Fleet updates via S&P?

[Foxmeister]

In the discussion on the Narn, Triggy made the following comment:

there are a couple of ships in the game (Narn included) that are only a little bit out in terms of ability or style but as P&P is an update, only important or large changes are likely to be made. This means that for the Narn fleet it's only really their Battle and War PL ships that will be looked at as tweaking all of the pulse or ion cannon weaponry in the entire fleet is outside of the scope for this project.

Now, I don't disagree with this approach, but it does make me wonder why S&P can't be used as a vehicle for more the more "wholesale" changes that some people are advocating? (Note, I'm not really talking about the Narn here, who I think only need a handful of changes anyway)

We've already had a new Gaim list in S&P, and it seems to me that there are a few other fleet lists (most notably the Abbai), that could do with an overhaul. Surely S&P would be a good place to do this?

Eventually, all these changes could be rolled into a updated version of the fleet book, for those of us who'd like to have everything in the same place - I'd certainly buy it!

I mean, why take up value space in P&P to deliver an updated G'Quan, when it could be "delivered" far more quickly in S&P, and allow P&P to contain more genuinely new content, rules etc.

Regards,

Dave

 

[H]

because you can save that new content for a later release and make more money.

 

[Foxmeister]

because you can save that new content for a later release and make more money.

Which is what a revised fleet book would deliver, except that the work for it would have already been done piecemeal in S&P, thus making it cheaper to deliver.

 

[Burger]

I'd rather not start changing entire fleets, until 3e is released. The Gaim was really necessary because they were totally broken.

 

[Foxmeister]

I'd rather not start changing entire fleets, until 3e is released. The Gaim was really necessary because they were totally broken.

That rather assumes that there will be a 3e.....

 

[H]

I'd rather not start changing entire fleets, until 3e is released. The Gaim was really necessary because they were totally broken.

perhaps all these issues that crop up after every single release would be adressed by a new method or group of playtesters.
now i know several of the playtesters will now feel insulted, but we have to adress the issue of sagi's, gaim, uberdodgy whitestars and such. So please note I stated the method of playtester before the playtest. We just seemto have too many issues per release, now this could be because playtesters don't have a specific remit of what/how to playtest, only look to their favoured fleets, don't get listened to properly, don't care (how often have EP or Wulf been around lately?). I think Ultimately this all goes back to mongoose and how they chose the playtesters, what kind of guidance they give them, do they present a vanilla fleet, is there a proper route for feedback.
from what I can gather from my brief tier 2 stuff, and from talking to playtesters, it all seems a bit messed up with no real guidance on just what to do.

 

[Burger]

I'd rather not start changing entire fleets, until 3e is released. The Gaim was really necessary because they were totally broken.

That rather assumes that there will be a 3e.....

Not really... LOL :lol:

 

[Burger]

from what I can gather from my brief tier 2 stuff, and from talking to playtesters, it all seems a bit messed up with no real guidance on just what to do.

A "thank you for your time" email would have been nice too. But we got nothing, nada, zilch.

 

[H]

I got missiles on the marathon ;-) I think that was my reward.

 

[Greg Smith]

Yep, sometimes our only reward is the satisfaction of seeing something in the book and saying to yourself, "I did that." Which is probably the most satisfying part of being a playtester.

For 2e we got copies of the books which fell apart and replacements, which have fallen apart but I don't want to get replaced because now they are in B&W. We did get a single ship mini. We were promised more models, which never arrived.

But I'm still doing it because I love the game and thoroughly enjoy it.

 

[H]

do you have any comments on the playtesting setup etc? you are better placed than a lot to see why we seemingly keep missing certain issues and having to continually correct things.

 

[Triggy]

Yep, sometimes our only reward is the satisfaction of seeing something in the book and saying to yourself, "I did that." Which is probably the most satisfying part of being a playtester.

For 2e we got copies of the books which fell apart and replacements, which have fallen apart but I don't want to get replaced because now they are in B&W. We did get a single ship mini. We were promised more models, which never arrived.

But I'm still doing it because I love the game and thoroughly enjoy it.

He he, same here for the reasons why I "playtest" and same on my rule books too.

As for the current setup - basically Matt presents us with stuff and we make suggestions back. Most of the stuff he accepts, some he is more reluctant to although if there is a major balancing issue then normally something is changed. The biggest issue in general is the shortage of man hours. This could be helped by either more people or more time (or both) but fundamentally means that we can't solve everything. You'd be amazed at how much stuff was changed before we got to a playable status for most fleets.

Whilst we'd welcome more playtesters (we really would), given enough time, we can do justice to the game - just check out the Gaim for example. The first lot was (in polite talk) not perfectly balanced, but with time to discuss and playtest the Gaim alone over about a month, we managed to get a fleet that now appears to be pretty reasonable.

As for articles in S&P, it's not the space in the book that's the issue with making lots of changes, it's that Matt doesn't want to make too many changes to the Fleet List book so as to keep it from being too much of a mix and match between the two books (and I can see where he's coming from). This makes it the priority to get big changes sorted, new rules, scenarios, etc. introduced and try to have as much "new" content as possible (well without new miniatures anyway).

 

[skavendan]

Sounds good Triggy & Smith.

I sure would be interested in knowing more on how a ship is classed and tested!

