Does this forum still serve any purpose?

tl;dr

Of course the balance forum serves a purpose; where else does balance get dissected so thoroughly for all to read?

Even if Uber don't post a dickens in this forum, it's great source of game-play knowledge to learn your units.

As if to prove my point, the first post from the devs on balance in months is posted in general discussion rather than balance discussions. This forum is nigh pointless and should be merged with GD.

I'd agree with the sentiment that this forum is for player-player discussions if 90% of the threads here were not aimed at making change suggestions to the devs.

https://forums.uberent.com/threads/some-thoughts-on-balance.65635/

https://forums.uberent.com/threads/why-the-balance-forum-feels-like-a-waste-of-my-time.59284/

This is why I almost never post here or read this forum.

Yeah I guess that post basically answers my question. In some ways I think that post marked a clear moment when communication with the devs fell apart. Meta wasn't really to blame but he did fuel the fire a bit. Now it feels like we are rebuilding from the rubble with the majority of the player base having moved on to greener pastures. And i'm not sure the community is better off as 90% of the discussion now involves roughly the same 15 people. Someday someone might make an interesting true-history of what went on here.

I plan to write at length about the development of PA at some point. It's been a hell of a ride.

I would read/watch that. Just since beta it has been an eye opening experience. It felt like a perfect storm of a consumer base with overly high expectations (fueled by the kickstarter) and devs with a lot of talent but a very bizarre, almost random method of interaction. That and a good heap of over-promising. Somehow the whole ride feels like a lesson on the experiment of crowd-funding. There has been a lot of good and a lot of bad for sure, in the end it does feel like great potential was wasted/lost.

We're not at the end yet by any stretch of the imagination

We'll see. Feels like a dead cat bounce right now. I will hold out hopes that even if PA as it currently is completely dies, in years to come the engine might rise again in glorious modification. You've got to admit that the community right now is really, really tiny. There is an unavoidable sense of having passed a peak or cooling down.

Talk like that kills it indeed.

If all it takes is one man speaking the truth as he sees it... I doubt that one man could have made it otherwise Colin. I've loved this game as much as anyone but I don't see how it helps to pretend otherwise. Better we prepare for the possibility of a shut down by Christmas. Ironically I feel safe having this conversation here as we know Uber doesn't read this forum.

Even the PA Realm channels are largely dead. The big question is going to be: how far can Uber get before it has to move on, and will it be far enough for the community to take up the reins from there. They said in the kickstarter they'd release the source once they were 'done with it'. We could still see the community revive this game once given full control.

(this is veering into derail so we should probably get back on topic)

Sorry mate. Here have a picture of a brain I made yesterday and a smugfrog:




That cheered me up

There are only two parties left:

• The players who did familiarize with the micro focused abomination PA is right now
• The players who are digging into modding the game following their own vision

Who got "silent" first? Mostly the players who demanded the game to be primarily macro focused, in a succession of SupCom. Followed by the players who asked for sophisticated controls. And the players who were bothered with all the small details. And then the player who gave up waiting for answers regarding the roadmap. And now the players who only remained to watch Brad loosing. Even Uber live streams (the few that Brad organized) didn't attract more than 100 viewers peak in the last weeks.

And Steam activity speaks for itself: http://steamcharts.com/app/233250#6m
Some bumps when update gets pushed to stable, and then it's back down to ~500 active players right away. (Not total 500 active players, but 500 players online in parallel.) That's only 100 more than SupCom + SupCom:FA currently have together, not even counting FaF!

I made a post with shiny graphs but instead decided to make a new thread for it:

https://forums.uberent.com/threads/pa-stats-usage-statistics.65804/

This topic is really veering into eye rolling territory.

You forgot "The players that are happy with the balance between macro and micro". Originally I was firmly in the "NO MICRO PLZ" camp, but I have come to find that there is an interesting game going on when you have to make choices about when to spend time controlling units and when to work on base building and unit composition. I do wish expansion would come back and bring us the good old macro games, but @cola_colin has shown that it wouldn't take much work to move the game in that direction. I'm still hoping for an expansion balance patch.