Part 1: What's happening right now?
Right now we're working on the update we promised (the one we talked about in Development Blog #12). We'll describe some of the things we've done later in the post, where we usually put funny gifs about the atmosphere in our office :)
Now, to our topic for today!
Polls are a delicate matter
We started using polls actively about 7 months ago, once the required features had been introduced. Since then, we've conducted 17 polls. That means we've conducted an average of two and a half polls per month.
Perhaps we should've conducted more? Or perhaps less? Or maybe we should've changed the number of questions per poll? It's a difficult decision – we need to find out as much as possible, but it's also not a good idea to overburden players with a multitude of questions. So we've tried many poll formats during these 7 months. They included any number of questions between one and ten. We tried five-point scale and ten-point scale rating questions, comments sections, and multiple choice questions.
Anyway, if you think our polls should have more or fewer questions, please, don't hesitate to tell us! Also, we'll be very happy to hear any suggestions and ideas you have about improving the poll system in general.
The latest poll on Skirmish included only two points: one general question with an 10-point scale and a comments section. By the way, the results turned out to be pretty intriguing.
When we analyse poll results, we usually distinguish among several categories of players. Here are the categories we used for the latest poll:
- All players
- All 7-tier players
- New players (less than a month in the game)
- 7-tier players with less than 3 months in the game
- Veterans (over a year in the game)
The results formed the following picture:
Looking at this, we can draw several conclusions:
- * Players with different playtime and progress amounts generally rate the game the same way.
- The average rating is "good".
- * The great bulk of replies are with a rating between 5 and 7, indicating that we could improve the game with a few updates to smooth it out. (We can't really do very much based on those who rated it from 1-3, because that would require remaking the game from scratch :)
So we've confirmed that we're moving in the right direction with the game's development, and we've prepared another poll that should help us understand what else could be changed to make our project even better and turn those 5-7 ratings into 8-10.
The poll is already available in the game, so please let us know which aspect of the game we should concentrate on next.
Comments are even more delicate
Communication via forums and social media is a whole different matter. Some of you (perhaps, many of you) have probably thought at one point, "Why didn't the developers listen to my suggestion, even though it got a few likes and several people even agreed with me?"
The thing is, not everybody on the Internet is inclined to write comments and participate in discussions. So, if we strictly followed forum suggestions, we'd be making the game only for the "loudest" people on the Internet. Besides, we regularly see vastly different ideas from the most active forum users. A good example was the suggestion to "make everything like it was in the first game". Later it turned out that "the first game" was different for everybody. Some people never logged out of GameSpy, while others beat the singleplayer campaign 5 times. Some played it only on a local network with a friend. All these people have very different impressions of the game's mechanics, rules, and pace. We're trying to create a game that simultaneously incorporates as many suggestions as possible, while also bringing in something new.
But that doesn't mean we ignore the comments altogether. We don't. We carefully collect them, analyse them, and look for things that can be implemented. At the same time, we don't always reply to every comment. And that's not just because we often have already done so "yesterday in another thread" but also because, if we did, our presence on the forums would be too strong. We'd look like a Big Brother hanging over forum users' heads.
By the way, we're often asked about the aspects of the game that we haven't yet started working on at all. Things like clans or planned DLCs. Don't take it the wrong way when we dodge these questions or just remain silent. Or when we say that "we're going to think about your clan idea later". We mean it! We are going to think about it later, when we actually get to work on this feature :)
And now, as usual, a few words from the development team about their most recent week of work.
Sasha, Lead Technical Artist:
They (surprisingly!) aren't letting us show anything, but I was able to get some things into the blog.
Sergey, lead community manager:
Part 2: Player Suggestions
Here's a suggestion from Sclu (on the project's VK page): "The game really needs a minimum reward of about 20-30% for losing in Skirmish. Imagine somebody plays a Skirmish battle. Then another one, then another one... they keep losing, they lose resources, they can't make any progress, and eventually they leave the game!"
You're absolutely right: this is a real problem. But we're going to solve it in a slightly different way, because we need to treat the cause, not the symptoms ;)
The current situation is caused by the fact that players fighting in Skirmish are often at very different levels. We've made our matchmaking broader, and now a hardened veteran may end up facing a rather average player or vice versa. We did this to make it easier to find an opponent while the project is still under development. As we add separate ratings for different game modes and also take into account the player's level, this problem will go away on its own.
Dante Psykowski (on the project's Facebook page) asked: And why duration of skirmish is average 5 min !? 10 min max if i let enemy have 1 point ! Srsly who was working on this and not aware of too short timeframe.
The cause and the solution here are the same as with the previous question. Naturally, the fight won't take very long if you're a veteran player with over 200 hours in the game and you're facing a less-experienced opponent.
Stefan (on the project's Steam page) asked: "Will the good old encyclopedia be returning in Blitzkrieg 3?"
We're planning to start working actively on the website soon. It already contains some basics, and we're going to develop them into a knowledge base. We may (possibly, but not definitely) add an in-game button to open the website knowledge base.
Part 3: The Next Episode
In the next episode, we'll tell you about our work on pathfinding. We'll talk about our mistakes and how we fixed them. Don't miss it – it'll be fun :)