Hi, Pt4h here. I have come to a point at which I heard so many people complaining and saying that PA or any other game or genre is dying without knowing what that actually means that I cannot take it anymore. So I feel the urge of doing some education on the subject. This post might be long but I think many people can learn from this, so if you can, please bear with me. You can also just read the first section and then skip to the 2nd post on this thread if you just want to read the non-PA-specific part. In the following I will describe: what it means that a project is dying, what the specific reasons are for saying that PA is dying, how PA actually looks like, why it is that people say such things and finally what you can do to actively contribute to the health of the community. So, without further ado, lets jump into the action: What it means that a project is dying: The dead horse metaphor There is a metaphor in software engineering (and probably other engineering branches as well) that perfectly describes a project that is actually dying: The dead horse. It is a project, that will with absolute certainty cost you more than you get out of it, like if your horse died and you still keep feeding it. (that is also kinda gross ) A person that is riding a dead horse is someone who puts energy or money into the project with or without knowing it is a dead horse. If you know, you might want to jump off it as soon as possible to not waste your resources on a lost cause. If you don't know it, well, you are doomed of course. Note that it can happen that you cannot jump off even if you know the horse is dead, for example in the case that you have spent far too much resources into it and desperately need to get this thing to work! If people say to you that a game is dying, they imply that engaging in any way with it will not give you anything in return. This might be true for the developers, that actually put money into it while they are developing and maintaining it, but what about players? Can you say that it is impossible to find some joy in a game, just because the popular belief is that it is a dead horse? What have you got to lose? It is not like anyone puts a gun to your head and forces you to waste your free time on it Divide and conquer! But, for the sake of education, lets be more specific. In the following I will divide the arguments I make into these categories: player base: How many players are actively playing gameplay: How interesting and engaging is the game bugs and features: How many bugs are there and how many features are missing from your point of view interaction: this is a big part, so I will sub-divide it devs (I will count community managers as devs too, so I mean all Uber employees working on PA) organization engagement community (streams viewers, players, tourney organizers, map makers, modders etc.) organization engagement interest trend: The "fashion sense" of the gamer scene as a whole Specific reasons for saying that PA is dying First, let me explain a bit: People who say that something is dying are communicating a trend and simultaneously a prediction. Someone who is dying won't usually come back from this condition. This prediction aspect makes the statement incredibly powerful and, like with all incredibly powerful statements, caution is advised. So lets break it down to the categories from above to find out what these people are really saying: The player base is decreasing and it will continue until nobody plays it anymore. Gameplay is boring and shallow, the balance is bad and always will be. The game is completely buggy and they will never implement the feature I proposed on the forums. The devs and the community is in chaos, and interaction will soon completely stop. Strategy games are not interesting anymore, and never will be again. As you see, the prediction part of the statement makes this whole thing a bit unrealistic. So lets see what is actually happening at the moment. The current state of PA Let me explain a bit again: I will describe PA as "almost indie". What indie is and is not is debatable, but personally I go with the description that it has a concept that is extremely new and the game is buildt heavily around it. (planets in this case) It also relies heavily on the community, because the dev team is small compared to the AAA game teams. OK, now that this is said, lets take a look at PA: (my personal opinion, might be a bit off) The player base was decreasing for ranked play. I don't know that for non-ranked or galactic war, but I assume Uber knows that unranked, skirmish and gw games are also decreasing. But that is not directly visible to everyone. However, more players are playing again because of the upcoming Big Bang tournament and of course the ongoing SuperCommander cup. So, things could be better, but it also could be much, much worse. The gameplay is decent. It may not have the depth of StarCraft, but comparing something only to the best makes everyone look really bad and only the best is kind of OK. Compared to the average, PA is not so bad at all. The biggest issue I see is that with only one faction, it can become a bit dull over time. But the fact that the metagame is still shifting is proof enough that there are many interesting things to discover gameplay-wise. Bugs are present, but they are fixed over time. Remember, Uber has not that many devs to work on this game. Even if they are not fixed, keep in mind that some of the bugs in a game might also become a feature when they persist long enough and players work around them. This is why there are so many weird micromanagement things in StarCraft Broodwar In the feature department it is clear that not every feature requested by anyone can be implemented. Currently there is the big feature of asteroids, that will be coming up, so there is some interesting stuff to look out for. The devs: Organization of the dev team is average to good. It could be better, but to me it makes the team more human and understandable if they make a mistake or two. Also, the open development and modding support covers most of these mistakes and I think they knew that fact from the very beginning of the planning phase. Organization also trends upwards since they gather valuable experience over time. Engagement of the devs is good too. How many games of that scale did you play where you had a member of the dev team in a chat used by the players almost all the time? Also, updates on development are sometimes discussed even before they go live in PTE. So