Isolated is active jamming so the reset it to find a way around the jamming or a frequency that isn't effected. Immobilised is as you say a matter of rebooting the system.
I miss the descriptions on the side also and I have to say, the pictures could be better and bigger to see the minis from different angels - that would help building the things together, but ...: The new packs are very modern, they have a QR code that will show you a picture with the description of the minis worked well enough with my YJ RF.
Player since 2012 here. The game's so much better than it was in N2 or N3. The community has come and gone. It's currently got decent numbers and frequency of players but player enthusiasm is currently muted despite the product itself being extremely strong. Two things are not going particularly well right now, and they are related: Problem A: CB is not communicating frequently with the Infinity community, about rules or anything. What communication occurs all seems tied to new releases, with little effort to encourage existing players to enjoy the game or participate in the storyline, either online or in-person. The neglect is palpable. The game is still okay, but it doesn't feel supported beyond new releases. Endsong's book was cool, but the WarCor program seems to be neglected and dormant so league play did not feel particularly engaged with the storyline. ITS is still fun, and the effort there is the best part of the community engagement that does happen. It just feels very one-way, which is understandable but needs just a bit of "hey guys we're listening" to be added. Problem B: The forums have been allowed to be a sewer of negativity. This is exacerbated by a lack of active community engagement, let alone contribution to forum content, from CB. Can't say I blame them for neglecting the forums, as it's very difficult to find positive content or address reasonable concerns when they are mixed in with grinding weird egotistical "but I want it NOW, DADDY!" demands. [Note: Queen's Gambit's criticisms and the original post here are thoughtful, clear, and not insulting. He's been an example of rational and friendly participation, which makes it quite sad to see him leave.] We can and should be sympathetic to CB's resources being stretched thin as they try to launch another successful product line (WarCrow). More product lines are needed to keep the company viable long-term without just exploiting and monetizing Infinity mercilessly. Avoiding the GW problem of milking power creep and burning existing players just to sell enough models to pay staff is a good thing for them to be working towards. But a small number of hours focused on constant Infinity community engagement would make a very big difference here, and are really vital to keep fans interested in playing and promoting the game. Such as: Solution Part 1: Coordinate with the good fan-content creators out there, especially WarLore and Human Sphere. Recognize and link to them in the company media presence, and direct people searching for the game's info towards those resources (especially WarLore's excellent background summaries for new players). And when there's a global campaign (Kurage etc.), do a final-results writeup that explains what happened, because there's a LOT of fan engagement happening there which feels unrecognized if there's not even a summary of what happened. Pointing out a few of the best batreps etc. would really make that feel like fan input matters. Solution Part 2: Make a couple posts per week on the forum, praising good content, or even just showing that someone is paying attention. Ignore the haters, just put out a few nice things to say to the fans. Maaaaybe consider rules balance issues where they are well-stated and not just whining... but that's got to be really difficult given the volume of complaints that get posted here these days. Speaking of which: Solution Part 3: MODERATE THE BLOODY FORUM, kicking people off permanently if they are constantly negative. Legit rules/balance critique is entirely possible without insulting CB or doomsaying the product. CB should absolutely not tolerate people who piss on their game, malign the company, and argue with fellow forum users without end. It's driven much of the community away from these forums, either onto the Discord or away from community sites period. [ Discord's amnesiac-chat format isn't great, but the mods on the Discord do not tolerate crappy behavior or aggressive ego ("I tried to create a YouTube presence based on Infinity and failed, so I'm quitting the game, and will return to the CB forum just to piss all over it at every opportunity."). If this forum took the same approach, you would regain and retain -far- more players than you would have to remove, or who might pout about others being removed.] Solution Part 4: Consider and address rules balance issues at least occasionally, and have a visible presence doing so. The FAQs are helpful, but they do not directly answer the question "why is this seemingly-out-of-balance unit/rule/etc. actually fine within the game system?". It's a tall order, but at least showing that you consider rules balance and are willing to correct things which are clearly out of band is important. This already happens, so it's mostly a matter of the occasional "hey we hear you, here's our thoughts on this" post. Poor IJW had a hell of a time doing this task before, but if you kick out the haters and rude people from the forums it will be a lot easier to do this. Otherwise you risk letting those whiners be the only voices that are easy to find on the internet. Infinity forever: RIP the forums, may they one day get better. @Koni @Bostria you are surely very aware of these problems, but: These two problems come up at every single in-person tournament I have attended in the last year, and on many weekly nights at local gameshops. It usually starts when newer players ask why it's so difficult to find good info about the game on the internet, and why the forums are so incredibly negative. Please, please moderate the forums, ban the haters, and get back in here to encourage people making good posts and content. We miss you guys!
Definitely more comms would help. A monthly article written by a dev about anything, like design musings, tactics, painting, a battle report, anything. And a quarterly unit update; buffs, nerfs, just pick a random unit and tweak it just to freshen things up.
i make sure to tell every new player to avoid the forums at all cost because of the constant negativity. The dev notes they released about the reinforcements release was nice to have...now we need more of that.
