with all that optical failures, cumputer reset etc, lucky sideshots.

Lowering the amount of units. The players generally control a quarter the amount of units compared to the wargame series due to large unit costs and very low availabilities. As a direct comparison to buy a cheapest possible tank in SD nearly always requires a whole minute's worth of income, while in wargame it's possible to buy anywhere between 4-10 of the cheapest tanks.

you have different decks, so as example USSR deck playstile and amount of units are pretty the same as divisions in SD. Main reason why amount of units looks lower - trucks which missing after unload. Also with Luftlande and some other decks you can into cheap units spam in the same way as in Wargame.

Maps. The maps in wargame were never that good, but SD's are a lot worse. It's nothing but flat maps with rows of treelines with the same imbalances that happened in WG (uneven road networks and one side having a better shot at capturing key cities). One might call this super duper realistic but I'll call it what it is,: bland, boring, repetitive and imbalanced.

For sure maps in SD is much more balanced than in Wargame, you just dont like them because of WG fanboism.

Simplifying many different mechanics.
This goes for a massive number of things, such as removing the ke/heat mechanic, health system and so on.

Ke/heat mechanics removed??? Lol that again shows how biased you are and how bad you know this game. Infantry still have health system, also HE damage and suppression damage still have HP.

 

[Harold Alexander]

I tend to agree with Sleska, but I'm willing to accept that one is not better than the other. It's just a matter of taste. But it's basically the answer to OPs question. It's quite obvious why not all RD players switched to SD. They are really different games in the core mechanics. RNG and the moral system makes them hugely different. They look quite similar but they are not.
What annoys me the most apart from the stuff Sleska mentioned is the stupid retreat mechanic especially for infantry. It should be possible to tell them where to retreat. Its just so stupid to watch them sqatter into random different direction often into another line of fire. Thats a rout. Most retrats historically were maybe not in good order but at least into the right general direction. Watching inf in SD "retreating" just hurts.
But yeah, different core game, different players.

most WG players dropped SD after few hours of playing because that's not WG clone what they wanted.

 

[Spawnfärkäl]

... because that's not WG clone ...

Yep... what a pity!

 

[Crotou]

@Sleksa I won't repeat what Harold replied to you, I 100% agrees with him.

Still one point from your text hit me hard : the maps. Yes, SD's maps are all (but one) flat and looks like the same overall. Blame Normandy for that. But concerning the imbalances, I remind you that thanks to the DFL mechanics, there is no more concept such as "key cities" or "key hedgerow". Because you can go past the cities and hedgerows to take the land elsewhere. You ar not fucked because you have to capture a zone which is behind a city or a bush. That's a HUGE difference. And all wargamers here know how voicy I have been being about bad map design for the three WG (especially since ALB).

 

[xXSunSlayerXx]

Where SD mostly failed for me are the following:

Replacing a perfectly functional damage table/health system with random number generation. This mechanic basically replaces skill based gameplay with luck on whether a expensive tank lives after it gets shot.

You mean... exactly like how accuracy always worked in the entire Wargame series? If anything, RNG got significantly reduced by the lack of guided missiles compared to Wargame...

 

[jammiebadger]

I think it would be pretty much impossible to import wargame mechanics and meta into steel division timeline and maintain a degree of balance and historical accuracy. I think what this proves is that what makes Wargame popular is game play and flexibility of deck design and not historical accuracy or realism.

Its what i've always suspected the people that want historical accuracy are not the people that sink thousands of hours into Wargame and probably any other game coming to think of it. You might have expected Act of Aggression to have been popular pursuing that line of reasoning but it wasn't because it was pitched at people who liked those golden age RTS games which were not all that interesting for people who are now adults, i played a lot of Command and Conquer in my early teens, i wouldn't touch it or a modern version of it with a barge pole now i'm in my thirties and found Act of Aggression basically incredibly tedious and shallow in comparison with Wargame with most viable strategies involving spawning a blob of units and rushing to destroy the enemy, honestly helo rushing is more fun than that.

What makes Wargame popular is the sheer number of different playstyles and deck choices which are viable along with a whole load of ridiculous decks such as Denmark mechanized which is or was quite fun to play as well. The tax that you pay on that flexibility though is the years of balancing it took to get Red Dragon to the level that it is today and the utterly terrible metas we went through during the early stages, not to mention DLC decks which with the exception of the Netherlands were broken as fuck when they came out and wiped out any remaining credibility in terms of Realism that Red Dragon had left.

