Fizzer I've just watched the replay and I would have a few comments.
About Auto decline for tournament invites (1:30)
At first you say you don't want that in free tournament, which is fair enough as you want people to put money into WL.
But later you say we should uservoice the feature and that you want more tournaments created. Well who in the community would vote against this feature ? We are all 100% interested in WL features and 0% in WL turnover. There is no point to uservoice that. You have to take the decision and choose on this occasion between more turnover or more activity on WL (which brings turnover in a later time).
Another way to do it (but not the best option) would be to add a stat on the profile and in tournaments pre requisites "% of time the player joins / declines / stays undecided" in tournaments. So that the frequently stay undecided players would not meet pre requisites of some tournaments.
About in game private notes.
This is something easy to code, its like you duplicate the team chat except you lock it to only the current user. Even if its not on your immediate road map (single player), it doesnt take more than 5 minutes to do. And for the benefits, when you play several 1v1 MD games and some of them are stalled by opponents, you dont want to everytime you load the game, load the history to re calculate your opponent income, where he must have moved at previous turns, and so on. You could just read your notes and save up to 10 min everytime you load that game. And so for every game so overall it has a big impact.
About time before boot in MD games.
You say you want games to be completed faster using psychological effect of showing players how long they have been stalling the game for on this turn, rather than how long they can still stall the game for. Well that's a way to see it. I dont think people stall games on purpose (it does happen as mentioned above but its not a majority and changing this would not prevent). I dont think this psychological effect works, nobody really wants a game to take forever anyhow. And more importantly, if people wanted games to be completed sooner they would create or join games with faster boot times. Players have a reason to play in 3 days, and that reason sometimes prevents them from submitting sooner. There s no point to try forcing them doing something they dont want ; helping the community however by improving its experience on WL makes much more sense. Sometimes though, they still join shorter MD games because say that specific tournament is only available in that setting.
Overall I think you are more focused in big overhauls (like new features on previous update (commander) or overhaul (cards / AI / single player) as a way to attract new players to WL. But 10% of the time it takes to develop those could be enough to make existing features more perfect than they already are, and would make the user experience much better that they would play it more, connect more often, stay online longer, and overall new players would be more attracted by a higher activity on WL (starting with more open RT games).
Uservoice is Fizzer's way of saying the idea isn't important for now, and its just his way of being nice about it. Alot of smart and small features are often suggested that would help improve and excite WarLight's core audience, but Fizzer is more interested in improving the experience of a new player.
I think this is the wrong direction. I think its smarter economically to double down on the core audience since it's those people that would spend money and spread the word on a game they love. Trying to cater more towards new folks instead of the core audience is more of a waste since a good amount of new people will walk away anyway, and the people will stay are the people that are just like the core audience that's already here. People that are into a (superior) risk clone are such a small subset of gaming culture, so when your game catches the eye of one they're going to stay regardless of how 'overwhelming' the game may seem initially. After all, these are going to be the super hardcore "I want to tweak the sh*t out of this" computer nerds that get excited by variation and depth. So by catering to the core audience you're also catering to those hardcore new people as well, and those people are way more likely to pump funds into the game than the "The create game tab is too confusing to me, I'm out" people. I know I really got into WarLight when I found out players could design their own maps, and while it's not super obtuse and confusing (Fizzer did make a really good built-in tool set that user friendlyish) the process is still too hard or confusing for most people, but that's fine. The mapmakers that stayed with it are the ones that were really excited by the idea of making their own maps, and I would bet that almost all of them are the types of hardcore people I mentioned above. By listening to us and our ideas it makes the game a better experience for us and makes the hardcore new people more excited because they see a game growing in an exciting way.
I think revamping the single player content was a smart move, but I think its time to listen to the audience on what they really want. It seems like alot of people want the ladder system touched up; making the competition scene more appealing would keep more hardcore new people invested. Alot of people want new features added to clans; more people are going to buy a $15 clan if it does more than simply group people together with a tiny JPEG and private forum. (Of course why make a clan when you can join MSF.) People want improvements to tournaments; little things can make a hell of a difference.
All that being said, running a game by oneself (isn't Mercer just an investor?) is hard work, so I trust he's trying to do his best because he clearly cares. Both us and Fizzer want the same thing so we shouldn't be mad when he steers WarLight in a direction we might not like. Because I would bet most of us also want him to succeed as well.
Personally, I think may of them do make it more of a card game. However, cards directly meant to be used against other cards are too much. They should at least have an impact on the actual game.
