Ashes And Crystal Dust - Part 1 - By John Ringo #899287

Numbers do not lie and these jumped off the pad and cut me like a knife through the heart. My family’s crystal farm was in danger of not surviving out the year if things carried on as they were. The last pirate raid caused enough damage that it would take most of our next harvest to pay back the loans we would need to take out to replace the damaged equipment and buildings. If the pirates came back and made off with that harvest we would be finished and would starve.

I looked up from the pad and at my father sitting on the other side of the table. He was backlit from kitchen window. Smoke was still rising off the blasted service drones and smoldering outbuildings. This was coloring the sunlight and changing the warm colors in the room to a garish scene of horror and dread. His face had a few more lines in it from worry and his skin had a pale cast suggesting his heart was bothering him again. He looked so much older than his actual years. If our fortunes did not change soon I feared he would find an early grave. Taking a deep breath to clear my head and steel my nerves, I reached into my pocket and pulled out the tattered flyer I had pulled off a bulletin board from our town’s only pub. The paper rasped as I pushed it forward across the table towards my father. The noise attracted his attention and his eyes focused on the logo at the top of the page and filled with a wild mix of anger and despair. My eyes met his and I braced for getting hit with both barrels as his lips parted with a ragged breath.

“Ron, you know we can’t pay the required fee for those Mercenaries to protect our farm from pirates” He raged. “If we did that would kill the farm as sure as the next pirate raid. Besides ‘Jan’s Ragers’ are little better then pirates themselves” He growled.

This was an old argument and I knew where it would end. It was time to change the script. “Dad we can afford it if I enlist with them. They would protect us for free while I am in training.”

“NO!” He howled. “We have lost so much already I can’t lose you too!”

“You would not lose me or the farm that way and all it would cost us is my time” I firmly replied.

He grumbled. “They will not pay you anything during training or your first year of service. You will be little more than a slave.”

“They will pay for my food, gear and a roof over my head so it will cost you less to run the farm so there will be more profit for the family. Besides, if I do well in a battle I will get a share in the salvage” I retorted.

“You could be killed! He sobbed.

Now we are getting at his root fear. “I could be killed in the next raid like David was last year.” I sadly stated. My older brother David had been killed protecting one of my younger brothers and my mother never recovered from the shock. She left us all and went to one of the core worlds in the hopes of never seeing another pirate again for as long as she lived.

“I know” He hoarsely whispered. “I am going to bed.” He got up from the table and zombie walked down the hall to his room. Know all I have to do is survive the wait until tomorrow and see if I had won the war.

Another Opinion On The BBQ - By John Ringo #899287

So today I sat down at my terminal with a hot cup of my favorite morning beverage and loaded up the FB MG Player’s Page to get caught up with what’s, what and who’s, who. Before the page finished loading so I could read it my terminal’s thermal alarms started screeching like a flight of Valkyries coming to claim the dead. The monitor started to warp and sag before busting into flames setting off the fire suppression system in my office.  Now that my warm and fuzzy feelings about my morning have been washed away along with my tasty beverage, I was tempted to let loose a long tirade of verbal abuse at the universe for bursting my bubble of peace and harmony. Thankfully my reporter’s instincts kicked in and removed the Engineer from that train of thought before it could build a full head of steam and leave the station. Where there is this much heat there had to be a story this reporter needed to get in on.

My office being in shambles and my terminal in ruins led me to head down the hallway to Ken Hicks seldom used office. As luck would have it GG had to buy Ken a super-cooled terminal when he changed his personal grooming habits and bought some new bath and body products. They were supposed to have some special additives that would cause people to like being around you and more willing to talk to you. This would have been a great advantage to a reporter so I can understand why Mr. Hicks was talked into buying them by that slick salesman. Unfortunately for all of us in the Galaxy who found ourselves even in a not so close distance to Ken it just made us feel cranky and ill. The “Active Ingredients” would take up to 3 months to leave his system and this led to a ton of hate mail and we needed to buy him a special terminal to handle it all. After blowing off the dust coating the terminal I flicked it on and got back to work reading the post and the 60+ replies that caused my office to get a shower.

It would be very easy to give into temptation and just wade into the fray on the Player’s Page and add my own voice to the “Discussion” there and then have to make more posts defending my position because it was different then someone else’s. All this would do is make more white noise and ruin a chance to get my point across. Lucky for me I have a newspaper at my disposal and can write an editorial on the subject so here we are.

First off, I understand the frustrations when your bets are ruined with clans you figured should win do not for any number of reasons. I have been there more times than I would like myself. With the costs to make those bets super high and the payoff so low for the last 5+ wars I have just stopped betting.

Warning!! This next paragraph is a shameless plug so read it at your own peril. If you want to skip it just go to the paragraph after it and continue on.

If you are frustrated about how crappy the bets are you could just write 2 articles for me at GG or my fine friends over at ANN and get 60 niodes for your time. This is way less stress then trying to figure out who is going to win this war and you do not have to pay your own niodes upfront to get in the door like you do with betting. You can also write more than 2 articles and “Win” even more niodes so please take advantage of this and get paid!!

Now for those of you who skipped that last paragraph congratulations you are now caught up with the rest of us and I will now carry on.

