The Elephant in the room. (Steam)
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You guys are bombarding Dave everyday with good ideas, and he's been amazing at trying to cater towards everyone and make things fun/new/exciting but what we are lacking more than anything is playerbase, and it's showing. The Issue: It's no surprise that the activity level is diminishing since our covid party is almost ending. I'm sure you've all noticed both lobbies, especially the beginner's lobby drop in activity. All these updates are great for older players but the competitive community is not what keeps AtWar alive, it never has been. It's the influx of newer players replacing older ones that keeps AtWar alive. People are always going to leave a game once they get older or bored. The Solution: One of the first things I brought up to Dave was inquiring about if it was feasible to bring the game to Steam (https://store.steampowered.com/). He seemed reluctant and hesitant at the time but I think he's onboard with the idea now. I've already made a post about it, which you can read below but i've taken a SS of it for easier viewing. I'm suggesting maybe we all stop asking for minor QoL updates from Dave and move towards the real issue at hand. Let's get the game some players.  My Older topic: https://atwar-game.com//forum/topic.php?topic_id=34376 Others: https://atwar-game.com//forum/topic.php?topic_id=40099 https://atwar-game.com//forum/topic.php?topic_id=35242 https://atwar-game.com//forum/topic.php?topic_id=34474 https://atwar-game.com//forum/topic.php?topic_id=25968 https://atwar-game.com//forum/topic.php?topic_id=25900 https://atwar-game.com//forum/topic.php?topic_id=25374 https://atwar-game.com//forum/topic.php?topic_id=15184
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I should mention that what i'm asking is not "easy" and probably one of the harder things being suggested  Sorry Dave!
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Totally agree. I may not be able to help, but I wish you programmers the best of luck to get this on steam.
---- https://prnt.sc/W3aEpwbpEwEU
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Good idea, but i dont think moving to steam will have much affect atwar is just kinda old and isn't attractive to kids and teens and they wont play it regardless if its on steam. i think this game was successful because it was a pretty well made strategy game that didn't require a ton of load on your pc like total war during the days where everyone had pretty shit pcs now we all got good pcs, what does this game have to offer that other games cant? how does this game compare to other strategy games? plus, even if it goes on steam, it might get negative reviews which would be potentially very damaging to the game when attracting new players maybe this game can be revived if dave burns a ton of cash on it and hires more programmers, but i dont think he is willing to spend that cash so overall i don't think going on steam is a good idea at the current state of the game
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Epic games could be a better option, they seem to be spending a lot of money to give free games to people so maybe they'd even pay something to get atwar on their platform. Otherwise steam would be a good option too, if Dave is serious about this then maybe he should look back at the old silverlight launcher that we had since that was already a standalone launcher that worked and wasn't buggy HTML5. It would still take a little work of course but the building blocks are there I believe.
---- Lest we forget Moja Bosna Ponosna
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Ooga booga simple game won't work Yet Travian, Supremacy, Ikariam have millions of players...
---- No such thing as a good girl, you are just not the right guy. 
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It's what totally me and SunTzu been saying this game needs to move on to some game engine to get more player base and steam is by so far that can help out player base problem. Second thing this game needs a major update to be on the line to attract players and so many other areas that need to be revised again, which means coding part. If the game allows channels to create content on history where there are several channels on youtube this will be another boom for Atwar to grow I think they would love to use this product as it will allow them to actually show units, reality based map, battles expansions and much more. I'm sure there are many other ways from which Atwar can grow.
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yea I agree this game needs huge update before going to steam other wise it's very low margin for game to grow.
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I doubt Steam would help us to solve our activity problem. Do you guys remember Transformice, which was a popular web game during 2010s, they moved to Steam but i don't think it helped them much. Though i think we need more adversitement so i support it.
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I disagree, I mean transformice was known already, before it went on Steam. It was a game played by children mostly... And children get bored easily. But there are too many strategy players who have never known atWar in their lifes.
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You just made me time travel to when i was 11-12, and relive memories, first love, she always wanted me to play transformice with her, heartbreak... Thanks
---- No such thing as a good girl, you are just not the right guy.
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So it was last year?