 

[Person012345]

Its what i've always suspected the people that want historical accuracy are not the people that sink thousands of hours into Wargame and probably any other game coming to think of it.

 

[jammiebadger]

Which proves what exactly?

 

[Claremont Waltz]

IDK. I can post screens of my ~900hrs in WRD (or just about as much as his time in both combined) despite liking SD44 (350hrs + if you include closed beta) more in theory (balance makes me hate it right now) and I'm not sure what the heck it'd prove other than that I'm a nerd who plays way too much of these games.

Oh but I'm a corporal because release 1v1 balance was terrible so I refused to play ranked after like day 2 so best ignore me. (-:

 

[Dundradal]

I play both Wargame and SD. I really enjoyed Wargame's focus on the neglected Cold War. Sure, it never truly went hot, but who didn't dream about fighting off waves of Soviet tanks in the Fulda Gap or leading those same tanks all the way to the Channel? It made for some great potential. Yeah, the dynamics led to a lot of fighting over the same treelines and locations, but it was a lot of fun.

I wasn't sold on SD at first. The game mechanics were annoying at first, but once I got used to them, they grew on me. There are still somethings I don't enjoy or like, but that happens.

I do wish that SD had been set in the Cold War and built off the improvements in RD (there are some odd steps back in SD that don't make sense...it's like they copied somethings but ignored others for no good reason) but I'm going to continue enjoying this and hoping the playerbase can bounce back. I certainly try to be friendlier in chat and games to get newbies to stay around and not just quit.

 

[Zinegata]

Steel Division didn't show in the top 200 also owned games for Wargame: Red Dragon owners which would put it at less than 15% of the ~600k WG: RD owners. Going by the SD numbers that own WG: RD it seems like around 50k people own both games.

I'm rather curious as to why there's such a difference... I suspect based on the games WG: RD players mostly own that the WW2 setting wasn't as appealing as the more modern cold war era. Also, Paradox being the publisher seems to have exposed SD mostly to their playerbase. I don't remember seeing SD advertised anywhere other than the marketing emails and posts from Paradox official accounts.

Since I started the trend of using SteamSpy's "game owned" feature to debunk a lot of the "SD is an inferior WG" nonsense, I felt it best to do a bit more analysis based on WG's "games owned" numbers.

The key thing to realize here is that besides Wargame: EE/ALB being the top 2 "other games owned", the rest of the list is actually pretty mundane and typical for your average gamer with a slight strategy bent. Your "average" gamer is mostly going to be playing Civ 5 and Total War for their strategy games; and have a collection of non-strategy games like CS: Go and Left4Dead.

Which means that the EE/ALB ownership are outliers; and given they all belong in the same game series it leads to an extremely simple explanation: A core minority of Red Dragon owners are long-time Wargame players who have been playing since either EE or ALB. This "veteran" base is what's skewing the numbers for what should be "Just another strategy game in a regular strategy gamer's collection".

So the picture that emerges is this: Wargame's audience consists of two main groups. The first, larger group are regular strategy gamers who played RD only briefly. A second, minority group play Wargame primarily and have been doing so since EE/ALB.

Which actually cuts to the heart of the problem and de-mystifies all of SD "hate" from WG players. WG players don't want to migrate to SD simply because they don't want to learn a new game. They've been playing WG for too long to want to migrate.

And note this is a recurring issue with multiplayer RTSs. There is a reason why the best-selling RTS on Steam is Age of Empires 2 HD, and why we are getting Starcraft remastered. Learning to play an RTS and getting good at it is hard. Most players who buy an RTS never get to this level and drop it after a few weeks, going back to Civ 5 or CS: Go or Total War. The ones who do learn tend to become very insular and "toxic" because they get really attached to the game due to all the effort they've put into it.

Sadly, the harsh conclusion that can be derived from all this data is thus really simple: New RTSs are simply doomed. It's not about the setting or mechanics or balance. There are simply not enough new game players who want to invest 50+ hours just to become competent in a game and there are too many "veterans" who will end up stomping them anyway before they get there. That's why the RTSs that are prospering today are either ones that don't rely on the multiplayer aspect (e.g. Total War, EUIV engine games), or old classics with huge pre-existing veteran player bases. That Dawn of War 3 - which had a much larger budget and made a conscious attempt to "widen" the base by being more MOBA-ish - got stuck at just 250,000 copies sold is a stark demonstration of the dire position of the genre as a whole.