the devs are a very big part of the community. The community: Organization of the community is also quite good. And I don't even mean the forum. Map makers make awesome or ridiculously fun maps to play on which are shared on the system share mod. Tourney organizers have bots that automatically gather match results and feed them to the brackets. Do you see that in StarCraft2 tourneys? Mod makers publish their mods via PAMM and pushing a mod update is so easy and convenient. And there are several twitch streams of players from almost every skill level. Oh, and PAstats. PAstats!!! What a marvelous piece of organization/information infrastructure! Engagement of the community is good or could be a bit better depending on what you look at. In the last few months there were less tourneys than before; Tourneys are a big part of the community and I think we should have more of them, not only for the top players but more importantly for the intermediate and even the beginners. And I think we are going in the right direction now that we have the SuperCommander Cup and the Big Bang tourney. The Exodus team is also well active on the forums. Streams are getting a bit scarce and this might be a problem. Map makers and modders still do an amazing job at adding cool content and features to the game. Interest trend: This is not PA-specific, but it is also almost impossible to say that strategy games in general are not that interesting anymore. So I will just leave this thing open for now. This all seems like it is not the best we could have, but it surely is not dying. Maybe we could say that we had a rough time in the last 3 to 6 months, but it seems we are recovering over all. (continues on next post)
Why people say "xyz is dying": Psychology 101 I assume you are familiar with the term of something going viral. It basically means someone started it and it spreads like crazy. This is of course not only possible for good and interesting things, but also for negative impressions and thoughts. Here is the theory: Humans have the intrinsic property on focusing more attention on the negative aspects of things. This is good, because it points you to the things that can be improved and learned from. But it also means that we should be aware of that fact; If we are focusing on the negative aspects of one thing and do not take any action (or if there are no good actions to take), then the thing becomes really undesirable after a while. This is a psychological negative feedback loop. This negative feedback loop is the plan B of nature, which enables individuals that experience it to warn other individuals that are yet unfamiliar with the situation. This enables the species as a whole to survive threats that cannot be easily overcome. Lets see how this works in practice: If you hear from someone that PA or strategy games in general are dying, most time this is the only sentence you hear or read. This is the plan B warning, which is "designed" by nature to have a really strong negative impact on you. The word dying is such a negatively loaded word and without any details given on what makes it so bad, you cannot simply say things like "yeah there are things that could be improved". It creates a negative association without the constructive counterpart, that was so crucial to understanding and changing ones environment. This in turn forces you into one of these two actions: You could think about it and discover the specific negative and positive aspects of the game yourself. (like I tried to do above) This means you need to devote some time and mental effort to see past the things you hear and read and it might be difficult to determine whether the positive or negative aspects predominate. This is because you need to combine the list of pros and cons with you personal bias. (For example if you just play the game, you wont be too angry about bugs in the system editor.) You could also choose the lazy alternative, which requires no time or mental effort. in this case however you are completely exposed to the negative feedback loop. This increases the likelihood that you will repeat the sentence and carry the plan B warning on to other individuals. So we see that a vague but powerful sentence like "xyz is dying" has a huge potential to go viral. But where would we stand today if all of our ancestors would have accepted that fire is a really bad thing and should be avoided at all costs? Our advantage as a species is that we can overcome the plan B warning and create a deeper understanding of the world, which in turn makes us more powerful and enables us to appreciate and enjoy the thing around us. But what can I do? Prevent the artificial corruption of the community! I want that if you hear the sentence again that "xyz is dying", you should think about what it is that makes it so bad. You don't need to become a pro in the particular area, just don't let the others influence you so easily! There is always more to a thing than the black and white kind of thinking that is implied with these kind of sentences. You can also train yourself to see past the plan B warning and see the helplessness that the people saying the sentence are in. And you can either pity them for not understanding or you could help them to be more constructive. Either way, knowledge is the best cure to the plan B virus. So next time when someone says that your horse is dead, take your time to look at it. If it is really dead, jump off, but if it is just in a bad shape, try to treat it so it can become healthy again. After all, you only have so many horses in your life and leaving a trail of half-dead horses serves nobody except the vultures. I hope you learned something from this and see you in the game! PAG_Pt4h (Posted at 13:37 local time. Like a boss )
Planetary annihilation is a good game. There are plenty of rewarding moments even for players who have spent hundreds of hours playing already. As far as the community, I wish there were more players, tournaments, and clans/matches. Even with all the hard work the tournament organisers, uber, clan captains, etc... put in sometimes the game feels empty which does scare me about the games future more than the random doom and gloom review/commenters.
Whoops, I totally forgot to mention the positive effects of PAstats on community organization. Somehow I thought of it as such a basic tool that it slipped out of my list. Of course, without PAstats there would be no bots that gather tourney results at all. Thank you @cola_colin! (updated op as well)
