= = = EDITION 20: April 20, 2019 = = =
Table of Contents
Section 1: Supporter Team Update
Section 2: Player of the Year Interview
Section 3: New Presets
Section 4: Spot a Noob
Section 5: A Refresher
"It is during our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light." ~ Aristotle
Supporter Team Update
As many players know, the supporter's team has recruited more players than it ever has in the entire history of AtWar, reaching 26 supporters in total. The team has also been in question throughout the community regarding if they should even have that many because of how useless it/they can be. I decided to update the community in general what the supporter team does for the community, and begin that mission with Dave himself, interviewing him:
Why have so many supporters?
Dave: The Supporter Team we are building up now is very different from previous versions. There is much more to do now, and we need a lot of supporters to do it. Fortunately, we have a good number of veteran players here who love the game, the community, and want to help out, and I'm grateful for the time they are contributing to the team.
How many supporters do you plan to have?
Dave: There is no set number I have in mind. Ideally, I would like to see a large enough team that we can have at least 1-2 supporters online at any given time of day, if not more. But as long as we have good players who meet our criteria and want to help out, we will continue expanding.
What tasks are supporters suppose to do, directly?
Dave: The purpose of the Supporters Team is to help atWar grow and thrive. Fundamentally, this means two things: 1) attracting new players, and 2) retaining players once they get here.
To attract new players, there are Supporters who help manage our social media accounts, post about events, make videos and anything else that helps get the word out.
Once new players arrive, they have lots of questions. That's why we implemented the new /help chat command, which routes questions to our Supporters. This is where it's important to have Supporters who are skilled, experienced players, who can not only answer a new player's question but also teach them how to play the game.
Finally, once players have arrived, learned the game a bit, and decided they like it enough to stick around, we have to do things to keep the game fun and interesting. This is why we have Supporters who host tournaments, Protocoin or SP drops, and other events.
Ultimately the more new players we can attract, teach them the right ways to play the game, help them rank up and so on... the more lively and fun the game will be for everyone.
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What Dave said is only a simplified version of the big part Supporters play in AtWar. The Supporters are meeting with each other constantly everyday planning, watching help chat, being active on the forums, bringing new content, working on social media and other websites, working on Map Editor, and ultimately help out with AtWar as a whole. Supporters also are the link between the community and the rest of AtWar administration; being integrated into the community to interact with them, establish relationships and be a word from them to administration/other things in AtWar that the average player wouldn't usually get.
To give an update on each of those, the Supporters have come together to bring general information from each section:
● Help Chat
Supporters generally are on most of the time during active hours of AtWar, though there are a few nightbirds that stay up during the in-active hours. Usually, they have lower ranks contacting help chat asking about game mechanics as well. To tag onto this, Supporters also try their best to help out in the forums as well, answering just about any valid question.
● New Content
Supporters bring a wide variety of ideas; everything from game-mechanics to metagaming. A few examples of what has been proposed lately are new strategies (Tank General, Fortress, and Reconnaissance) and the development of a metagaming team in the Supporters to bring out the best of the community to bring new content.
● Social Media and Advertising
Supporters are solely the ones running AtWars major and minor social media websites where activity has sky-rocketed in the past few months with the introduction of new events, new content, major changes/announcements, and map/game advertising via these social media websites to gain new subscribers and ultimately new players.
● Map Editor
Generally, the current Supporters do a lot of testing on the map editor, help out with its problems/questions, create maps, review maps, and create guides for maps. Of course, this is actually fairly new to the Supporter's team as it just introduced new cartographer-interested players such as Helly.
● Helping out the game as a whole
Supporters are also called upon by moderators and admins alike either to give opinions, test, produce something, or to just help out in general. An example of this would be the forums. They are also called upon by the players to help out with a map, game, clan, or other things in the community.
Player of the Year Interview
Now that the PotY polls are over we took our chance to talk to one of the winners.
●Dozer: Hey Sascha, Congrats on becoming 2018 Community's Choice Player of the Year and on your recent appointment as MOD!
Sascha: Thank you!
●Dozer: How long have you been playing atWar and what do you like most about the game?
