Version 0.8 at last

[KGB]

One last thing about non-Silver and Gold users not being able to see the number of moves/turns that a unit/stack has remaining. The issue I have with this is that all of us have been playing with this in place for so long, and for it now to be taken away I feel is a bit unfair.

Frankly, if this was put back into place, the limit of the number of games a non-Silver or Gold player can play slightly increased, the amount being asked for to purchase a Gold membership slightly decreased, and the hero issue evened out, whether it be by my suggestion of otherwise, I would then see no reason for any complaints. In my opinion anyway...

Why is this unfair? How is it different than any promotional giveaway that runs for a limited period of time? For example I used to get free HBO for 3 months when I switched to cable from satellite (or vice versa). After 3 months it went away unless I paid for it. Cell Phone companies often do these kinds of promotional giveaways as well. The whole idea is to get you hooked on it. No real difference between that and the moves/turn it takes to get somewhere (which as has been pointed out, you can manually calculate just as you had to do in War2/DLR).

In fact I think it's actually a *good* idea to let any new player get this kind of feature for a month so they can see how much they like it so that it helps justify spending the money on a Silver/Gold membership.

Another feature that I can see making Silver/Gold is the 'stop on enemy' feature. For free players that would not be possible so your armies would move their full distance regardless of spotting an enemy. Free players can manually click 1-2 squares at a time to make sure they always stop when seeing an enemy unit so there is no disadvantage for them other than the time to move stacks will take a lot longer if they decide to click 1-2 squares at a time instead of a longer path.

KGB

[piranha]

I just wanted to let you know that we are working on subscription model that I hope will make you happier.

It will be a automatic monthly draw using paypals subscription option that will give you access to silver or gold level + heroes. We decided to include heroes because paypals transaction fee becomes such a large part of the cost when you are making smaller transactions. I hope we will have it working and tested in a few days.

The subscription model won't cost less, but having a monthly cost of a beer (silver) or a mc donalds meal (gold) instead of a upfront cost will hopefully make it easier. You can turn of the subscription when you won't so if you wont be playing for a year you won't be pay for it.

With all the comparisons in the thread I'd also like to make some comparisons too. Games like WOW cost $15 / month and kids are paying that. Our community consist of adults so I think the real problem here is that you are used with Warbarons being free and that makes it seem very expensive.
Someone mentioned that Warbarons is not a game made by 20 developers, but the thing here is that these kind of games aren't made these days because no one wants to risk the cost of 20 developers doing a old school turn based game.
You are here because you prefer this type of game over most triple A games so it shouldn't matter if there are 20 or 2 people. It's the game you want to play and we are working just as hard as a bigger team.

You could even turn it around and say, this is a niche type game for adults who grew up with these games and it should therefore cost more than a mass market game.
There is a million ways to argue for it costing too much or not enough.
The truth is from our point of view as the developers is that we are walking a knifes edge here. We have worked a long time on the game and spent about $15.000 (excluding kickstarter) from our own pocket to get where we are. We have 600 users and of those perhaps 20% are going to go for premium. The goal we are struggling towards is to be able to pay for all the costs involved with just keeping the bandwidth / hosting payed from the community. Something that must be possible or we wont be able to keep the game running in the long run.
You are saying that you are very happy about to be able to play it and that you have been waiting for so long for a game like this so it should be worth the cost of a hamburger per month.

[BowenTheKotoc]

It might be a good idea to put "X's" for moves in upcoming turns. Using "0's" (zero's) can be confusing, does the first zero mean that you get to that hex with the final moves of your current turn? or is that the first hex of your next turn?

This is a good idea, I will try to implement it shortly.
Edit: Implemented - press F5 to refresh the files and you should see X instead of 0 incase your move is not enough.

SnotlinG, did you mean to change the turns remaining to Xs for all players? I am a gold member and I have the show remaining turns on the path setting turned on, but all I see are the Xs now for moves beyond where my unit can reach in the current turn. I thought from your reply that you just meant to turn remaining 0s to Xs, but maybe you decided to remove the steps remaining feature because of the controversy? Apologies if I misunderstood your intention.

[Ahla]

I think most of the premium features are well chosen. It is very hard to pick them so that people are willing to pay for them without making them too much of an advantage. I have played the same online game that I think SnotlinG and Piranha are refering to, and there using gold (their ingame bought "currency") has always been a significant advantage, and now they are almost at the point where most spent gold in the hands of fairly good and active players will make the best account. I am very happy WB didn't turn out that way.

