I assume that you are right and new boards probably don't bring in or keep a lot of players. However, it is the primary reason I am here. If there were only risk and close risk variants, I probably wouldn't have made it more than a year here (and conversely if I were primarily interested in risk and close risk variants I would have gone elsewhere).

I realize that I am likely in the minority, but my main draw to this site is the large variety of boards and the continuous development of new boards. Secondary draws for me are the nice community and appreciation for Tom's business model and management style.

asm wrote:

Plus, don't new boards attract and keep players on the site too!!!!!!!

To be blunt, no. Almost not at all, would be my guess. Just a bit of a fan of being a dissenting voice, I suppose...

Ok, so, the other dissenting voice might look at the extreme opposite of what you're saying and ask how many people would still be around if the only board here were WGWF... but with unlimited and awesome player features... Answer, not a heck of a lot!  Boards are the bread and butter of what keep people around by providing new avenues to explore and new places to ply their WarGear trade!  For me my route went something like WGWF -> CC -> CivilWar -> Antastic -> Invention with a few others tried along the way.  So, not every board is a hit, especially for me, but I think the site would be far less enriched without the progression of new and old boards that keep us exploring and interested.  Meanwhile, I'm a pretty selective GR player and am not a diverse board player like someone like Mad Bomber, BlackDog, or Cona Chris!

Maybe you're playing devils advocate or maybe you really agree with your position and we'll just have to agree to disagree, but, I for one can definitely say that the few boards I have taken a liking too has definitely been a mainstay reason for my being here and staying here!

To be very specific, when I first came around these parts, Viper's Civil War is the board that attracted me to take a greater interest in the site as I went on a tear up its rankings and Ozy's Invention has been one that has kept me around with its intricate and excellent game play.  Both of those boards have also been an encouragement for me to dabble into making my own boards and hopefully continue the tradition one day of attracting/keeping new players at the site with more awesome boards!  None-the-less CW and Invention are two great boards that the site would be greatly lacking without...

Korrun wrote:

I assume that you are right and new boards probably don't bring in or keep a lot of players. However, it is the primary reason I am here. If there were only risk and close risk variants, I probably wouldn't have made it more than a year here (and conversely if I were primarily interested in risk and close risk variants I would have gone elsewhere).

I realize that I am likely in the minority, but my main draw to this site is the large variety of boards and the continuous development of new boards. Secondary draws for me are the nice community and appreciation for Tom's business model and management style.

Just saw that you wrote roughly the same thing as I on the next page.  I really don't think that you or I are the minority here.  Sure there are some players who only come to play WGWF and boards of that ilk, but, I'm pretty sure that they are the minority?  And, usually even if a player starts off that way, it usually doesn't last long before they are into other boards as well!

It would be interesting to see a list of the mean/median/mode numbers of boards played.

berickf wrote:

 Sure there are some players who only come to play WGWF and boards of that ilk, but, I'm pretty sure that they are the minority?  And, usually even if a player starts off that way, it usually doesn't last long before they are into other boards as well!

I suspect that many players who come to this site only to play WGWF with no intention or interest in other boards migrate elsewhere pretty quickly.  There are a number of sites out there that do the pure Risk clone thing better.  Go out and read reviews on this site and the competition as if you were a noobie and it's pretty clear what sets WG apart, and also why you might choose to not come here. 

The main strength of the site is the variety of boards and unique game-play opportunities.  Anyway, we need to move on.. We've all but hijacked this discussion.

 I can't think of others right off the bat because my head's not in the game right now - busy with other stuff these days, but off the top of my TokensTerritories/Real-Time Factories/Movement Count - any of these would be awesome.

If it's designer-specific features we're voting on, then I'd go for either

1. Border-specific fog settings

2. Territory minimums

If it's designer-specific features we're voting on, then I'd go for either

1. Border-specific fog settings

2. Territory minimums

+1 to that, if Tom is looking to add design capabilities.  I think territory minimums are another way to solve the more general goal of on/off board territories.

But we actually had a recent discussion about what designers want, and one thing we all seemed to agree on was that we wanted more players to be playing our maps.   There were a bunch of ideas put out towards that end, including quite a bit of discussion on how to improve the board review system:

http://www.wargear.net/forum/showthread/4011/Encouraging_Designers

Ozyman wrote:

one thing we all seemed to agree on was that we wanted more players to be playing our maps

Indeed. That would be best!

Sorry to have derailed the conversation M57, my bad.

Back to the topic at hand.  I'm just a new board maker myself and all my boards which have gotten stuck have done so because I want to do stuff off board and it ends up screwing up eliminations and the territory bonus structure.  Every other designer feature being listed would be great to have, but few of them are holding back boards like token territories are!  Token territories would open up the potential for a great influx of boards by enabling the designer more off-board creativity and would allow those boards that have been shelved for such reasons to be put back on the table again!

Even though Ozy keeps suggesting that auto-neutral/auto capture and now territory minimums might be able to do something to create quazi tokens, I just don't see how, and if they could somehow, the time factor involved to do something like that versus clicking a box saying "token" in territory attributes would most likely be extremely prohibitive. 

There are other features I think would be awesome and add amazing variability to game play and to the types of boards that could be created, real-time factories for one, variable attacks for another, but, to get stuck boards dusted off as well as open up a whole plethora of off-board possibilities, I can't help but emphasize that tokens are the most logical step.  They would not be a toy in the boardmakers tool kit, but would quickly be realized as a necessity to taking all boards to a new level.  All the creativity of releasing boarmakers a free hand off-board will end up dwarfing anything else in the long run no matter how novel it sounds!

I'm tempted to agree that the lack of tokens are a significant stumbling block for design moving forward. I'll reiterate that Tom has mentioned that it would be a lot of work to implement (presumably because of the amount of code that would need to be re-written), but almost every designer on this site has bemoaned their absence.  It's pretty clear that they need to be part of the bones of the machine.

