Dogs of War Online

Jigoku,

Your recent post in the 'first impression' thread is inappropriate. This is capitalism champ, you have not made this game for our benefit, you have made it for profit.
I can understand that it can be frustrating to get negative feed-back when you have likely poured hours into changes. That is the nature of opening your unfinished product to the masses for comment. Beta players are providing you with more of a service than you are providing them, that is why you have entered into this process.
I also take a bad tone from time to time. I however am not representing my company and talking to potential customers who I have requested feed-back from.
Believe me when I tell you I am your target market for this game. I have played similar since childhood, and have wanted something a little less cartoony than Blood Bowl with a PvP focus for a long time.
I think it is very good with even more potential once more factions can be introduced. Your thanks will often have to be taken from the amount of users and people regularly enjoying the game. That is the way of things. Even if you think comments are unreasonable or just inflammatory you should not engage on that level.
I am a very upfront kind of person IRL (or asshole as some would call it). If I am going to take the time to comment in hope of improving this game I will do so as I please while avoiding causing any personal offence.
I think the new patch is dodgey and the rankings are as out of whack as I have ever seen them. You are free to take that advice or leave it. You as the developer who put your game on open beta are not free to complain about it.

Regards,
Errol Flynn
Ex-Lion player, recent Ram convert.

I really think Jigoku deserves more respect from the community. Please name the games where the devs take time to write almost a page explaining this and that almost on a regular basis. Regarding the answer that made you angry i felt he was very polite instead. Players used very hard statements and he simply quoted them, stating that the aim is to improve the game and this comes from deeply analytical posts...not from: OMG RAM OP WTF LOL or LMAO I QUIT.

About the "capitalism champ" issue...Cyanide is never meant to be a philanthropic organization, which is the common idea people have when they play any f2p games these days (indirectly). Devs MUST work for us or else if the game is not appreciated by the public, the public will leave and at the end of the day they won't get any profit. So yes Jigoku is really working for us...he HAS to. This leads to a loop where making better games -> making more money -> making better games and so on. I think Jigoku didn't hide behind any marketing mind control technique and simply said the reality.

About the target of their game...this is very debatable from a marketing perspective. Yeah we all agree it is "THE CUSTOMER" but...which? Maybe the majority of players like a very complex game...while some others just love the bloodshed and staring at pretty numbers. For sure there is not only one target and one path to follow.

Jigoku's last post was long because he snapped. Real nobody loves me kind of stuff. I think when the haze clears even he will agree. Beta testing is actually a service they have sought out. You can pay play testers and get unbiased reports of bugs issues etc. If you choose for economic reasons to do an open Beta, you don't get to choose the format for comments, most will be biased and ranting. If Jigoku and Cyanide cannot handle that they should not put their games in open Beta.
By target market I mean I am a player who is always extremely interested in TBS games. That is why I am checking this one out.

Errol Flynn wrote:Jigoku's last post was long because he snapped. Real nobody loves me kind of stuff. I think when the haze clears even he will agree. Beta testing is actually a service they have sought out. You can pay play testers and get unbiased reports of bugs issues etc. If you choose for economic reasons to do an open Beta, you don't get to choose the format for comments, most will be biased and ranting. If Jigoku and Cyanide cannot handle that they should not put their games in open Beta.
By target market I mean I am a player who is always extremely interested in TBS games. That is why I am checking this one out.

maybe the fact im not a native speaker might have fooled me....but it really didn't look like it snapped. He just took his time to make his statements as a game designer and to explain his vision. Should we really make a case out of it? You know the only thing you might obtain is Jigoku posting less and giving less explanations since the public (or you?) perceived it so bad.

I took Jigoku's comments as refreshingly honest. When you make a video game, it becomes your child, and it's hard to hear people (who like playing it) bad-mouthing it.

His comments were too the point and about how the development teams sees the changes that were made. I guarantee his feelings (on the inside) were much more harsh than what he wrote, but he took a nice subjective indifference and stated the facts of how the development team saw the changes.

I commend him on this because that type of info is not always encouraged to be put out there by the developers. A lot of developers only like to interject on bugs or major issues. Very few every will get into the debate justifying what they've done in concern to balance. Most stated developer opinions are like Dr. Ido has said before, "we made the changes we made because we thought the game needed them to be more fun."

So thank you Jigoku for giving us some insight and joining the conversation.

Errol Flynn wrote:I am a very upfront kind of person IRL (or asshole as some would call it). If I am going to take the time to comment in hope of improving this game I will do so as I please while avoiding causing any personal offence.

Don't comment then just play it and let the betatesting report to those who:
1) remain calm and play to betatest not to win.
2) make constructive comments and not "I am gonna quit!" kind of posts.

