[EB] Discussion about Standard Rules

[vartan]

Correction Vartan, that was not a presumtion. It has already failed epicly. Theres not a single reply at the post I made about EBonline. While RS2, which MP was crafted by a clannie, GalvanizedIron got alot of popularity.

Do not judge a scene by how much talk there is about it. Some scenes happen to be more low-profile than others. Great example: the EB scene (esp. MP).

That Is Flaming , not discussion. Only idiots play huge scale. Play normal. So far only vartan has replied seriously.

Plenty of serious folk on these forums, actually. To others, let's keep it calm 'n steady.

I think it is rather strange how few players there are here playing online and how there is little activity here in the MP threads. For there are a lot of people playing the Campaign and sending threads about the in-game issues. But even that you win 1000 battles against the AI then you do still never learn anything from it.

Since this a a historical RTS game then people should focus most upon the art/science of tactics by fighting against human players.

Everything is great about the rules and such issues, but the MP part of the game needs more publicity in reaching to other players.

I hope SP players are reading this, because I say this with confidence: my honest belief as to why EB contains such a vast base of campaign players (over the years, not necessarily concurrently) while it contains so few concurrent MP players is due mostly to a fear of the unknown, of what an experience in EB MP would feel like. This is in turn, I think, due to the fact that EB is the antithesis of RTW in that RTW's community has the sense of multiplayer gameplay engraved, while EB's playerbase has not a sense of MP, as EB is, arguably and as a matter of speaking, "a single player game," for lack of a better phrase. This is why I regret not starting EB Online in 2009.

You just nailed it. I nominate you for president. Just to let all the haters here know, I HAVE NOTHING AGAINST THE CURRENT RULES. But if we are to bring more people to the game, and competent ones, these will not work. Mark my words

Mark the following words my dear friend. Today was the first day I played Scrabble. To top it off, it wasn't just any game of Scrabble. It was Scrabble in English but using IPA, the International Phonetic Alphabet. For those who don't know it and don't wish to look it up (don't waste your time), and to put it simply, it is both a curiosity as well as a pain in the sense that we are used to the English alphabet when constructing words, not an alphabet of sound-corresponding symbols. Anyway, I found the rules of Scrabble to be frustrating, at least in that if I wanted to create a new word but some of my tiles would touch other words, then the intersections would necessarily have to themselves be valid words or else I could not create my new word at all. Being the more open-minded and self-trained person I am (in the art of Frustration Level Reduction--I suppose that is what I would call it), I learned in minutes to collect myself and convince myself quite successfully that the game was fun--and it was fun! Although I didn't win, I had a great time.

The lesson? No matter if you are dealing with people, board games, video games, or any other entity of some sort who or that functions in ways other than how you would have them function, try actively to bring yourself to a level of contentedness with that entity before giving up and calling for a change that would, truth be told, alter the entity to your tastes, to something you are more familiar and hence more comfortable with. As you know, humans are most comfortable with what is most familiar, most of the time. It is said, after all, that we fear the 'unknown', that we fear change. Just some food for thought.

I am open to change, but I would've liked to have seen some reason why we should change to the proposed ones

Me too.

With this said, I seriously doubt that the rules are to blame for the fact that the community isn't bigger than it is. Changing them is not likely to bring in more players (nor would I really see that as a sufficient reason for this kind of change anyway).

The rules are not to blame for the small community. Here is why. Firstly, think on what Viking said. After all, there is a large number of players of the mod Europa Barbarorum. It is not as if there are very few people who ever played the game. So there is already a recruitment base or pool, so to speak. Secondly, changing rules is not necessary nor is it sufficient for enlarging the number of online players. If we modified EB's models and stat values so that they became identical to RTW's, and created a standard rule set identical to the (in)famous CWB rule set, would we still be justified in calling our system "EB Online"? or would we have strayed so far from our original goals that we would have created a new monster, one unrecognizable? Remember that as a mod that was created with historicity in mind, it is only logical, at least to me, that the multiplayer be formed with the same in mind. Considering the current rule set on the EBO website, we have not created much complication at all. Don't let the small font size fool you. What I would call over-complicated would be if there were limited army compositions for each group of factions (whether regional or cultural), or even each individual faction. And, don't be surprised, but individual army compositions were actually very seriously proposed not too long ago on these forums. There are extremes on either end, and moderation, as we've learned, is the key to an experience that is more enjoyable than it is frustrating. No outcome will be perfect, but many refinements we have gone through.

Excuse my long-windedness (that's the word, right?). It's been a long day. Or maybe I've quoted too many posts. Thank you all for your discussion by the way; it is always appreciated.