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I've never been opposed to Steam. In fact, I think its a good idea, and I plan to do it. Its just a question of when. I do worry about getting a lot of negative reviews, given the game's current state. While I've fixed quite a few bugs, it still seems like just the tip of the iceberg. Not to mention how dated the UI is and all the other problems we all know about. What I worry about more though is our user retention issue. We easily get 3-4K new registered users (not guests) every month, but so few actually stick around and become regulars. We tried advertising a bunch of different ways and it was the same thing -- we could get a boost of users but none of them stuck around. I'm afraid it would be the same with Steam. Now maybe we should do Steam anyway -- it doesn't cost much, and it wouldn't be that hard to do. Fair enough. Even if we end up with only 1 or 2 new users sticking around, hey that's 1 or 2 more we didn't have before. What I'm really focusing on though is trying to solve the user retention issue at its core. Any QoL update I've done has just been quick & easy stuff to try and keep the existing community happy -- nothing really complicated. My real interest is how to get brand new users to stick around for longer periods of time. That's why I've done things like updating the tutorial (I know, still a work in progress, but its better than it was before); updating the start game UI to expose people to more variety of maps; giving free players the ability to play promo'd maps; giving daily login SP to encourage repeat activity; giving PC earnings from games to encourage people to stay all the way to the end and not abandon; putting a lot of effort into reducing toxicity and making this a friendlier environment (which continues to be a struggle, but we have achieved the removal of some of the worst people); and putting a lot of effort into building the Supporters team to help/mentor newbies. All of these things *should* be helping to improve our user retention numbers, but the hard truth is they've continued to go down, not up. I don't think any of the things I just mentioned objectively made retention worse, per se. Its just that we're fighting against a downward trend that's been going for a long time now. I'm sad to say, nothing that I've done so far has stopped this decline. Excepting the huge temporary gain from Coronavirus lockdowns, and fleeting little gains here and there from advertising, the overall downward trend has continued unabated.  I have more ideas I'm working on to try and make some positive breakthrough with the user retention numbers. (I don't want to say what they are at the moment because it will just derail the thread, but you'll see when they arrive.) If I can find a way to turn the downtrend into an uptrend, then doing advertising and Steam and everything else would be much more worthwhile. Anyway... Like I said, maybe we should do Steam anyway and see what happens. I just wish we could find some way to actually hook new people when they come in the door. I would feel much more confident about it in that case. Also, and this is going to sound terrible but to be totally honest, it *would* be kinda nice if people stopped bugging me with little QoL ideas so much, because realistically 99% of them are not gonna get done anyway. I mean I appreciate that people want to help out, but we already have tons of ideas. We're not lacking in the idea department. I do want to keep the existing community (minus the toxic ones) around as much as I can, but I'm much more focused on the r0-r3's... that's where the future of AW will come from. And if we do Steam, it would be much better if those new users actually stuck around.
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why dont you encourage youtube channels to use this platform to make their content that basically only focus on history related to wars or shout out their multi times the list I've talked about in my previous comment is the charm the might use for their content and their user base will find out about this game and who knows who finds interest in it. maybe some sort of agreement or payment can help out
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We've reached out to a lot of youtube channels and they all want money. We did pay Kings & Generals (a lot of money, btw) and just like everything else, we got a bunch of new users and 0 stuck around. It's not so easy.
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I wonder what atWar's user retention should be? I don't know what it is, but I wonder how far off the mark we are from similar games. Thanks for the reply! I see now why it hasn't been done yet.
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---- No such thing as a good girl, you are just not the right guy.
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I wish, life has been nothing but pain since. I think people should be given more in depth tutorial that explains things in simple words so I don't get r9 in cw claiming I am hacking because I tbed him.
---- No such thing as a good girl, you are just not the right guy.