Sascha: I'm been playing atWar for around 8 years but I had some breaks in between. What I like most about this game is the community. They made me coming back every time after I took a longer break.
●Dozer: I see that IF one of your favorite strategies. For me, IF is one of the hardest strategies to play with it's reduced range. Do you think it is one of the strongest and underplayed strategies?
Sascha: The HP boost makes Iron Fist powerful and since I really like the ancient world map it's one of my most played strategies. I wouldn't say underplayed but it's hard to play on the default map because of the 0 range militia and low range in general.
●Dozer: What is the most memorable game you have ever played on atWar?
Sascha: My most memorable game was prob my first cw against Tendo. After my allies died I managed to win a 1v3 with PD Germany. That's like 5 years ago
●Dozer: What do you think of the two test strategies Insurrection and Counter-Insurgency?
Sascha: Insurrection is pretty cool. I've played some world games with Ins and the amount of units you can spam is insane, maybe a bit op. Can't say much about Counter-Insurgency since I haven't played it yet but I like the idea.
●Dozer: If you could make a strategy, what would it be like?
Sascha: Uh that's a hard one, I'm happy with the strats we have and without new units there are not that much possibilities.
●Dozer: What kind of New Units would you like see.
Sascha: Something like a aircraft carrier would be cool.
●Dozer: I think a few new units and strategies would be good for the game but the problem with new strategies/units is that they will most likely upset the balance of competitive EU+ games and clan wars, thus making it hard to come up with new ideas. What do you think?
Sascha: Game changes will always make some people upset but as long as more people are happy then upset about it we are good. Changes are needed to keep the game alive!
●Dozer: How do you like being a MOD?
Sascha: Being a mod has it's good and bad sides. On one side you get to talk to the admins and see a lot that happens behind the scenes which is really cool and on the one the other side there are this type of annoying people you have to deal with. It's good that the amount of nice people outweighs the trolls.
●Dozer: Thanks for doing this interview Sascha! One last question, What is your favorite beer?
Sascha: I like pilsner and during summer I usually drink a lot grape beer(wheat-mix).
New Presets Available Soon!
As most of you already know if you talk to me personally or if you watched the Supporter Q&A video last month, I've been heading a project to implement a few new Default Map presets into the game for non-premium and premium players alike to play on. I'll briefly go over all three as they currently stand here, and if you have any suggestions or feedback feel free to leave it in a comment, and as always: I need people to help test these Presets, so if you're interested be sure to PM me as soon as possible.
Central Asia:
My thought process here was doing something similar to the Greater Middle East, but focusing far more on the sparse land/lack of units/vast amounts of land to tread, something not popping up very often in AW maps. This style of gameplay has proven itself time and time again through rigorous testing to be a substantially interesting and enjoyable experience, mostly from a competitive point of view. Most strategies are playable here, and I'm sure Buildings will find themselves at home here considering the (average) higher income to reinforcement ratio present. This map has been fully tested andis ready for implementation as soon as the other two are done. A few competitive picks to note are Russia: Volga, Russia: South, Iran, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Russia: Siberia, China: North, and China: Northwest.
Atlantic:
It's always been odd to me that we have a Pacific map but no Atlantic variant. I believe the weakest part of this map will be any sort of possible travel between Scandinavia/Northern Europe through Greenland and into Canada, as there is a lack of cities in this region. Perhaps in the future we could add cities like Iqaluit and Cape Dorset up here on the default map? I would comment that the entire Canadian Arctic Archipelago could be redone, but that doesn't seem feasible at the current time. Nonetheless, much more testing needs to be done here soon before implementation can be discussed. At the moment, the weakest areas of the map exist in the Southern Hemisphere. Buffing the hell out of Africa's income and perhaps Latin America will be necessary soon enough I believe. Besides the obvious Euro and North America picks, a few countries really shine here: Nigeria, Peru, Venezuela, and Texas really kick a lot of ass if played right.