A couple of are gaming group would no doubt jump at the chance to help game test and give feed back.

I can understand the desire to keep all the information down to a limited number of sources to avoid rules confusion.

 

[TGT]

well i think a lot of the 2e playtesters I know got ...( politely) pi**ed off that a lot of the comments and suggestions passed onto Matt were subsequently scrapped by two supposed playtesters who didn't even play the game!

I do think minus a few obvious tweaks a 3e is going above and beyond
unless its in line with a big shuffle/sort out in mini production and thereby
bringing new players into the game...

so i'm for S&P edits to ships and I'd suggest MGP could do a far worse job than running official polls for ship edits...case in point would be the 1st ed Gaim..which no one believes saw anyone elses imput but the guy writing it..and trying to sell the ships..which franckly the cheese kings got around by using paper counters

I guess frankly a lot of ACTA ships we play with are house ruled and to be fair the only time we play with official ships as they are, is at non Sentient Rabbits tournies......

 

[MongooseMatt]

because you can save that new content for a later release and make more money.

Which is what a revised fleet book would deliver, except that the work for it would have already been done piecemeal in S&P, thus making it cheaper to deliver.

And that is pretty much what we do!

 

[MongooseMatt]

[

As for the current setup - basically Matt presents us with stuff and we make suggestions back. Most of the stuff he accepts, some he is more reluctant to although if there is a major balancing issue then normally something is changed. The biggest issue in general is the shortage of man hours. This could be helped by either more people or more time (or both) but fundamentally means that we can't solve everything. You'd be amazed at how much stuff was changed before we got to a playable status for most fleets.

It is worth pointing out here that we run the CTA playtesting in a very, very different way to our other games, principally because of the quality of the playtesters involved - and their committement.

The Five Good Men (since expanded from five!) know this game inside out. They are allowed to do far more than just playtest my scribblings - they have an incredible amount of input into the core of the game's design and the direction of each fleet. You can think of them as part playtester, part sub-developer. They were recruited precisely because they demonstrated a fundamental understanding of the game and what it was about.

Have there been any 'issues', arising either from them or myself? Sure. But the fact that these problems have been so minor across 13 fleets and 200-odd different ships speaks volumes to the hard work these guys put in.

Believe me, if you are thinking 'well I could do better', the chances are, you couldn't - as a few of the newer additions to the Five Good Men found out when they were recruited!

 

[Greg Smith]

do you have any comments on the playtesting setup etc? you are better placed than a lot to see why we seemingly keep missing certain issues and having to continually correct things.

With a lot of playtesting in 2e it sometimes felt like the playtesters were each pulling in different directions. There was a lot of too-ing and fro-ing over what was canon, what appeared on screen, the size of the models, what was better for the game, what level of detail was needed.

I have 3300 playtest emails in my playtest folder, and that only dates back to July after my computer died.

Time was a factor, Sometimes we'd get two or three updates a week, covering several fleets. You'd have a playtest game, send in a report and something would get changed that night.

It would sometimes feel as though the whole thing was getting away from us. We started out with a clean up of 1e, and then the beam rules would change radically, and the whole Centauri fleet changed and so on. It felt as though there wasn't quite a plan for the game, it was changing week by week.

As we got towards the end, there were a couple of radical changes that really threw spanners into the works. They happened so close to the end that we didn't know how they were going to end up until we saw the finished books - which seemed a little too rushed.

I know that all sounds overly critical, but you have to remember we do it for the love of the game, and if it had been too onerous I'd have packed it in.

That said, the playtest process worked pretty well for things like the Gaim update, the Drakh book and so on.

So I guess the answer is the sheer volume of material in 2e made playtesting imperfect.

 

[H]

Thanks Greg.

 

[ATN082268]

[

As for the current setup - basically Matt presents us with stuff and we make suggestions back. Most of the stuff he accepts, some he is more reluctant to although if there is a major balancing issue then normally something is changed. The biggest issue in general is the shortage of man hours. This could be helped by either more people or more time (or both) but fundamentally means that we can't solve everything. You'd be amazed at how much stuff was changed before we got to a playable status for most fleets.

It is worth pointing out here that we run the CTA playtesting in a very, very different way to our other games, principally because of the quality of the playtesters involved - and their committement.

The Five Good Men (since expanded from five!) know this game inside out. They are allowed to do far more than just playtest my scribblings - they have an incredible amount of input into the core of the game's design and the direction of each fleet. You can think of them as part playtester, part sub-developer. They were recruited precisely because they demonstrated a fundamental understanding of the game and what it was about.

Have there been any 'issues', arising either from them or myself? Sure. But the fact that these problems have been so minor across 13 fleets and 200-odd different ships speaks volumes to the hard work these guys put in.

Believe me, if you are thinking 'well I could do better', the chances are, you couldn't - as a few of the newer additions to the Five Good Men found out when they were recruited!

Even with a relatively simple game like A Call to Arms, anything close to 5 playtesters is *way* too few for adequate playtesting. Personally, I would advocate something in the range of around 3 dozen.

Sincerely,

Andrew Norris

 

[H]

but then they couldn't use the oft repeated phrase "5 good men" even though there are more, i think this shows to some extent that Matt seems to have preference for those 5 anyway, irrespective of the possible input of others. would you want to be part of the 31 unheard men ;-)