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OK. I see many good points and even more bad ones. It's not your fault, probably most of you are not web developers or software engineers at all, given that you are adults in the first place. Let me give you my point of view of the retention issue. RETENTION ISSUE In order to sustain a straight retention value on the graphs, we need to keep the players enganged. It's necessary to focus on retention and engagement at once. How can atwar engage the youth (gamers)? Has anything changed massively since 2010? The short answer is no, nothing changed at all. Risk is a board game like Chess. Has chess become boring since 3000 BC or so, when it was first played in China? No. Strategy games do not age. They improve by generation changes, graphics, and complexity. No strategy game could ever replicate reality 100%, so in fact, atwar is fine for a few more decades at least. It is not "aging" in this term. I would say risk is almost as popular as chess, they're even competing in western cultures. This theoretically means in terms of available people - as long as atwar has no competitor in this area, - we are absolutely fine. A very easy concept that has been developed into a virtual strategy game. The unique value of atwar relies in this. We should stick to this matter as it's an amazing resource for advertisement (unless we find something better, highly doubt it). We should return to the roots instead. Why do people prefer atwar? Why would they spend 3 hours conquering the world as China: Southeast instead of sitting in front of their newest Creative Assembly (total war), Taleword (mount and blade), Paradox Interactive (hearts of iron), or Firaxis (civilization) games? Because it's different. It's based on a board game (risk), and started developing in a way that is outstanding, plus eventually managed to find a marketing gap, either by accident or on purpose. To understand this let's take a look back to the early development of atwar. UNIQUITY OF ATWAR Now investigate atwar's essential strength (compared to risk board game and strategy games): 1. Besides world map it offers an astonishing customization option, the map editor (which is similar to modding, user-generated sandbox is always attractive for strategy gamers in my experience), where you can replicate and change about everything in the game, setup your own playground. 2. Great potential in the cities-countries system, which also provides the opportunity for further implementations. 3. It features several - on paper unlimited - different types of units, like in modern strategy games. 4. Given the fact we are online, it's a great social activity if you consider that Hearts of Iron or Civilization multiplayer lobbies are almost dead. Their communities live on the games' forums, private communities and such. Atwar can't and shouldn't try to compete with large titles, it's an entirely different story. 4.1. We utilize people to people combat, both real time and casual strategy. That's extraordinary. 5. Quality of Life focused, clean and modern UI design. Brilliant solutions that brought and then upgraded the concept of a board game. 6. Derives from the golden era of Total War series: turn based RTS, almost standalone idea. And now the weaknesses, where we should definitely improve: 1. Overall design of the User Interface, map editor and such. The game was already giving retro vibes back in 2012-2014, now in 2021 this contrasts even more (in a bad meaning this time). The most important thing here is the in-game interface, obviously. 1.1. Add more colors, make the panels easier to handle, make it more user friendly, change the UI in a way suitable for future expansions and updates, like if it was designed for a 12 years old. 2. Quantity matters too - probably more than quality - in a strategy game. We need more units, more strategies, more CONTENT. This must remain nearly ignorant to the parallel quality changes (adding two buttons or three to the interface and changing the background shouldn't prevent us from adding logistic wizard strategy, right? object orientation in the development team too, please...) 2.1. Seasonality. 3 months for a cw season is a thing. On the other hand we don't get any content changes, or they are just minimal and disappointing, see point 2. 3. To make atwar more interesting and engaging, it needs depth. No, I don't mean witch doctor's and froyer's walling skills in cw. I mean things like improved diplomacy, more types of cities, units, generals (remember tank general? inner joke nevermind XD), better naval and air combat (ground dominates now). 4. Game settings tend to look like we are in a beta phase. Limited to 20 players, then limited to 40. Limited to 4 teams. You cannot disable buildings. You need premium to have extra cities. This can be modified either way: add more premium options as the game develops or make it a free feature and focus premium on something else. As JUGERS once said, we need more customization, not less. He might have been wrong with the buildings, but in general, he was right. 5. Development is so diverse and elitist, every single update I've seen so far in the last 3 years was focusing on bugfixes and improving CW. Dave please, a decade passed, listen to the peasants not the nobles. I promise it will benefit all of us. We need ranked games, new game modes, not improving fucking eu 3v3 cw. We can keep eu 3v3 cw nearly the same even if the game has a lot of news to it... so the 10 years old atwar players can satisfy themselves in the old cw, incubated... whatever. 6. This is a counter argument here. Nobody cares about toxicity. We don't have 80 games running in the beginner lobby so that we can ban people like waffel. They're one of the most important members of the community. Fortnite players will never come to atwar. I believe our vast majority of players are mature adults, and only minor percentage of them is toxic, like the rest of the internet (...) PERSONAL SUGGESTIONS 1. AI for the neutrals. Complicated but probably worth the efforts. 2. More diplomacy options, for example a reworked system where you can trade your resources or land to someone. 