Edit: Also, the above should really demonstrate why pining for WG4 really isn't going to change anything. Sure you might get some older WG players to migrate, but it's just as likely many will cite a couple of changes they don't like for the sake of not having to move and spend more money. Meanwhile the real source of new players - which is the wider game market - will continue to see it as a game where they will get stomped and don't see themselves wanting to invest 50+ hours to get good. It's a genre problem, not a problem with any specific game.

 

[Fade2Gray]

Since I started the trend of using SteamSpy's "game owned" feature to debunk a lot of the "SD is an inferior WG" nonsense, I felt it best to do a bit more analysis based on WG's "games owned" numbers.

The key thing to realize here is that besides Wargame: EE/ALB being the top 2 "other games owned", the rest of the list is actually pretty mundane and typical for your average gamer with a slight strategy bent. Your "average" gamer is mostly going to be playing Civ 5 and Total War for their strategy games; and have a collection of non-strategy games like CS: Go and Left4Dead.

Which means that the EE/ALB ownership are outliers; and given they all belong in the same game series it leads to an extremely simple explanation: A core minority of Red Dragon owners are long-time Wargame players who have been playing since either EE or ALB. This "veteran" base is what's skewing the numbers for what should be "Just another strategy game in a regular strategy gamer's collection".

So the picture that emerges is this: Wargame's audience consists of two main groups. The first, larger group are regular strategy gamers who played RD only briefly. A second, minority group play Wargame primarily and have been doing so since EE/ALB.

Which actually cuts to the heart of the problem and de-mystifies all of SD "hate" from WG players. WG players don't want to migrate to SD simply because they don't want to learn a new game. They've been playing WG for too long to want to migrate.

And note this is a recurring issue with multiplayer RTSs. There is a reason why the best-selling RTS on Steam is Age of Empires 2 HD, and why we are getting Starcraft remastered. Learning to play an RTS and getting good at it is hard. Most players who buy an RTS never get to this level and drop it after a few weeks, going back to Civ 5 or CS: Go or Total War. The ones who do learn tend to become very insular and "toxic" because they get really attached to the game due to all the effort they've put into it.

Sadly, the harsh conclusion that can be derived from all this data is thus really simple: New RTSs are simply doomed. It's not about the setting or mechanics or balance. There are simply not enough new game players who want to invest 50+ hours just to become competent in a game and there are too many "veterans" who will end up stomping them anyway before they get there. That's why the RTSs that are prospering today are either ones that don't rely on the multiplayer aspect (e.g. Total War, EUIV engine games), or old classics with huge pre-existing veteran player bases. That Dawn of War 3 - which had a much larger budget and made a conscious attempt to "widen" the base by being more MOBA-ish - got stuck at just 250,000 copies sold is a stark demonstration of the dire position of the genre as a whole.

Edit: Also, the above should really demonstrate why pining for WG4 really isn't going to change anything. Sure you might get some older WG players to migrate, but it's just as likely many will cite a couple of changes they don't like for the sake of not having to move and spend more money. Meanwhile the real source of new players - which is the wider game market - will continue to see it as a game where they will get stomped and don't see themselves wanting to invest 50+ hours to get good. It's a genre problem, not a problem with any specific game.

Wow, this is some interesting theorycrafting. I think the biggest highlight is this...

Which actually cuts to the heart of the problem and de-mystifies all of SD "hate" from WG players. WG players don't want to migrate to SD simply because they don't want to learn a new game. They've been playing WG for too long to want to migrate.

What utter nonsense. This is literally just the polite way of calling the Wargame community "lazy" or "bitter" or whatever you want to call it. It's basically a long winded attempt to mock players like me. What strikes me as amusing is how so similar that WG and SD are that people are still harping on the "don't want to learn a new game." Ummm, what? I may not own the game, but I have played it. The transition from WG into SD is pretty easy I find, overall the games are so similar that as long as you have someone you can poke at for questions you can adjust to SD very rapidly. I took to it like a fish to water because of my long history of playing WG. I dare say that plenty of other long time WG players have felt the same as well.

tl;dr Wargamers don't want to play Steel Division because they are "lazy" is pure garbage and anyone who says that is just talking out of their 4th point of contact.

