100 Custom Commanders

*raises hand*
Every day that hat simulator gets uninstalled is a good day.
Or at least a slightly better day.

The game itself is good, and I have no problem with using a cosmetic-based business model to keep the game alive and add new content when it would have otherwise died long ago. It's a great example of a F2P game done right. What other approach to monitization do you think should be used, pay to win? There are few other options.
*note that I'm probably baised here, since I have over 2000 hours in TF2 and have made a couple in-game items, but I stand by my point.

You keep mentioning 100 x $1000. You are aware that some people may have paid much more than that amount?

Heh, anyone else out there that shrinks their windows installs, trying to get rid of useless in-built junk?
300MB is nothing when you can trim terabytes from a bog-standard windows install without breaking anything

He does have a point, the majority of the amount of funding comes from lower cost tiers. And it only gets"worse" the higher the total amount raised goes up, think if PA had only raised 900k, if the 1k+ tiers had been maxed out then yeah they would have contributed something like an 8th of the total funds, but the amount in the higher tiers eventually tapers off as the overall amount funded goes up.

What I don't like are some of the claims made in regards to that, yes as it stands PA would have been fine without that ~140k but I don't think that makes our contributions worth any less.

Mike

Of course they're going to be on every machine, otherwise how would you see them when one of those backers use them? And it's 300MB (so about 30 cents of space) so who gives a ****? If that's a lot of space to you then you've got bigger problems with your PC.

We're really reaching for things to complain about now, aren't we.

This may not be directly connected to the discussion, but it does kinda fall into this topic: Is balance currently on pause because Mr. @scathis current engagement with this, or is he/are you doing something else? Also is that engagement going according to plan or is it taking longer than expected?

So the file size issue isn't a huge concern for us, though we know it is for some people. Our game right now is ~1.5gb uncompressed on disk, download size is only around 700mb because we pre-compress the downloads. PC games these days are often in the tens of gigabytes. Even the new generation of console games are several tens of gigs.

Ignoring that, just because someone doesn't have access to a particular commander doesn't mean their game client doesn't need it. When you play the game if you encounter someone else who's using a custom or limited release commander you would otherwise need to download it, so currently we're just shipping them with the game. We may eventually have some sort of automated in-game download system, but we don't yet.


As for the more specific question of what you can and can't do with the custom commanders... I'll answer it this way:
For mods we cannot officially condone re-releasing assets from the game; we don't really want people uploading the music files or any other part of the game. There are some obvious cases where this doesn't apply, like using the music for part of a podcast or streaming the game, but in general we will likely ask people to remove any game content they upload.

Now for what people do on their own computer, there's not anything we do to stop people from changing stuff around, and we really don't want to have to. This is why we don't encrypt any of the files on your PC and have already released information about the content package format. We want people to mod the game however they want to. The game has specifically been architected to not care what each client has locally; if they want to make every unit in the game look like prancing ponies, they can, and they can play on the same server as someone with a vanilla copy of the game or another visual mod.

Yes, he does have a point, but larger backers can't change the facts after the event. As I remember it, the forums were a bit more energised after some of the $1k donations. Though I'm old, so I might be mis-remembering...

It was the non-cosmetic items, and the overall departure from the game's original aesthetic, that prompted me to abandon it in the first place, not the style of monetization. (Not to mention the item drop and crafting system.) It doesn't matter to me if the game would have otherwise died, because it's already dead for me. The only reason I could have to play it would be to make money off of it.

Dota 2 is a little more strict, but so long as "monetization" is involved, I see it as a conflict of interest between what good game design demands and what cashflow demands, and the latter will always win out eventually. It's a systemic problem.

Yep, storm in a teacup here I think. I think the OP was more interested in alternative uses for the custom commanders. Noone really cares about 300MB - can you imagine how big PA would be if the maps weren't procedurally generated? Some people still don't understand the amazement of that, the other day someone in the lobby said the map was still 'downloading' to someone. Nooo, a tiny set of params got downloaded and the rest is procedural. Fantastic stuff!

The bigger backers did an amazing thing and deserve their custom commanders. I'd be unsurprised if a mod later let those cats out of the bag, but even then I think if you asked those backers they'd rather keep the open platform they supported initially, rather than any kind of nonsense to start encrypting things everywhere.

Just when i thought some of you guys couldn't come up with something else to rant about...haha.

Unless one of the custom commanders is an exact replica of the Dire Wolf mech from mechwarriors, I couldn't care less about these custom commanders (& since that of itself would be a copyright violation, it ain't happening)

If I had my druthers I would get my own custom commander to look like a timber wolf ... or a bat-man! But neither of those are going to happen, especially since I don't get a custom commander, and we don't render fur...
What, you didn't think I was referring to copyrighted stuff did you?

i am very thankful for the chickenfafnir

I learned a lot about custom commanders then I originally intended.

Also learned that people are quick to rage. People need to chill out, be a little more like Tea.

i honestly dont care about those 100 custom comms ... i got what i wanted commwise ... those couple hundred mbytes? meh ... bit much but no reason to go on the fence for that ...

You know, It's occurred to me that the custom commanders might inadvertently spawn an unintended side quest in PA.... Commander Spotting!

I can see a mod adding in a check list with all the known commander types listed, that you check off when you encounter them... I would say that gamers wouldn't be into this except for the number of friends I have who've been playing hours on such enthralling titles as the "Euro Truck Simulator" and "Farming Simulator" to name a couple...

I hereby demand a Steam achivement "Gotta Catch 'em All!" - "Played in a game where a custom commander was present."

The "Timber Wolf" had fur ??