2.1. Bound resources to countries, for example natural gas in Russia: Siberia. Do not question it. Ask people. Implement it. 3. Quality of Life improvements like auto-unit-moving? For example if you hold down CTRL key and click 3 places, the unit will try to move to those places in the next 3 turns, except if it's interrupted by a player's wall or the sea. This is very useful if we want to add more complexity to the game, it saves a lot of time, similar to auto-production. 4. Map views. If more things are implemented, it's necessary to add more views to the map. I mean an income view that ranges from green to red to see where is the most money on the map, a reinforcements view, a naval view, an air view, etcetera. Not just stealth detection and move range views. 4.1. This game lacks missiles. I don't care how you implement it. Maybe Notify the player with a red spot above the city or something that indicates a rocket is coming in next turn, so you cannot abuse the 100 move range of a rocket. It should also be more limited. This is related to world map now, but it would be even greater for custom maps. 5. Steam and Epic Games sound not good but NECESSARY steps to keep the game alive and grow it. Is it on steam? No. Will we have less players if no one clicks on our steam advert? No. Then no comment. Even though, the game should be improved for this... in first hand. 6. More types of units. Or just simply more units. How long are we asking for trucks, trains, aircraft carriers, cruisers (...) ? 7. One general is a nice minimalistic thing, very good for competitive play. Larger scenarios require stuff like a field officer unit update, similar to general, it could be highlighted with some different element instead of a star with different bonuses and upgrades. 8. The upgrades. Holy moly. Double it. Triple it. Quadruple it. Make current ones cheaper. More premium options. End of story. 9. As I mentioned the UI is trash. You already know this by now Dave, and everyone else, but still I have to mention it. The chat keeps jumping down to the newest message, spectators' message can still be seen after ignoring, I don't know if moderators have a panel with buttons or they still use commands, lack of kick and host swap options in the lobby, unpleasantly aged forum, some menus are hard to find or are in the inappropriate spot (like the elo calculator), etc... 10. A variety of ranked games, not just cw. This would be great for a more challenging, but also more rewarding (sp, pc) game mode. There has been dozens of cw suggestions, I won't go into this in depth now. But keep in mind that cw at the moment is fine, and absolutely not prior #1 to change. Keep it as it is for now. 11. Numerous other things, I could write a book, but hopefully you got the idea by now. Whoever you are dear reader if you got this far, bless you. SOLUTIONS FOR RETENTION The whole point of my long message summarized, let's see. In order to gain players and solve this retention issue the answer is quite simple. We need continuity. We need to continously, seasonally upgrade the game, hence why I provided ideas above. There is a lot to add or change to make the game more attractive and engaging for newcomers. Atwar has twitter, discord, even facebook if I know right, so we should start posting about the new MASSIVE updates there. Not two new strategy and one of them is taken away again. No... This leads to nowhere. Generally speaking, twitter and discord are good to keep the community engaged and active, but the most important thing is probably twitch or youtube (and epic games or steam for obvious reasons as mentioned before...). I would support Sid in his videos but let's face the fact that he is an unpopular person on youtube. Who play games? The youth. How will we attract the youth? Through videos and streams. That's the current trend. For example we should invest into some strategy game player with 200 thousand subscribers on youtube, asking him to make a professional showcase video or gameplay series of atwar. Now think about it for a second. Is atwar ready for this level of advertisement? Or we need to change a lot of stuff. Yes. If you think about it, we need to change a lot of stuff. What arre you waiting for... go continue coding or giving ideas to Dave. In my opinion this is the straightforward way to success. Not only to bring atwar back to life, but to gain a larger playerbase than we ever had. It's not as hard as you think. And I think I have not said anything new. Just the fact we all know. We need content to advertise. Then advertise to gain content idea, then repeat. This is the definition of development. Thanks for reading it all, greetings. P.S.: Ivan and Sun Tzu are possibly the most competent people who understand this problem. Excluding Sid and Dave.
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There is no problem of finding new players, the game has a problem of retaining players and the reason for this is not related to the mechanics of the game. Most new players love the game but can't find enough motivation to keep playing. Turning the game into a grand strategy type won't change anything and may make the game even worse. It should be discussed why new players do not want to continue playing the game.
---- Victory is our fate
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The game was heading towards a way of expanding. Then Ivan and Amok kinda abandoned this small game. Ever wondered why they added seemingly weird functions, or a Secondary Attack unit, if it has never been used, or nobody ever assigned an upgrade to this type of unit? Simply because the game was expanding and this is the way to grow it. And see, magic, since they stopped going on with these ideas, we are declining in number. How surprising, what could i say... A growing community and a developing game comes hand-in-hand. They coexist. Unable to exist on their own. The point of my long message was especially that even if atwar is similar to chess by the fact it's a developed risk, it is not a board game. It is a video game. It won't survive 2000 years with this tendency.
