Dave Dave Crook7年前Lets start off with some truth: our relationship has been on the rocks for a long time now. To be frank a good number of the players feel like they are being ignored, and that your being exploitive. We have had meetings, we have yelled, we have boycotted and yet your hell bent on staying the course that your on.
This is a mistake.
You are a company that once called itself “little Zynga” - they had faith that their marketing efforts would always be able to replenish the customers that they burnt out, burnt through. The problem is that customer acquisition without retention isn’t a way to build a sustainable business, or brand. More importantly the pool of players in the “giant robots” genre isn’t nearly as deep as you might think. Those that enjoy the genre most are fickle, and will be loyal to a fault.
These are the people who can talk about war robots in the same breath as battle tech, mech warrior and Armored core. These are the players who are abandoning your game - the love is gone because the trust is gone.
I don’t know if the choice to isolate yourself from your customers was a willful one - but from the outside looking in it sure looks like you ignore us intentionally. You only seem to show your face in public when people praise you on the few social media platforms that you participate in. We only get a direct response from you when you slip up and let us know that we don’t matter. The pattern is very apparent. You say “however simple human psychology fact - it is more likely for someone to go out there and complain than praise” and we get a player meeting. We protest and you say “how dare you”, and we then get “we hear you”. You slip up and tell us that tanking isn’t really tanking and then you give us a FORM to fill out -
Lets look back on that player meeting - we told you that you were making WR feel like a job. A year on you gave us paper work to fill out as an appeasement strategy.
Lets look at the pattern: You screw up, we complain, you say your going to address it and we buy into it. Or you give us half measures that you later take away. Fundamentally though you never really address the issues, things never really get better.
It took me a long time to figure out why. Not only do you not listen to us, you don’t really use your own game. If the level of play in your last live stream is any indication, you really should spend some quality time with your product. Again, much like Zynga you embraced being data driven but fell into the classic data driven trap because - "If you do not know how to ask the right question, you discover nothing.” It wasn’t just the live stream that made this clear - it is a LOT of things.
The way you keep buffing molots screams “I never used them” because they weren’t really under powered 2 buffs back - your hell bent on turning the damage knob and you forgot that their big issue is ‘cycle time’. More Power.
Lets look at how players are ranked: More Power
Lets look at how clans are ranked: More Power
Lets look at why tanking is a problem: Power
Lets look at why people hate MM: Power imbalance
How is gold distributed post match: Power
Lets ask a champ why they don’t play KOTH: Because wining helps my league score, but not my activity, not my clan rank — it fails because everything else in your system is about power.
Lets look at how leagues work: You have a power sorting algorithm. You tried winner take all and it failed — and what your left with could find the fattest war robots player if you replaced damage with a scale.
But it isn’t the only issue. War robots used to be about choice - what to purchase, how to fit your bot, what league to play in. You went and took all of that away, you gave us components, and gambling, you made MM a crap shoot. In an impressive move you managed to turn GAME MODES into a lottery. It is as impressive as it is sad that you managed to turn something that might have been an enhancement into something that alienates your players. To quote Paps from the forums:
"Yeah, oddly enough...I tend to not play at all when I can't use my own time as I see fit.
If I wanted to play poker, but every time I went to the casino the only available game was roulette, I'd be just as likely to leave without spending anything as stay and waste my time and/or money doing something I have minimal interest in. Thanks but no thanks."
This was an open letter, and to the players as well.
We need to get behind a simple unified message - one that every one can pick up and get behind, one that is (for a change) demanding a positive change rather than complaining about what has passed. Skill and choice not power and chance. This isn’t about your pet issue - it is about ALL the systemic issues.
Skill and choice… it is a dead simple message that every blogger and youtube who cares about the game, can repeat, and amplify. Those that don’t want to beat the drum of skill and choice, well stop reading, unsubscribe and tell them WHY.
If you are producing a blog or WR videos then you clearly have enough passion to invest in the game, maybe you even love it at some level. Well if you don’t get up and fight FOR it then it will die - maybe not tomorrow but sooner than you think - Skill and Choice is a drum you can beat, it is a positive message you can send.
Just keep repeating the message Skill and Choice not Power and Chance till the fixes are LIVE.
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