Mecha Galaxy is just a game that we the players use for any number of reasons but to Nick and his team this is a business and MG is a product they “Sell” to us every day to pay their bills. One of the key concerns we the players have is how few players stick around and grow our community and if Game Craftsman is like a normal company this issue should concern them as well. If they can’t bring in enough new blood to at least offset players who stop playing the game in time their company will go out of business.

Every time this topic comes up on the Player’s Page it is revealed that this game is played by a diverse group of humans who have a lot of different opinions on why it is so hard for new players to stick around and fall in love with this game like we all did. The most common opinions for this failure revolve around clans in the lower divisions for Clan War choking them out from having a chance by camping, spending etc. I would like to offer a different opinion about what I feel is the single largest obstacle to a new player and place the “blame” for this at Nick’s feet. Nick, I hope when you read this you take it as constructive input and not a personal attack. I feel your new player tutorial is one of the worst I have ever experienced in a game and I felt like rat that had been taught it was better to push the green button and not the red one but because this game does not play like most players expect it to my first account I made after finding your game got messed up quickly and in only a few weeks of play I left the game with anger in my heart before I even had the chance to play in a Clan war. After a month break from the game I could not stop thinking about it. There was enough excitement about the concept of this game I had to try it again so I created a new account and I had the luck of meeting a few helpful players in Kong chat and was taught a few key tactics that helped me feel like I was not just spitting in the wind. Because of those players I joined my first clan and became a member of the AFF and played in my first Clan War and this gave way to new frustrations about this game. Nick, you have created a game that gives us lots of interesting factors that affect how we can play the game. The problem is your tutorial does not equip the new player with any knowledge on how the game works other than how to use the game UI. This lack of education in game leaves a player feeling like they would have better luck equipping their mechs and going into battle asking a Magic 8 Ball for advice. Over the years players have had to test the hell out of all the possible options and then make educated guess on the results. If a new player does not meet the right seasoned game players and get taught the right verbal lore on how the magic that makes up this game works they are screwed and leave the game in frustration. Nick, depending on your user base to explain why a new player should love your product and how to use your product is a very bad marketing plan and leaves the continued success of your company up to pure chance.

The other large challenge a new player faces is the ever-widening level gap that makes up the bottom divisions each Clan War. With more brave players joining the level 300 club each day and the player base shrinking this is causing the average level threshold to move into the next division to raise ever higher. As this gap gets wider and wider it increases the cost a player has to pay to move up in the game at a time where it is even harder for a free player to gain the needed crystal from harvesting from other players due to the shrinking player base. We are rapidly finding out those of us who started playing in the beginning of the game or at least for a longer time then players who have joined the game in the last year or so will always crush players who have joined the game in the last year. The prizes, free giveaways and betting all had a much higher value then they do now at a time when it costs way more to try and compete then it did back then. Your only real option is to whip out your credit card to buy niodes if you want to win but last year when you changed how your packages are structured you greatly lowed the value of what you get for the money spent. To be honest I do not have any extra money in my real life to invest in this game. But also, to be honest even if I did knowing what you used to get for spending $500 vs what you get now would cause me to boycott investing any of my money anyway and I know a lot of other players who feel the same way. They are at most spending $1 each rent party as it gives the best value for the money with the 50 extra niodes you get and a chance at more if you win on of the extra prizes in the raffle at the end. Nick, if I had to guess most of the players who invest more than a $1 in a rent party are in the upper few divisions and this fuels their exponential level growth with compounds the issues new players face in the lower divisions. This is also a very risky position to place your company when you are depending on a few players for most of your cash flow. In time, enough of them will move on from this game placing you in a negative cash flow spiral.

Watching how you have been adjusting the prize list over the last few wars shows that you are attempting to combat the cost challenges new players face by raising the value of the Silver prizes to the point where they are worth more than the Gold. This is only creating new challenges as players do the math and adjust how they play the game to win the greater prize. Also, with the shrinking player base and D1 level growth having only 4 prize tiers further erodes the value of the prizes relative to the player level making it ever hard to grow in levels and not gut your accounts power.

To help combat this issue I would offer this opinion. Scrap the current Clan War prize structure and just pay niodes for each medal. This would make for less work for you and your staff each war as you would not have to decided what mechs, equipment and weapons you want on the list and making sure you have the balance you need for the prizes etc. It would also allow each player to take the niodes and invest them into things they feel best help their army. It would then be very easy for you to create a prize tier for each division and allow you to better fine tune the payouts relative to the average player level in each division.

Nick, we all want new players to join our ranks and enjoy playing this game with us. We also want to retain older players and seek to offer input on ways to help you win on both issues and in doing so help keep this game alive and thriving for us all.

To everyone who read this entire 2000+ word editorial I extend my thanks. My goal with this was to try and offer a constructive opinion and as always if you have an opinion on how to improve the game please write it up and submit it to me at GG and earn some niodes for your trouble.

Again, this is just my opinion and if after reading it you feel it barely has enough value to use as toilet paper then that is your right. I just ask that we all try to have civil conversations about these issues going forward or we are just throwing more fuel on the emotional fire and speed up the player exodus and kill this game.