The biggest irony is this, I'm actually pretty excited about much of the tweaks that SD made to the WG style of RTS. I love how they have changed conquest, and I think the "divisions" idea of deck building is pretty nifty. Needs some serious fleshing out and more tweaking to resolve a lot of things, and some other things I'm not a fan of, but overall I'm pretty excited about the direction it is taking. Why didn't I get SDN then? Because WW2 does not interest me. Otherwise I'm definitely following the development closely and hoping that they make a solid series out of this.

Sure thing. Its the most convienent group to blame. Nevermind the other dozen or so possible explanations.

At this point I think this "bitterness" is simply projection. The SD community on here is very bitter and down that their game has dropped off a cliff, so they want to blame something. Right now it just happens to be "in" to blame Wargamers, it is a pretty even way to get free upvotes on here I'm noticed. Bad mouth Wargamers and the SDN community (what's left of it that is) eats it up.

It seems Eugen are stuck between two paradigms with this game. There are those who came to it via Close Combat, and similar (very old) WWII RTS games, and want a more realistic, slower paced game. And those who have the history with Eugen and Wargame franchise. They want a competitive game, more than anything. It is a tricky balancing act.

As someone who is a fan of the Combat Mission series (well, I only own Black Sea and Shock Force), I find the claims of SDN being more "realistic" to be highly entertaining. I sometimes wish out loud on the WGRD forums for features from CMBS. From what I can tell, there isn't any "random" generation for the penetration and what not, nor are there "criticals" like in EUGEN's RTS games. If a shot penetrates but doesn't get a solid kill on an AFV, you will often have things like the engine knocked out, crew members dead, and even having them bail out (and they can even get back in, or you can have them crawl forward to look around, etc etc. You can even order them to bail out if you want). If you really want "realism" then you should go look at the CM mission series, it makes everything EUGEN has done look like a bunch of silly kiddie games in the realism department.

 

[Sleksa]

@Sleksa I won't repeat what Harold replied to you, I 100% agrees with him.

Still one point from your text hit me hard : the maps. Yes, SD's maps are all (but one) flat and looks like the same overall. Blame Normandy for that. But concerning the imbalances, I remind you that thanks to the DFL mechanics, there is no more concept such as "key cities" or "key hedgerow". Because you can go past the cities and hedgerows to take the land elsewhere. You ar not fucked because you have to capture a zone which is behind a city or a bush. That's a HUGE difference. And all wargamers here know how voicy I have been being about bad map design for the three WG (especially since ALB).

Yes the frontline system is imo a good improvement. SD in general does have many things right like giving commands to units before launch, the neat movement showing lines, los tool etc, but the negative parts still far outweigh the positives (again, for me).

So the picture that emerges is this: Wargame's audience consists of two main groups. The first, larger group are regular strategy gamers who played RD only briefly. A second, minority group play Wargame primarily and have been doing so since EE/ALB.

Which actually cuts to the heart of the problem and de-mystifies all of SD "hate" from WG players. WG players don't want to migrate to SD simply because they don't want to learn a new game. They've been playing WG for too long to want to migrate.

And note this is a recurring issue with multiplayer RTSs. There is a reason why the best-selling RTS on Steam is Age of Empires 2 HD, and why we are getting Starcraft remastered. Learning to play an RTS and getting good at it is hard. Most players who buy an RTS never get to this level and drop it after a few weeks, going back to Civ 5 or CS: Go or Total War. The ones who do learn tend to become very insular and "toxic" because they get really attached to the game due to all the effort they've put into it.

This is a downright moronic attempt to bash on wargame players in general for not getting into SD. Personally I stopped playing wargame over a year ago and switched into open red alert and age of empires, the former of which i'd never played before. I gave SD a similiar shot but considered it a less succesfull version of wargame, which retained the chief problems of the series like splitting the already low playerbase between moronic destruction mode and slightly smarter conquest, as well as 10v10's and custom tactical lobbies and such. Another big problem was the lack of matchmaking system, leading into lobby gaming where people stack their teams into one side and kick any other team trying to give them a fair fight.

