Non-Client Non-Balance Stuff

I dont think remaking the game is the best option but do you guys even have a Facebook page for advertising? Sell the game as highly evolved chess. You could add stuff to it like the latest video someone has recorded between Ballballer and Tinydragon etc... Spieky is a good commentator although if you want something with lots of comedy, upload an Iabjamacca video... On the facebook page you can advertise the factions with difficulty ratings etc... I want the Stormbunny to be SPs mascot.

 

I'd be willing to stream, but I only have brief experience with OBS. Is that still a standard, or is there something more ussr friendly for free/ extremely cheap?

There really aren't enough pro videos.

 

too much to reply too, but I appreciate the time

but it's not really misinformation, i never doubted their were reason for ending things nor do I believe your responsible for either the decisions to make these changes nor do you have the ability to do anything about them when they are made, I also stated there could of been many reasons and I have no idea what to blame even if i wanted to. I may of mispoke saying devs here when I should of said administration i suppose

I was simply stating the "reasons" to play are gone, for example the golden heroes as you mentioned first, the reason given for why they are gone makes sense i'd even take it a step farther and say half of the golden heroes aren't even run now anyway, that said the fact that they are gone brings two questions to mind, first why not move on to something else to continue the goal players had for ranked pvp, you have the bg data so you could see some of the most popular runes being played and easily find stuff players want, and make them the new gold rune, and second why was nothing put in to replace it? some other high tier pvp goal for players to aim for.

of course that's all decisions made a very long time ago, as i said I have no idea what could be done now given the state of the game as it is, I only know what i'd due differently if pox was made from scratch today, which isn't at all feasible now.

I normally wouldn't even attempt suggestions on pox as there is literally just too little I know about how you guys do things behind the scenes but what ever i'll spit some out i guess.

faction wars - drums of war light. just run an equation that tracks the wins of a user with the faction the players with the most gets a gold reskin of the current mid term. tradeable of course

hall of fame - take the battles master at the end of each week/month/term ( even if it's just tiny 100 times over) and put their names on the list for that month.

titles - so pox is an elitist game, sorry to break it to anyone who didn't know, as such you should be trying to do everything in your power to make high rank players seem better but not actually be better in any realistic way. coloured names were a simple way of saying...this guy is better then you, you want to be this guys so win a couple games and you can have a blue name too, don't stop paying or you may lose that rank and go back to a white name. so play fan fare when they log on, have a blue leprechaun come out an slap anyone that loses to them i don't really care but something needs to be done here.

I had always heard tournaments had ended because of gambling issues, assuming based on what you said that is not the case i'm surprised they haven't returned, it makes sense players could abuse them because they were free tournaments, but tournaments run with a purpose or with a cost prevent that. an example of tournament with a cost is simple 8 players pay 5 buckets to enter the tournament and at the end get a prize worth 20 to the winner.

example of a tournament with a purpose top players ( say top 10 ) of each faction get 1 tournament ticket, on day X any who wish to enter can join the tournament for the chance to win a grand prize a diamond harbinger of their faction. after that they play a single elimination tournament with by's in play for drop outs and no shows. they can make a big spectacle out of announcing players can observe, hopfully someone will upload the gams to youtube, etc. of course that's bigger then is likely capable with pox's staff.

free tournaments with big rewards are indeed easily abused,but that doesn't mean it cannot be done, I personally used to love drafts =/

regardless it's not your responsibility to do anything like this, as you stated your job is balance hopefully someone who's job is UX will think of something as it's pretty rough right now.

 

You should really make the legendary mid term releases have a semi limited border. It would help sales of legendaries. Make a class for like 3.5k shards and an alt sprite color. Then re release after next expan

 

yep these systems when they were around were great, they did a lot to keep the player base around.

when pox is running smoothly and this client stuff isn't going on and it's running at it's usual pace, we can expect most likely 4-5 patches every 3 months on balance( low balling it imo). that's 1 with the expansion, 1 with mid terms, a balance patch after each to fix the meta breaking runes about 2 weeks after each comes out, and 1 misc one to randomly to fix some iPox combo.

on that pace you can expect 20 patches a year( again low balling because i believe the real number is in the 30's to 40's but I don't have the data ), there is a council of players devoted to balance, community threads devoted to balance, in comparison I would be surprised to see one new feature added to the UX every year and no player feed back is ever requested on this front, and going by the list given pox has been around 10 years+, and about 13 items are on that list if you remove duplicate items and ports so it seems to line up to a degree.

now of the items that do get added most of them fall to the way side shortly after and are lost, personally I call that neglect, if balance was child A and the UX was child B, B would be living under the stairs wishing he was going to hogwarts.

 

Battlegroups of 20 max to 30 runes was a major change too

 

-Bases removed from champs too, pure aesthetical and if i remember correctly players voted for that in the forums and it took a while to implement
-Updated maps too, and more maps.
-Avatars
-Poxanthuru map
-Split Bgs
The list could easyly reach 40s changes or more

 

Did you guys develop a map editor, or do you hard code the maps? Not that I really think there is a huge problem either way with maps, I just sort of need a laugh because I get the feeling it is the latter.

I used to make custom war3 maps frequently when I was a kid, using all the triggers and resources disposable, - a few like the cache and JASS effects. But I could edit units, custom models, custom spells & effects very easily. How hard is it to program pox compared to using the war 3 editor? Please be honest, so I can laugh at your expense (although to be fair w3 editor was probably the best combination of user friendly and technical even by did today's standards).

More avatars and more avatar balance (damage spell CD less versus CD of defense spell) would be really awesome. Transfiguring an avatar can be exciting if you would normally be at a huge disadvantage on a map.

 

I can't really speak for Calisk vs Sok, but i can say that the new client has a much higher potential, but has drained the resources of the game noticeably for the last year.

That's good to know.

 

actually I didn't count the facebook port at all because I don't count it as UX, i count it as a port and a waste of time port at that, like every port pox has had so far.

the only port which could of been really good is the vita port, but sadly the only place left that cares about vita is japan, and this is coming from the guy that still religiously collects every vita game that gets released, and at this point I am starting to think i'll be more likely to see new NES games released then vita ones.

you keep getting stuck on the man power involved in the tasks, I'm not considering that at all I'm strictly speaking from an end user point of view. nobody cares about the effort involved in a task if most of the player base leaves while you are doing it, nor does the average person care about anything more then what they get at the end, the administration should of choose more realistic tasks that a small development team could of accomplished in that time if that was an issue.

the new client has a ton of potential but the amount of time spent, the players lost, and the portions of the UX that were lost in it's creation I have a hard time justifying now, maybe in 2 years we may see the fruit of those efforts but right now, no.

 

well on the non binary part I admited your point a long time ago( when i clarified I should of said administration instead of devs ), you have nothing to do with the UX coding as such you can spend all your time balancing stuff and it will have no effect on the non-time being spent on UX. this should clarify any more discussion on that fact as I conceded your point on the matter

now that we can say you are free to spend all the time on balance patches that you want, nothing changes in the fact that no time as far as an end user can tell is being spent on UX, the features that do exist are being lost, and this is all occurring in parallel to a client that doesn't work on any of the platforms it currently is built for.....that last part has nothing really to do with UX features, but it does effect the UX so worth mentioning i suppose

balance patches still accomplish nothing, and pox is no closer to improving in the realms of giving players something to do