This is a bit devs fault too, they shouldn't have put the ranking system with prizes on a beta, persons become mad too easily when they lose. That damn ranking system makes persons forget this is a beta and makes them play only to win.
Remove it and you see how the comunity becomes much more friendly.

But don't worry, Lion players. We did read what you had to say about the patch, and it will be taken into consideration. The "Philosophy" of the Lion army implies that they lack physical punch compensated by high magic prowess, discipline, and the most steady rolls of the game (favourable auspices and divine favor are here for that, to name a few), and because of that, their special is not a total badass unit compared the two others.
Those are valid concerns that we will look into (but then again... slower pace).

This was the only part of jigoku's post I did not like, gave two impressions. One that devs think Lions are just crying, and two that noone with any pull in the dev team plays lion.

Other than that Jigoku has had to put up with alot of nasty comments including my "how to kill a game with one patch" thread. I wrote that 2 days after patch and look what happened. Golems have grown out of proportion, I said golems were to op right away. Healing was overnerfed, noone uses healing sparks anymore. Valks were nerfed, and their ap not reduced, I now see valks only as archer buffers. And all of this while making a new deployment system that clear disfavours the faction whose main dps units (mages/arches/lions) are some of the squishiest units ingame and you put them within sprinting distance of th enmy team at deployment.

All in all I think Jigoku meant lion no harm and on paper he didnt do all that much since ram andwolfen were allso nerfed. But the impact those nerfs have had on the lion gameplay are much larger than on ram, and wolfen still easier to play than lion.

Please remember that some of us adore this game, thats why we take our time to write these long threads.

Edit: In no way did I find Jigoku's post offensive though, but when you told us not to worry and then labelled some random goals for lion I thought "ok there is no-one on the other side that clearly sees the issue with lion" which is ofc not true but it transmitted that idea.

sorry to derail the thread a little but Lion is still strong and viable. I highly suggest you to try double shot archer with accuracy + 1 lvl 2 valk + swordmen and lions.

double shot archers and accuracy can obliterate even the super frightening HB skeletons as they have terrible dodge and will probably eat both arrows. You can still play the turtle game and win if the other opponent doesn't attack you as favorable auspices especially in small maps is still very strong and can break any turtle formation. Block your choke points with the swordmen and keep the lions ready to either finish off the targets or lock the other archers.

There are other very viable lion builds, people should just try more. Warbands with 2 mages are asking for a beating as you can find many counters around (archers,occult erosion, assault units etc...)

The build I showed in my other post includes such an archer. I know the power of LoW, but before this patch I never could include a KoTL. I am liking him because I use 2 Valks and the KoTL is actually worth regenerating. 2 Valks, 3 parry Swords and a KoTL is quite a bit of melee power, throw in the archer for some stance/orders abuse and you have yourself a pretty decent, quality and flexible group. My main problem with the KoTL and any very high AP unit is that it is a lot of eggs in one basket, but it is a fucking good basket as it turns out. I may switch him for a pair of lions or some such but would like to use him for a while. KoTL and the like are too vulnerable to ET or other devastate single target abilities for my liking.

Note: with more people including high AP units I think despite the nerf, ET is actually probably more powerful post-patch. Not much good against quantity over quality builds, but very good against quality over quantity builds which are more common now.

I'm very sorry, and saddened, to read this post.

First of all, I was only speaking in my name alone, not in the name of the team, not in the name of Cyanide, when I wrote that recent answer. It was only me, speaking about my job.
But obviously I do have a responsibility to them with my posts here, and apparently one of them offended you or other players.
For that, I deeply apologize. I really do.

The idea was to offer you guys some insight on why we had done some things, to offer you the opportunity to react on that toughts and maybe add perspective. From what I read there, it worked, because there are now very interesting answers and valid arguments; it also satisfied players who looked like they needed the explanation.
I did not write the whole scope, of course, only a part of the reasoning so maybe that wasn't such a good idea.
But talking about weeks or months of work in a "small" forum answer is nearly impossible so I had to stop somewhere.

Also, I did it on my free time, and I was pretty tired when I wrote the whole post so I might have written something wrong without even noticing - but I can assure you that I didn't snap, at all.
If you were talking about the "uproar" part, I just tried to make a "funny" comment on what happened recently, but apparantly the joke led to a misunderstanding.
English is not my native language. I thought that my english was good enough to make that kind of joke on a forum, and I now understand that it is clearly not the case. Maybe in my language there would have been no misunderstanding, but we will never know.

Again, I am very sorry.

I can promise that I will be much more careful with my posts now.
I am hoping that they won't offend you anymore.