Gamespeed + Leaver Discussion [Current problems in KaM]

[Bludmaster]

I completely agree with TDL on his posts specially last one. Also i want to ask you guys ... If most of you said nowadays we have moch more leavers, blamers etc. My question is why? And in my opinion its easy: GAME SPEED. It attracted many new very young players who are just too impation for this game. And as TDL said do we really need/want this kind of players to play this game?

This is REMAKE of some very old and very nice game. We ,in my opinion, dont need and cant even expect to have huge player base. We dont need to change game completely for attracting many new players. And to be honest i didnt read anything good about speed. Most of us here "can live with it" but will never choose to play with it. And others? Statements like "its saving time" are completely stupid. Because if it save time why with speed bigger PT comes? No players are spending same time with playing. Or another one i read here "we like building". What is this? You like how your buildings are build in 3 seconds? For me speed is something completely unnatural, unfitting to this game. And when i rarely play it i feel like playing completely different game.

In past i was playing with "randoms" kind of lot i made new friends among them i tryed to show them what is possible in game etc. These guys were friendly they wanted to learn so they gameplay was improving and than they enjoy it more. Nowadays? Something completely unreacheable. Most of guys will leave other will tell me that iam stupi i**** and i should f*** off. If you are saying that you cant enjoy game on 1x but you can on 3x than i just must laught!

I quess thats it. And i hope youll think about it closely because if change of speed, than remove it completely because 2x max will fix nothing.

[Nissarin]

That's not a good reason at all if you ask me - changing key features to attract more players? Blasphemy. That's like removing all apple from an apple pie so people who don't like apple will also eat it. I rather have 100 players who are dedicated to the 'old ways of KaM' than 1000 players who play at 3x speed and don't know what they're doing at all. And with that I'm not referring to skill; those 100 players are not necessarily skilled because they would play lower speeds. Of course we all want to make KaM bigger... but we must think twice about the 'how'.

Ability to speed up the game was present in the original game (TPR) and I think most players used it quite extensively.
One way to encourage playing at lower speed/pt is to host such games, if other people won't do it, do it yourself. When I host the games I set 60/2/1.5 (maybe I should go down to 1.5/1.0) and kick in the face people screaming "2.5x!", it works.
Another way would be to implement some kind of ranking system and enforce rules in such games (pt, speed) but obviously it's a lot of work.

[Bence791]

Ability to speed up the game was present in the original game (TPR) and I think most players used it quite extensively.
One way to encourage playing at lower speed/pt is to host such games, if other people won't do it, do it yourself. When I host the games I set 60/2/1.5 (maybe I should go down to 1.5/1.0) and kick in the face people screaming "2.5x!", it works.
Another way would be to implement some kind of ranking system and enforce rules in such games (pt, speed) but obviously it's a lot of work.

The "kick in the face" is just as I do, but the problem with it is that the others players are like "omg host wtf are you doing" and leave as well. Checkmate.

About TDL's opinion, I agree, but only partially. If we speak about a game like KaM, it's obvious it doesn't have a big player base. But if we spoke about another, for example World of Warcraft, where you make loads of money out of attracting more players, you will make the changes in order to make bigger profit. In the case of KaM Remake, which is actually the hobby of Lewin and Krom, there is no money made out of it. I know that it is some sort of proudness to see their own (I consider it their own, since they have rewritten it from scratch) project's downloads reaching 60-70k (r4179). That means something. But IMO "adapting" the game to people's wishes who don't even know the real game, is pretty... weird? Really. "The game takes too long, so I go play another game for x10 as much time! Logic ftw!" IS BS. Personally I don't care about people saying it takes too long... How much do they play other games? Is it a problem to play those games in one sitting? No! Then what's the problem with the Remake after all? Seriously, these newbies don't even think of it before they speak.

Also I completely agree with Bludmaster. Back in the day there used to be loads of new players. Tbh I didn't mind playing longer PT either, just not these ridiculous speeds. On the other hand, there were far less leavers and people who insulted each other.

[pawel95]

I completely agree with TDL on his posts specially last one. Also i want to ask you guys ... If most of you said nowadays we have moch more leavers, blamers etc. My question is why? And in my opinion its easy: GAME SPEED.

I agree. It´s for sure not the only reason why we got that many leavers(e.g also because they "experiment" and see how easy it is to change their name ), but it´s for sure the biggest reason why we got that many unfinished/diry(insultings) games!

Ability to speed up the game was present in the original game (TPR) and I think most players used it quite extensively.
One way to encourage playing at lower speed/pt is to host such games, if other people won't do it, do it yourself. When I host the games I set 60/2/1.5 (maybe I should go down to 1.5/1.0) and kick in the face people screaming "2.5x!", it works.

Exactly it works, but try that what you just said

maybe I should go down to 1.5/1.0

(what we have just tried for many hours in total) and it won´t work.

[Leeuwgie]

Hmm, Toms reaction sounds logic (thats its better for the developers to attract 1000 new players than keep 100 die hard players happy) but I think the main reason that will keep this classic game alive are the die hard players in the end. About the gamespeed, it's making the gap between lesser and better players only bigger. Not only because better players like to play on normal speed (so they normally wont meet in a lobby) but also because with gamespeed usually comes alot more peacetime. And my experience is the more peacetime the more troops/better spam the better player has. Anyway, I dont have problems with players who like to play at higher speeds aslong as I can play with with people who like to play at normal speed. It's just that I like to play with new people from time to time. For this topic I just finished a game with some unknown players at 2.5x speed (in and after pt), pt was 80 mins For those who like to see the replay, tell me if the overall gameplay has improved since higher speeds are implemented (do players have a good buildorder/economy or more troops?) Maybe nice to mention, the red player (who was also the host) called his teammates noobs at the end of the game

[pawel95]

Is that correct that purple left after his stonemeasons were finished and grey had 3 xbows at PT with 80 min?