3 games for a free player might be few, but if the number was 6 or so, a lot fewer players would get silver accounts.

Is the "Saved time for next turn on end turn" capped? If two players do 10 turns each on a day on a small map with 24h/move time limit, will a gold player then have about 9,5 days for turn 11? Really don't hope so, otherwise this is a great feature.

Also like the "away time" feature. Might be a problem for free users during summer when a lot of people go on vacation. All 3 games might be on holiday break. Any idea to temporarily raise the max 3 limit in such cases?

What I don't like is the buy heroes bit. I know it is just a one time sum of 5 EUR each, but still. They seem to be strong at a first glance, and will be at least situationally useful. I like WB to be determined by skill (and to some extent the unavoidable luck factor), not how much money someone payed. In other words:
1. I don't want anybody to have an advantage on me because he spent more money than me.
2. I don't want to have an advantage on anybody because I spent more money than him.
I would like a way to combine 1 and 2. Maybe to let the game creator choose which heroes can be bought in the particular game. It would still mean that players who buys them can play more varied games with each other. Hopefully this is still enough incentive to buy the new heroes.

If people buys them to avoid having a (significant?) disadvantage, and they are nerfed in the next upgrade, some people might feel cheated.

[SnotlinG]

SnotlinG, did you mean to change the turns remaining to Xs for all players? I am a gold member and I have the show remaining turns on the path setting turned on, but all I see are the Xs now for moves beyond where my unit can reach in the current turn. I thought from your reply that you just meant to turn remaining 0s to Xs, but maybe you decided to remove the steps remaining feature because of the controversy? Apologies if I misunderstood your intention.

No, for gold members it should only show X´s when you cannot reach that tile even with full move, i.e. if you click an impossible path (up a rdige without opening etc). Do you not get the pathturns for a normal path? (I tried your account quickly now and seems to work for me - let me know if you still have an issue)
In addition we have also enabled the pathturns in all Tutorials, regardless of membership level, to make it a bit easier on the newcomers to pickup the game.

Is the "Saved time for next turn on end turn" capped? If two players do 10 turns each on a day on a small map with 24h/move time limit, will a gold player then have about 9,5 days for turn 11? Really don't hope so, otherwise this is a great feature.

It is capped at max 48 hours or the game turntime - whichever is less. So if you play a game with 1 day turns it is capped at 24 hours, so even if you in that game make 9 turns really quick you can only store up to 24h.

[BowenTheKotoc]

It seems to be working now, thanks.

[hatchfactory]

Someone mentioned that Warbarons is not a game made by 20 developers, but the thing here is that these kind of games aren't made these days because no one wants to risk the cost of 20 developers doing a old school turn based game.
You are here because you prefer this type of game over most triple A games so it shouldn't matter if there are 20 or 2 people. It's the game you want to play and we are working just as hard as a bigger team.

- As I was the one who mentioned 20 man developer teams, I wanted to reply that the context meant by the post was to point out that the marketing approach would have to be different than a game developed by a 20+ team crew, that it is a "niche" game and to support the validity of "freemium" marketing a "niche" game.
- I, in no way believe you need to provide your services without a cost and actually agree with you probably about 95%. I see no problem that you want to make money (I want to make money) and I wish you a considerable income from this project in the future. I also hope you want extend the reach of your market beyond just the people who used to play.
- As you said there are a million ways to argue cost, my point wasn't to argue cost but to counter a comment that the free accounts with ads option would detract contributors. Personally I'm just fine with the current cost, paid the difference for a full year gold membership and bought the heroes, and have faith that over the 365 days my gold membership will just get sweeter.
- I believe small software developer teams have tons of more options than they used to, "niche" or casual games have blasted out of being stuck the "shareware" zone, look at the iOS or Android markets. (The mobile Warbarons client is my most anticipated upgrade ) There are many different ways you can go about marketing your game successfully and you have to make the decision that you have the most belief in and excitement about.

It is the game I want to play and pretty much the only one I currently do. I also acknowledge and thank you and snotlinG for the hard work and time you and put into making this a great game.

[vallarphoros]

I just wanted to let you know that we are working on subscription model that I hope will make you happier.

It will be a automatic monthly draw using paypals subscription option that will give you access to silver or gold level + heroes. We decided to include heroes because paypals transaction fee becomes such a large part of the cost when you are making smaller transactions. I hope we will have it working and tested in a few days.

Will there still be the option for 3 month, 6 month and year long subscriptions?

