Yesterday I also saw this data on Nomads, Ariadnian and international networks, which can complement these figures: [09:26] Tristan228: Because I'm bored at the moment, I've calculated some figures on the combat activity of commanders : Commanders: 1085 0 Reps: 655 / 60,4% 1 Rep: 189 / 17,4% 2 Reps: 88 / 8,1% 3 Reps: 54 / 5,0% 4 Reps: 38 / 3,5% 5 - 9 Reps: 37/ 3,4% 10+ Reps: 9 / 0,8% This represents fewer registered commanders than during Durgama (in fact around 32% fewer) and around half the number registered during Asteroid Blues. - The player base shrank during the pandemic. - So far, the campaigns themselves don't bring anything new (in terms of adding different mechanisms to play the campaign), the fun elements are mainly player-driven. There was an alliance option during the Flamestrike campaign (the first one) where points from all allied factions were effectively counted in the warconsole for theater domination, but this was never implemented thereafter. What's more, I had real trouble finding people willing to play games from the campaign (many thanks to @Lady Numiria for playing with me ), despite a fairly large and active local community. But that's not representative. From now on, I simply think that people aren't as involved as they used to be. On the nomad side, it looks like this: Wisekensai: wow 59% just registered for the memes ^^' [15:41] Jukebox: Final Victory Ratio in % according to latest warconsole data Tohaa-59% JSA- 58% PanO- 55% Haqq- 49% CA- 48% Aleph- 46% YJ- 44% Ariadna- 43% Nomads- 38% 012- 30% [18:17] theGricks: Top JSA and Yu Jing commanders
My analysis: - The numbers explain why the Tohaa are almost equal to the O12, with just a few more active players, the Tohaa could have tied with the O12 although superior in numbers but less active and successful, the fact that the Tohaa micro base is made up of veteran players helps a lot. - The more numerous nomads didn't manage to do justice to their numbers, and the win ratio didn't help them, which partially erased their advantage, but it seems that people signed up more for the nomad show, it's true he was handsome. - The battle between the JSA and Yu Jing was intense, but it seems that the JSA benefited a lot from the big players who uploaded a lot of reports, which made them equal with the 113 yujingyu, a problem that the shogun mentioned, and it remains to be seen whether the warconsole admins will change the final scores. The decline in influence is noticeable, at least it will have kept the warconsole stable and without server failure and take a look at most reports. But we need to find a way to encourage people to participate. Some people have talked about the period not being optimal, but in a global campaign it's complicated to find a time slot for the whole planet, not everyone has the same lifestyle, and with global warming producing intense random heatwaves, I think it's complicated to run a campaign in summer when most of the world's population would be available, because if the heatwave hits during the campaign, you've got a whole region where people under +40°C with no air-conditioning won't want to go out and play and turn on their computers to up a report.
Personally, I signed up was unable to play games during the allotted period, in my opinion this is a consequence of a player base composed by older people with more responsibilities, and fewer young people able to play during weekdays. In my specific situation, only saturdays and sundays are available at best, and having barely 10 days per phase to play games ends being a "well, I have time for a single game per phase", which to me leads mostly to a not bothering with the photos, the codes, talking with my opponent so we both upload a 150 words report, etc... TLDR; too much hassle for a very short event that only offers a few quirky missions and extra work after the games, at least for me. Flamestrike was at least 15 days per phase, I think, if not more... That means 3 weekends with a little effort.
I hope the next campaign would be organized to include three weekends in each phase, with a five-day downtime between phases for long-form narratives and trashtalking. A five-day warm-up before the campaign where the missions and backgrounds are available would be nice too, to let RP people work on the roles they want to play. If this is thought to increase the number of games too much to manage and/or verify, perhaps limit the submissions per player to 1/day (instead of 3/day)? That might also encourage players to expand their wordcount per report...
My situation too. In previous Campaign i ended planning a game just to see the location closed or the faction objectives changed before being able to play at all.
On one hand, you have a point - there were cases of reports consisting of merely two lines of text in a language I don't read, and three or so photos. On the other - writing and editing a reasonably-sized report without writing an extensive narrative for it! - felt like a chore to me (not discounting the fact the OTT interface is awful to work with). And took half again as much time as the game itself. While not going to the lengths of some of the excellent reports I've seen. So I could understeand that someone plays a few games during the week, and sits down on the weekend to edit and upload all the reports. I really don't see a good solution there.
I agree on the fact that warconsole interface is not great, and it's particularly lacking in user friendliness for reporting battles I tried to report the First Battle narratively, but i had a lot more ease (and Better grades) reporting It casually, as if i was commenting the game on a video, like shepherd does (except he's a good player and doesn't drink when he crits) and evenndoing so, having to use that interface was not a fun time Thanks to tts i had the luxury to play 4 games with a friend Who had time, but in general, in the italian community, I saw a lot of people unable to participate, or Who didn't find time to play, which was a pity
First campaign in which I could only logged in for watching, whats going on and DL the briefings. I was at vacation, about 10K km away from my minis but I enjoyed the narratives. But even if I could participate, I would be only able to get one or two games incl. reporting in the given time. Work, getting people that also have small time windows together etc. thats RL.