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use brain nazi kid. I am not criticizing the mechanical development of the game. The ''developments'' you mentioned do not fit the mechanics of this game. You are talking about very stupid things that cannot be added to the game anyway and will require reprogramming of the game if it will be wanted to added. A game's infrastructure is what it is. It's easy to over-imagine for you.
---- Victory is our fate
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Oh no guys! Why can't we keep players :// *has an unfinished and useless tutorial* *thrusts new players into an empty and boring beginners lobby* *they get destroyed because the tutorial taught them literally nothing* It's so strange ://
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Only women don't skip tutorial.
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Well, that's an excellent question. I don't know what it should be. I have no other games' data to compare atWar to. I would love to find out somehow what retention numbers should look like in a successful game... but I haven't been able to find this so far. All I have to compare to are my other businesses, which are mostly ecommerce-related software. One of those, for example, is a business I've had for 3 years. I have spent exactly $0 dollars on advertising it, yet its been growing on a straight upward trend since day-1. I make money by charging an annual license fee -- 60% of my customers renew after the first year. Imagine if atWar had the same stats! Right now we average about 10% of new users who are still playing after the first 30 days (I'm not home so I don't have the exact numbers in front of me atm, but off the top of my head I know its close to that). After 365 days that percentage goes down to almost nothing. Imagine if instead we had 60% of our new users still playing after a year -- there wouldn't be any problem! Of course, games and e-commerce software are totally different things, so maybe this is an unfair comparison. I could also be entirely wrong about atWar, maybe 10% after 30 days is a great number. It doesn't feel like it to me, but who knows. I really would like to find out somehow. (If anybody has connections or knows the stats for a successful game.... lemme know....)
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I'll try to contact some other similar games.
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no, the uniqueness of atwar came from its wide array of game modes/maps/customization for a browser game the selling point for this game was its easy accessibility for people who wanted to play strategy games but didn't have good enough specs to play tw this is why the game flourished in 2011/2012 it's the same reason why flash games started declining
some of your improvements have no substance or plan. you have these ideas, but they just aren't possible with the time/resources that dave has atm. 1. UI development is unbelievably tedious and it's definitely not something you can just come up with in an instant. 2 & 3. more content, game-depth and seasonality is easy to say, but also takes a decent amount of planning and programming which again i don't think are all possible with the time/resources that dave has atm. 4. sure 5. i don't even think 3v3 cw was even improved that much lol. there were a bunch of strategies that were implemented that weren't viable or used in 3v3 so idk what you're talking about. 6. sure
1. too hard 2. too hard/takes too long 3. probably possible 4. probably possible 4.1. kinda dumb lol 5. probably possible 6. probably possible 7. probably possible 8. probably possible 9. takes too long 10. too hard/takes too long realistically, dave probably has a family and a job. this game is probably a side gig for him. like most people, he's not gonna dump time/resources for something he isn't going to get a return on.
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On the contrary, I exactly know how the changes I'm talking about would look like in code and I have flawless picture of how difficult it is what I talked about.
And this is adorable but no valid excuse so far. This reminds me of women's emotional reasoning. When the husband tells his wife "honey, we're going to eat in this restaurant now", and the wife randomly starts talking about their wedding 15 years ago and how bad it was, but it comes out that she just didn't want to eat in that restaurant because she was on the second day of her period and the sunlight was breaking through the window 3 degrees further towards the North Star so she was disappointed by her husband's decision of eating there. How on Earth is this related to the game's state? Really... That's off topic man.
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I support the idea about bringing the game on Steam, but I also agree with Dave that maybe some fixes need to be made before such things happen. Just as someone stressed the importance of user retention, we also must deal with toxicity in our community (which we have been dealing with for months now). We do not need immature players that have been punished in the past for bad behavior to give us negative reviews for no objective reason. In my opinion, this game has great chances to exponentially increase its playerbase if we make it new players - friendly and eliminate toxicity. Much worse games of similiar genre have bigger communities, I could talk about names aswell, but I will leave details for private conv with Dave I guess.
They spent millions advertising for 10 years aswell.
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