Regarding gamelimit for free users:
Every game is stored on our server, every gameaction is processed by the server etc, so in short every game takes diskspace and processing power - which costs money unfortunately. We believe that if you like and enjoy the game so much that you want to have a bunch of games going (i.e. taking up more server resources), is it too much to ask for that that player helps support the maintenance costs? Maybe 3 games are not the optimum number for free users though, but still there needs to be an incentive to upgrade otherwise noone will get premium accounts and in the long run we will then be forced to shutdown the server.

What happens if you have a silver account with unlimited games and your subscription expires? Do you surrender all but three games? What is the average game length?

I think everyone received enough credits to open a month long silver account, just wondering what happens if they don't renew?

I'm not sure how much work it would involve, but with a lot of players already playing three or more games, it could be a while before many users have room to start a Version 0.8 game.

Maybe you could add a separate counter for 0.8 games and allow free users to have a minimum of one version 0.8 game in addition to any old games they had started previously.

This would allow more people to offer feedback about the new version sooner and . Eventually, all free users will be down to the max of three games.

I'm not sure how much additional server space it would require, but maybe it's a workable approach.

I'm planning to get a gold account in the next week or so, I'm just making this suggestion based on some of the comments I've read (I can't even keep up with the games I've started and won't be trying a version 0.8 game until I've finished a few of the old ones).

Be Well,
VP

[piranha]

Vallarphotos: All games started will continue as normal. Heroes are permanent so they wont go away. You will not be able to use the gold features / start new games (if you have more than 3 going) if your account expires.

We have dropped the subscription option. Realized that it would only cause a lot of trouble.

We have lowered all the prices instead. Up to 15%. Also made the price difference when buying shorter term slightly lower than before.

We will update credits for those who already payed the higher price in a couple of days.

I also updated so that only version 0.8 games counts for the free account type. If you have beta5 games going they does not count any more so you can get a couple of version 0.8 games going.

We have also fixed a couple of bugs that have been discovered, still have a few to go. Hope to have them fixed by the weekend.

[vallarphoros]

Hi piranha,

I went ahead and got a gold account, the premium features are great.

Love the grid, I've been spending a lot of time counting how far an enemy stack could reach on the next turn, so a great time saver.

I hadn't thought to ask for something like the group stats window, but now that it's available I can see how much I missed not having it.

The stack Fight Order is awesome. I was thinking of suggesting the ability to save a custom Fight Order that all of your games would start with rather than needing to set the overall fight order for each new game. Has this already been discussed? If not I'll start a post about it in the Wish List forum.

Tue May 08, 2012 8:21 pm:
I just wanted to let you know that we are working on subscription model that I hope will make you happier.

It will be a automatic monthly draw using paypals subscription option that will give you access to silver or gold level + heroes. We decided to include heroes because paypals transaction fee becomes such a large part of the cost when you are making smaller transactions. I hope we will have it working and tested in a few days.

Wed May 09, 2012 8:22 pm:
Vallarphotos: All games started will continue as normal. Heroes are permanent so they wont go away. You will not be able to use the gold features / start new games (if you have more than 3 going) if your account expires.

We have dropped the subscription option. Realized that it would only cause a lot of trouble.

We have lowered all the prices instead. Up to 15%. Also made the price difference when buying shorter term slightly lower than before.

I'm unclear about how the heroes are going to work, will they remain a separate purchase now that the subscription option has been dropped?

If you won't have an auto renewing subscription, have you created some kind of reminder system to let folks know that they only have a few days left of their silver or gold membership?

When I asked if there still be the option for 3 month, 6 month and year long "subscriptions", I probably should have used a word other than "subscription". Basically, will the model remain that we can purchase bunches of days (30, 90, 182, etc.)?

I think the pricing is very reasonable.
1.50 Euros a week?
For unlimited playing time?
Where I live, it costs 5 times that to go see a two hour movie.

I also updated so that only version 0.8 games counts for the free account type. If you have beta5 games going they does not count any more so you can get a couple of version 0.8 games going.

Great, should help to get more users experimenting with version 0.8 and so broaden the discussion and speed up the reporting of any bugs. Maybe you could put a note to that effect on the Premium Features page so people will be aware of the change?


A few questions for anyone with the answer:
Is the "Flash bless information" feature the pop up that you see when you move units into a temple (it displays the amount of blessing being added to each unit)?

Has the idea of allowing team mates to transfer ownership of a city been discussed (like you can do when offering a temporary pact to an enemy)? I haven't played many team games, so I'm not sure if it would have a negative impact on the game, just a thought that came to mind.

Be Well,
VP