We are of course looking for feedback and suggestions. Analyses and related discussions, are always useful especially when compared with each other.
I didn't find the length of the phases very well advertised. I played a game in the 2nd phase on the Thursday night then went away for the weekend. I came to report and write up my game on Monday night only to find the campaign had closed.
I think it would have been better to flip the phase times, longer phase 1, shorter phase 2 as people are getting up to speed on the system and learning.
This can be done by limiting the amount of reports per player per week or per phase. In fact, I would prefer a system more or less like this: You use your ITS identifier with your account This allows less trouble with codes than in previous campaign pairings, you would get the option to "pair" your report with those of the other player's ITS id reports for games in that location+phase, and then confirm it from your main dashboard at a later date (the second player that uploads their report gets to make the link, the first player gets to confirm). You can play as any faction with your account You are limited to 3-5 games per faction, per account, per phase, OR up to twice that number if you use a single faction for the whole event (sectorials being part of said faction, for those needing the extra specification, so Bakunin, Corregidor, Tunguska and "vanilla Nomads" are Nomads). While you don't need to lock the account on creation, you would get a warning when the second faction's battle report is added. This will reduce a little the account spam, since some of us tend to play with different factions for whatever reason, while others just started and have a single faction, possibly even not complete. There is a pool of missions, and a pool of modifiers. You can report any mission in any location, but using the specific modifiers will give a little extra points for winning there. For example, one location is inside caves, and playing with the "limited to 60cm range" (half a table), Mountain Terrain, and "Landslide" (a circular template per player is placed before Turn 2 starts, this template is of unlimited height and blocks LoS), another is in space (terrain 0G, Extra Long Firelanes -all troops count as having an X-Visor, those with one already... no extra bonus), etc... The faction that controls each location gets a custom modifier, based on said location, for the next phase. For example, winning control of the Planetary Comms platform lets your EVOs give one extra regular order (max 1 per list), getting control of the Orbital Base gives your Aerial Deployment troops Tactical Sense (max one per list), etc... Winner factions of each location at the end of the campaign get something nice in the lore, but never at the expense of another faction. This is not a zero-sum game, and most importantly, winning doesn't get you merely a "protagonism" bonus (that for certain factions is a kick the dog moment...).
I hope that this will not look like advertising, but I implemented a similar principle in my last campaign - https://shiva-ocp.online/infinity/echoesofparadiso4 Judging by the statistics of the last (Durgama Takeover) and the year before (Asteroid Blues) campaigns, there is a steady decline in participants and active players. I think this is all due to the lack of development of the platform on which all this is being done - Warconsole from OnTableTop. Initially, the functionality there was relatively modest in relation to Infinity, so interest in the event is gradually decreasing: Asteroid Blues -> Durgama Takeover - -18% of registrations, Durgama Takeover -> Shattergrounds - -35% of registrations (the percentage of active players is about the same). Warconsole is not a bad thing for some average campaign, but for Infinity in 2023 this is not enough. Another important drawback is the lack of active support for gameplay within the campaign to whet players' interest in the campaign... Many in my community complained that there was no IC news about the progress of the campaign from the organizers. And some of the reports that were highlighted in the news were not of very high quality this time.
Another boring morning so you get this: Here I just listed where and when the most Battles happenend. Also the upper chart shows the usual decline of overall battles in the 2nd Phase (which the lowest so far, Durgama had 18% loss, AB 40% loss). The lower chart highlights which faction had the most of each category (B/C means total battles per all the faction's commanders, not only the active ones)
I think it's pretty important, for these campaigns to have a future, to rein in scoring for community members who run away "farming" a lot of winning reports. There are a handful of players who are able to do this, perhaps because they're on staff in a game store and playing demos against inexperienced players, perhaps because they can simply play TTS every evening, or live with an opponent who is happy to get beaten every evening. The AI historian seems to be more of an in-joke than ever. A cap of 3 games a week rather than 3 a day would tame the runaway generals and make games from other generals matter more, or it could be some kind of soft cap... after your first 2-3 wins in a phase, games score 1 point each instead of 3 points. You could even make it so that 3+ wins from a single general in one theatre drop off in scoring effectiveness, encouraging factions to attack in more than one place on the map. I don't want to diminish the work and commitment some of these "superstar generals" have put in, I'm sure most of them are playing real games and putting work in to write the reports. However, these generals dramatically lower the impact of "regular generals" who have limited ability to stage fun thematic battles more than 2-3 times a week and often go out of their way to write good reports for them. Coming out of these campaigns, I'm enthused by memes, hobby, RP, and amazing thematic games I've seen. Those are the reports that should be winning theatres, not the generals who can pump out over a dozen wins. As player numbers drop off, this seems to be more of a problem with warconsole than ever, and the fact it hasn't been dealt with in previous campaigns may well be what's causing the decline.