Also wargame (and SD) have always had highly toxic communities filled with things i hesitate to call people. Other games do it too, but ww2 and cold war nationalism brings out the best of everyone. It's a lot harder to do such dickwaving about starcraft marines, zerg hydralisks or c&c ion cannons and tesla tanks when there's no nationalist wanking nor 100000 books, reports and history channel documentaries to base one's beliefs on.

 

[Archonsod]

Replacing a perfectly functional damage table/health system with random number generation. This mechanic basically replaces skill based gameplay with luck on whether a expensive tank lives after it gets shot.

That's the other way around. You know (or can work out) the odds of any given weapon being able to penetrate a given tank. You also know how to increase or decrease those odds. The entire system is based on minimising chance (admittedly luck will still play a part since as far as I know no weapon can get 100% to penetrate, and I don't think it's possible to reduce most AP weapons to 0% chance to penetrate). Assuming two players of equal skill the luck factor should balance out over the course of a game (for every 10% chance of killing a tank that comes through you'll likely get a 90% chance of a kill that bounces); generally speaking the player who is better able to exploit the odds in their favour should see the better results.
Health bar systems on the other hand work to mitigate against player decisions by providing a buffer. If your tank is caught out of position by well placed AT guns it'll take a mauling but you'll usually have a chance to pull it back. Conversely the opposite is also true - doesn't matter how badly the AT guns are played, they can still beat the tank through simple attrition.

Maps. The maps in wargame were never that good, but SD's are a lot worse. It's nothing but flat maps with rows of treelines

Welcome to Normandy It would be nice if there were more map variation; not every engagement took place in the French countryside, and of course there's always the Netherlands (still flat, but a lot more interesting in terms of rivers and canals).

Which actually cuts to the heart of the problem and de-mystifies all of SD "hate" from WG players. WG players don't want to migrate to SD simply because they don't want to learn a new game. They've been playing WG for too long to want to migrate.

The same data could also lead to the conclusion that there's a significant number of players likely to have bought SD on the basis of it being Eugen rather than any desire to actually play.

That's why the RTSs that are prospering today are either ones that don't rely on the multiplayer aspect (e.g. Total War, EUIV engine games), or old classics with huge pre-existing veteran player bases.

Not sure I can agree with that conclusion. Back when they released UT3, in the era before F2P was a thing, they justified it's inclusion of a campaign mode by revealing that 80% of UT2004 players never went online. So only 20% of the player base for an online, multiplayer arena shooter actually bothered using the online multiplayer bit. It's nothing to do with the games; multiplayer has always been something of a niche, and with that particular niche being well served these days by professionally produced free to play games most developers focus on single player because that's where the money is.

That Dawn of War 3 - which had a much larger budget and made a conscious attempt to "widen" the base by being more MOBA-ish - got stuck at just 250,000 copies sold is a stark demonstration of the dire position of the genre as a whole.

It's more an illustration in why you don't radically redesign a successful franchise unless you know for a fact the new game will find an audience. They changed the game fundamentally from it's predecessors which lost them much of the existing audience, but the game they released wasn't good enough to attract much of a new audience. It may just be me being overly cynical, but I wouldn't at all be surprised if DoW 3 was a case of a company trying to use a franchise to flog what was otherwise a mediocre game that spectacularly backfired.

 

[Zinegata]

The same data could also lead to the conclusion that there's a significant number of players likely to have bought SD on the basis of it being Eugen rather than any desire to actually play.

Not really because there isn't a lot of Eugen titles on the "Also owned" list of SD owners. Red Dragon is the highest and it's not even in the top 10. I would argue that Eugen - the developer - holds virtually no stock with the majority of the playerbase. It's simply not a big enough studio for your average gamer; which further puts to light how silly all of the Eugen-hating is by the "veteran" WG community.

Not sure I can agree with that conclusion. Back when they released UT3, in the era before F2P was a thing, they justified it's inclusion of a campaign mode by revealing that 80% of UT2004 players never went online. So only 20% of the player base for an online, multiplayer arena shooter actually bothered using the online multiplayer bit. It's nothing to do with the games; multiplayer has always been something of a niche, and with that particular niche being well served these days by professionally produced free to play games most developers focus on single player because that's where the money is.

You're disagreeing that multiplayer RTSs are dead by saying all multiplayer games are niches anyway. Not really sure why you are bothering to disagree.