[Jeronimo]

What about the "new players" who start playing KaM Remake because they had/played "original" time ago, and they see that all lobbies have these speeds up?
Don't you think this is actually alienating nice people? They can't enjoy the old improved KaM... so they march away.

Many cases to mention... I agree with Bludmaster. Remove totally this. And as opinion, never implement mutators. Same story.
Divided small community -> Classic KaM will be only played by the KaM fans of this forum. This is easily predictable.

[Nissarin]

What about the "new players" who start playing KaM Remake because they had/played "original" time ago, and they see that all lobbies have these speeds up?
Don't you think this is actually alienating nice people? They can't enjoy the old improved KaM... so they march away.

So you're telling me that after they bought the game and downloaded few hundreds megs in total, they will just "march away" after one look at the lobby ? Doesn't sound too convincing...

BTW: just a while ago I played a 60x1.5 game, in a short discussion after it one of the players said that he usually plays at 80 and he doesn't have time to learn how to play better (i.e. play with lower PT/speed), in other words ability to play on higher speed means he can enjoy playing more games than previously. Let's not forget that not everyone is a hardcore fan.

Also, I have a question for "players from TS" - how often do you actually play with other people ?

[Lewin]

BTW: just a while ago I played a 60x1.5 game, in a short discussion after it one of the players said that he usually plays at 80 and he doesn't have time to learn how to play better (i.e. play with lower PT/speed), in other words ability to play on higher speed means he can enjoy playing more games than previously. Let's not forget that not everyone is a hardcore fan.

I agree, it's good to support casual and hardcore players, otherwise the number of active players would be a lot smaller.

I wonder, if the casual players had a KaM community they might be discussing how we should remove 1.0x and 1.5x speeds because annoying hardcore players insist on using those options which makes it harder for them to organise their 2.0x and 3.0x games

I think our player base is big enough to support a few different speed options where everyone can find a game at the speed they want. Maybe 1.0-3.0 is too much choice, we could restrict it to 1.0-2.0 or change to 1.0 increments instead of 0.5.

[Krom]

Veterans can play x1 and should not force everyone else to the same rules. Casual players can play x2 and I see no harm in that they can enjoy the game at a decent speed.

I have played a nice x2 game few days ago, PT65. Despite me being a weak player even I managed to build a decent city and 15knights + 20xbows by the end of PT. So I'm not buying that argument, that x2 is way too fast to manage for a casual. Poor management comes from the lack of skill and hardcority. If that would be x5, then yes, but x2 - no.

[The Dark Lord]

Mweh... There is no point in denying that x2 speed results in less good gameplay than lower speeds. You can't say it doesn't make a difference after just playing a x2 speed game. It may feel like you did okay, but maybe you would have done lots and lots better with lower speed?
Anyway, that's the least interesting part of this discussion for me. I don't care about skilled or not skilled; my problem is that there are too many options which makes it hard to find a game.
And of course I've said this before: I love the Remake, but it's not much of a remake anymore with all these extra features that are not necessarily good and liked by everyone.

[Krom]

@TDL: That is why these are options. You can select x1 and enjoy good old KaM, or select x2 and enjoy casual KaM gameplay.

[dicsoupcan]

2x is still doable, you will not perform as good as with x1 but witha bit of practise you can keep the mistakes made to a minimum. however,2,5x and 3x are really fast speeds to play on (yes i did it and you hardly can manage anything after you get past woodcutter). That is why i suggest it again, and thereby agree with lewin that a restriction to max 2x speed would be the best compromise to limit both choices which will give less arguing about speeds in lobbies and keep the game manageable. changing increments from 0.5 to 1 will not likely help imo.

[The Dark Lord]

@TDL: That is why these are options. You can select x1 and enjoy good old KaM, or select x2 and enjoy casual KaM gameplay.

And you can select 1.5, 2.5 and 3.0, which is why there are too many options. Players can play the speed they want, I have no problems with that (although obviously I would prefer everyone to play at x1, but that's not going to happen anyway ). But with this many options (25) it's hard to find a game with speeds that you like. Sometimes I see a building game with acceptable peace time speed, and then they have some crazy game speed like x2.5. It's crazy, you can't micro with x2.5 speed. There is no way you can react on a sudden attack; it makes no sense. So what some people and me proposed before: remove x2.5 and x3 so there are only 9 options left and differences are smaller. It would also be possible to remove game speed completely and only have pt speed (preferably with less options of course, maybe only x1, x2 and x3), because fighting at high speeds is ridiculous.

[Bence791]

Devs, I see your point that we shouldn't (and mustn't?) force any casual players to play the normal speed. But there is something you don't "notice": we are either forced to play ONLY among ourselves or we are forced to play those ridiculous speeds... And as a consequence of that, the casual players can't get further with skills (can't see us, the better players building cities and fighting) and we can't play.

@Krom: I'm sure you could do that with 60pt x1 Probably even better.

because fighting at high speeds is ridiculous.

Hehe. I wouldn't care either if I had no army.