Indian / Erythraean:
Similar to the Pacific and Atlantic naval-based maps, I thought an Indian Ocean equivalent would be unique to follow. There's a vast selection of countries and a multitude of playstyles available here. The only issue may be the name; Not meaning to sound prudent, but just calling it "Indian" may be seen as offensive to some people, and calling it the "Indian Ocean" would break the trend set by the Pacific map, unless we rename it "Pacific Ocean" or something. Anyhow, as a placeholder I chose the Greek name for the Indian ocean-- Erythraean-- as a substitute for now. Sounds cooler anyways! Anyhow, 4v4 exists strongly on this map with picks like South Africa, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, India (nerfed to hell and back- might not be permanent considering feedback), China: southwest, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Australia: Queensland all work fairly well here. Could we see the birth of 4v4 and even 5v5 CWs from this? Test it and leave me some feedback so we can figure that out!
Spot a Noob
Welcome to the first ever spot a noob interview!
Spot a Noob is a bi-weekly event in which a supporter hosts a map with different winning conditions, maps, and settings. The reward is a month of premium and a interview for the ATN to be featured in a feature article. There can only be one winner, it is chosen by the player with the most strategy points at the end of the game. This weeks event was a 10k, Whole World, Extra Cities FFA, 25 Turns, Hosted in the beginners lobby. Our first winner was a lad by the name of RockyHD. He selected Ukraine as his starting position and had a pretty packed Europe and Middle East to contend with. It was a close match but in the end he overcame his opponents and became our very first Spot a Noob champion. After the Match it is customary for the event for the victor to be interviewed as said above, its basically a player spotlight, where we ask the victor a few questions about themselves in relation to Atwar.
So I asked him a few Questions and here is what was said.
There we have it folks RockyHD a rank 6 from the country of Venezuela, the champion of our first event, who is eager to try out the premium features he was awarded for his effort. The next spot a noob will be on Saturday 4/20/2019 (Americans) 20/4/2019 (Everyone Else) at 3:00 pm EST, The settings will be on Dream World, 10k funds, FFA 20 players, rank 9 and below. There is absolutely no use of Alts in this event and a moderator will be there to check the contestants. There is no sign up, and it is first come first serve. The winner will be by sp again. I hope to see all of you there! Well that concludes the first every Spot a Noob event, it was thrilling and fun to watch the new blood of this game compete for our grand prize. It will be a worth while wait to see what kind of action our intermediate ranked players find themselves in the next event.
A Refresher
As we've seen recently, Dave has finally implemented Buildings after having been tested by our previous developers-- Amok and Ivan-- some year and a half ago on the AtWar Test server. Buildings have seen various responses, so let us know how we did, what needs changing, and what sort of direction you would like to see Buildings go as a new unit type in the future!
Along with this, our beloved BrianWL has finally ascended into Administrator status!
While Insurrection and Counter-Insurgency (purely coincidental naming conventions, promise!) may be gone for now, that doesn't mean they won't return in the future! Whether you liked them or hated them, be sure to leave your feedback and ideas for both on the forums! You can find the support thread for Counter-Insurgency here.
Recently we conducted a Moderation survey, and as a shock to us all: Sascha hasn't been a bad boy. You can find the results of said survey here.
As Dave has been running through the list of community-requested patches, changes, and ideas, one stuck out and was finally implemented after many years of necessity: Help chat has been completely revamped into a system far more akin to the /report command (Sorry, you can't advertise your New World Empires here anymore!). Along with this much-needed update, the /help and /report command have been implemented into the chat bar at the bottom of everyone's screen for easier access to all players. Tell us what you think!
Weekend and Weekday PC/SP drops have come to AtWar! The Supporter team plans on hosting these events every weekend and on certain weekdays from now on, and we've got even more news to share with you regarding weekend community events in the near future! Stay tuned!
Thanks for reading today's edition of the ATN! We appreciate your dedication to AtWar. and we'll have more exciting news and details to share with you soon! Until then, I would like to leave you with this: Every month Dave has consistently added new strategies as requested by you-- the community-- to the game. Sans Buildings, April is no different. We look forward to unveiling our plans for this month very soon...
Credits
Supporter Team Update Alois
Player of the Year 2018 Interview Dozer
New Presets Garde
Spot a Noob Helly
A Refresher Garde
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