It's more an illustration in why you don't radically redesign a successful franchise unless you know for a fact the new game will find an audience. They changed the game fundamentally from it's predecessors which lost them much of the existing audience, but the game they released wasn't good enough to attract much of a new audience. It may just be me being overly cynical, but I wouldn't at all be surprised if DoW 3 was a case of a company trying to use a franchise to flog what was otherwise a mediocre game that spectacularly backfired.

Except that there is no such thing as knowing for a fact that a new game will find an audience. Moreover, I would argue that DoW3 (and some of the recent sequels like Civ 6) were not radical redesigns from the core formula, and yet there has been a lot of disproportionate complaints from the existing fanbase about these changes. That's again not a "the game is good/bad" issue, as that issue is entirely too micro and quite frankly little more than fans trying to make themselves feel big.

The simpler reality is that people are people. When they invest time in something, they will continue to support it because migrating will "undo" all of that time investment. That is why MMOs are still led by WoW for instance. It's just really unfortunate that people aren't honest to themselves and just say this; and instead try to be amateur game designers giving their (often very mistaken) two cents about why a game is good or bad to try and justify game choices.

 

[Zinegata]

What utter nonsense. This is literally just the polite way of calling the Wargame community "lazy" or "bitter" or whatever you want to call it. It's basically a long winded attempt to mock players like me.

Of course it was. Because I can literally say something like "The Sky is Blue" and you would pretend it's an insult to the "Wargame Community". Expecting broken logic and feigned offense is completely expected from the "Wargame Community" at this point.

In short, thank you for simply confirming that the Wargame Community is really just a pile of salty players starving for attention which is why they keep trying to claim that they "killed" Steel Division or their "suggestions" can fix it.

The SD community on here is very bitter and down that their game has dropped off a cliff, so they want to blame something.

Uh-huh. And yet you twisted "Steel Division tried to revive a dead genre and failed" into "The WG community was insulted"!

Sorry, but what this tells me is that you're the one who's bitter here. I didn't say the WG community was lazy. The WG community was irrelevant. Meaning whether they didn't matter even if they helped or hated.

The point is they didn't want to migrate because they didn't want to change games. That has nothing to do with laziness or bitterness. People are people. This is why WoW is still alive.

If you're mad that they're irrelevant then maybe they should take a long, hard look at how Wargame crashed and burned years ago and have been reduced to whining about other games. Or better yet if you're mad because I "insulted" you and that "community" then maybe you should realize how idiotic it is to be feel insulted by someone saying that the sky is blue.

 

[Zinegata]

This is a downright moronic attempt to bash on wargame players in general for not getting into SD.

This is more Wargame players trying to pretend the world only exists to insult them.

Personally I stopped playing wargame over a year ago and switched into open red alert and age of empires, the former of which i'd never played before

"And note this is a recurring issue with multiplayer RTSs. There is a reason why the best-selling RTS on Steam is Age of Empires 2 HD, and why we are getting Starcraft remastered. Learning to play an RTS and getting good at it is hard. Most players who buy an RTS never get to this level and drop it after a few weeks, going back to Civ 5 or CS: Go or Total War."

Uh-huh. So you decided to rant to try and "disprove" me... yet you admitted you kept switching RTS games just as I say most players are inclined to do.

Because again that's usual player behavior. But no, this "usual player behavior" must be an insult to Wargame players for not switching to SD.

I gave SD a similiar shot but considered it a less succesfull version of wargame, which retained the chief problems of the series like splitting the already low playerbase between moronic destruction mode and slightly smarter conquest, as well as 10v10's and custom tactical lobbies and such. Another big problem was the lack of matchmaking system, leading into lobby gaming where people stack their teams into one side and kick any other team trying to give them a fair fight.

... And there's the SD cheap-shotting to try and gain points.

Also wargame (and SD) have always had highly toxic communities filled with things i hesitate to call people. Other games do it too, but ww2 and cold war nationalism brings out the best of everyone. It's a lot harder to do such dickwaving about starcraft marines, zerg hydralisks or c&c ion cannons and tesla tanks when there's no nationalist wanking nor 100000 books, reports and history channel documentaries to base one's beliefs on.

Try a DOTA 2 or LOL community. Plenty of toxicity but no nationalism there!

The whole "nationalism makes the game more toxic" angle is just more nonsense peddled by the WG community to try and make their game feel more special; just as the whole "I don't like the theme" bit is largely a non-issue. Most WG owners don't even own any other Cold War games.