And as for the argument that there should be or could be workarounds, I will echo berickf's sentiments that there shouldn't be.  Having to create hundreds (and sometimes even thousands) of factories to deal with a simple (to describe) and commonly desired territory functionality is simply going to discourage designers both experienced and new from exploring new board design ideas.  I for one fall in that category of designer.  Yeah, I want the fancy new-fangled designer tool features that'll make for cool game-play; hell I've come up with some of them and want 'em bad, but I recognize that the foundation needs to be solid.   So I'm going with a big +1 for Token Territories.

I agree, that having to do workarounds is not ideal.  It's harder for both map makers and players to understand what is going on.

>Even though Ozy keeps suggesting that auto-neutral/auto capture and now territory minimums might be able to do something to create quazi tokens, I just don't see how.

Check post #11 in this thread: http://www.wargear.net/forum/showthread/4026/on_amp;_off_board_territories_with_no_abandon_and_no_capital_on_board

That explains how to make on/off board territories work if you have abandon on.  If you have territory minimums, or the auto-neutral/auto-capture fix, you can use the same technique on boards without abandon.

Randomly allocated capitals would also give the same quazi token effect.

Korrun wrote:

Randomly allocated capitals would also give the same quazi token effect.

And that could be the easiest one to implement.  Lots of ways to get from there to here, just a matter of what Tom can get done.

Yes, random capitals was originally my suggestion, I think, as a possible programming shortcut to get us half way there to tokens, but they would still be lacking with regard to the bonus structure, as would all other workarounds, I believe?  So, tokens are still the only true solution.  I like how M57 put it.  Real Tokens would be a foundational modification to the designer toolkit - paraphrased.  When I asked Tom about random capitals it was in the hope that it could be something he could implement quick as a stop gap to tokens, but, since he's asking for what to do next as an actual focus, I think he's willing to put a little time in to achieve something good, so let me not ask for workarounds... Tokens, yes please! ;-)

asm wrote:

I love what you guys do here but I feel strongly that the next upgrade should be on the player/interface side and not the designer side. I know you designers have dreams and plans and machinations for the Next Big Thing but I think it's important that Tom stay focused on what attracts and keeps players at the site, and that's not that.

What do you think is missing from the player side?

Amidon37 wrote:

asm wrote:

I love what you guys do here but I feel strongly that the next upgrade should be on the player/interface side and not the designer side. I know you designers have dreams and plans and machinations for the Next Big Thing but I think it's important that Tom stay focused on what attracts and keeps players at the site, and that's not that.

What do you think is missing from the player side?

Unranked Public Games

Better Board browsing system (current one is getting unwieldy for so many boards)

Improvements to History Viewer (attack arrows, ??...)

Improvements to Native Player (attack circles doesn't work, ??...)

Better Onboarding process (i.e. what can be done to make the site more newb friendly).

Better Board Reviews (or is this more the designer side).

Good list Ozy.  We got onto two of those in this thread:

http://www.wargear.net/forum/showthread/4011/Encouraging_Designers

I liked Korrun's post #27 - quoted below.  This ties the "Better Board Browsing" with "Better Board Reviews"

I would prefer it to be overhauled to make board discovery easier. Someone mentioned using ideas from amazon and netflix. If I want to find a specific type of board to play, my only hope is to go through every single board one by one and click onto the board page and read the description and rules. What about if I want a map that is basically like risk without any of the weird stuff? Or basic risk with 1 or 2 dice mods? What about if I want a board with capitals? Return to attack? A really complicated tactical one?

All I get from the board page is the name and picture. Even the filters on the top are hard to understand. There is the weird tag system, but how many people even notice it? And who decides what the tags are and what boards they go to? Like why are Anarchy and Axis V Allies 'abstract'?

Maybe there could be a user generated tag cloud type thing? Maybe there could be a 'other players also played x' and 'other players favorited x'. The board rating system should give recommendations based on what boards other players liked that also liked the ones you did (and maybe disliked the ones you disliked).

As a start I think the green titles on the main board page should link to the full board list sorted by that criteria.

I too like O's list.

In my mind, unranked Public Games is a must moving forward. This would be at the top of my list too, and it can't be all that hard to implement.  I'm not sure what drives tom's business decision on this one, but it just seems clear to me that there are probably a lot of people who don't like to play ranked games on new boards OR on any boards for that matter.

Board Browsing System definitely needs and overhaul - the tags up top barely make sense to me and I use that page a lot.  However, I think the way boards are rated and evaluated (at the bottom of O's list) needs to be re-examined first for anything to make sense.

The only thing I would add to the list, and put it pretty high up, is an overhaul from the ground up of the CP and GR systems.

I thought of another improvement to the history I'd love - some sort of fast forward or skip past fogged turns.  But rather than try to brainstorm all of these things at once, I think if Tom decides to work on history or the player, etc.  He should announce the next area of improvements, and then we can have a thread to hammer out all the possible improvements to that area.

Just to be clear though, my top votes:

#1) Unranked games

#2) Token territories/random capitals/territory minimums

A lot of the other stuff would be nice, but those two for me would be game changing.

Definitely agree on the better board browsing page. Any ideas welcome - particularly if they include a link to a site where something similar works well!

Territory minimums I did start work on but abandoned... it's a tough one because it will involve a LOT of updates to both the Players and the game logic - every single player action involves checking territory counts from attacks to factories to transfers etc etc. Because so much code will be touched the likelihood of breaking something is quite high even with regression testing.

Not to say it can't be done if it's the number one option, just it's not as trivial as it perhaps seems on face value!

I've added border arrows to the Native Player history view - red arrows are for attacks, white arrows are transfers / fortifies.