The game is fun to play, and it is one of the most balanced games that I know. It can be even more fun to play? Of course! Bring it on with exciting changes and new features! It can be even more balanced? Definetely. I myself I am an advocate of the proposal of having more frequent balance passes in which a "Overepresentation/Overperform/underepresentation/underperfom" criteria is followed for the changes. I support @Savnock lenghty message. A more "positive-percieved" community is ace to attract new players and keep veterans around!
Completely agree with (almost) everything you say. The only thing I would like to clarify is that the forum has become a quagmire of negativity, it is not solely and exclusively the responsibility of those responsible (administrators and/or moderators). There is no doubt that the (at least to me) incomprehensible non-moderation policy that the forum seems to have is a big problem. But without denying the problem that the above entails, there is another problem that no one seems to want to mention and that is the forum crusaders. Understanding as such those who every time there is a negative comment (sometimes even if the negative comment is legitimate and true) respond in ways that are sometimes much worse than those used by the (supposed) haters they intend to combat.
"Both sides" argument, and not even vaguely in scale. The constant, soul-crushing negativity coming out of several super-regular posters, is in no way equivalent to the few polyannas who were here over the last few years. - The complainers killed discussion, crapped on peoples' enthusiasm and creativity, and drove people away from the forums. - The polyannas were just annoying, but mainly to the complainers. The worst they can be accused of is "poking the bear" and keeping the complainers going, giving them more chances to keep posting doom and anger and stirring up sh!t. On the plus side, the polyannas/crusaders helped people see that the complainers are in no way the dominant view, no matter how frequently and visibly they post. What's nice to note is that the usual-suspects complainers have gotten a bit more restrained in their emotional tone, and seem to be pretty constructive recently as I read through recent posts. This is great because several of them have very, very solid understandings of the game and valid suggestions for its improvement (were they presented without attacking the character of the company and attempting to sh!t on the pleasure of others in the game such as it stands). Kinda seems like behavior and emotional tone here are tentatively improving. Let's hope that's a permanent change, not just a result of the much-reduced posting volume on the forums overall giving less chances to overcomplain. Let's also hope CB have some plan to drive users back to the forum and repopulate it, rather than just let this place die a slow death while newbs all join the Discord. The Discord's awesome as a chat, but it's not a place where you can find older articles, cool ideas and paintschemes, and records of the standing discussion of rules issues.
the plan is simple N5 people will come back, but QG made a good point faction identities has been lost over the years and some of the new profiles are a bit overturned and underpriced
Of course, because everyone knows that flames are only created because someone says something outrageous and only because of that, not because that is responded to with an equally or more outrageous statement, which in turn is responded to with another and another and another and another. If the first outrage is ignored, there is no flame, if the discussion escalates it is because there are two sides throwing gasoline on the flames. Anyway, I have no interest or intention to argue with you about this, I just wanted to express my opinion that two don't argue if one doesn't want to, and that many arguments escalate because there are two sides making it happen. About reactivating the forum... what are each of us going to do to make the forum an active place again?
On the French forum, even though the majority of the community still reads it, it's almost exclusively me who posts there. The departure wasn't because of the posts, because we don't have the problem of the international forum (which, incidentally, only affected the rules and profiles part, not the hobby part, the section of the community only interested in art should have stayed), it's only because nowadays the majority of people go online on their smartphones, and despite security problems and horrific stories of full-scale hacking, people find discord and instagram more comfortable to use from their phones than the forums. Of course, the forum is more useful for separating topics, research and readability, which is discord's drawback. For example, I noticed that in the French discord community, they unknowingly redid the translation of the operation deck in raw data format 3 times, and as part of the discord community has the oddity of refusing to go to the forum, none of the three saw that the cards had already been translated and designed for weeks when they did it. Which just goes to show on discord that information is hard to get access to. On the other hand, between Discord's financial problems and the fact that forums are better for AI research work, it's possible that forums will come back into fashion in the near future unless you want to stick to a chat format, because they'll allow you to have a variety of tools (integrated into the forum or browser) thanks to the fact that forums function as a clear, public database, where Discord doesn't because it's just monstrous continuous threads of mixed conversations. And it's something that happens very quickly. On the french forum, the AIs have boosted the number of views, and in just 3 months we're almost at a year's worth of views. When I do a search on infinity, very often it's either the official forum, the french forum or human-sphere that come out to feed their generations of replies, as a database, forums are very valuable.
@Wizzy that's really helpful info to have about the behavior of Infinity communities in other languages! Interesting implications for whether emotional tone really has been the primary culprit of the anglophone forums' dwindling, and something to think about thanks. It would be awesome to see the English & Spanish forums get optimized to appeal to AI search. That's beyond my understanding, but if you have thoughts about that, you might try sharing them directly with CB. I bet they'd be really really interested to hear them. [ BTW, you're exactly the kind of community member whose posts make forums great. Thanks for all your work bringing info together here on this one (and in the French one too)! ]
