My issue, if you read the quote, was that it gushed. Period. It stopped just short of saying “You just have to buy it.”
That ain’t a preview it’s a softsell.
And @AGameOfJoes, publicly available statements to include descriptive qualitative adjectives from the developer themselves probably leads to breathless ad copy-soundling hype.
And my point is that “gushing” is in the eye of the beholder :). I fully get why their tone bugs you–I’m not a fan of the site myself, though I’m pretty hard to please anyhow–but I guess from my perspective “gushing” is pretty much what previews usually end up being. It is the nature of the beast IMO. There is a real art to writing a preview that is positive, not gushing, informative, but not a shill, and which reserves judgment while still implicitly encouraging the reader to get excited about the game. And most publications today, on the Web, don’t pay enough to get that kind of finesse.
Why I never read that site, unless @MiquelRamirez posts something. Then I get to see the breathless tone or the lovingly uncritical review and get reminded again. But this is the last time I will engage @AGameOfJoes in conversation unless he brings something else to the table.
It is not the last time I’ll have an opinion about his website’s content, if it gets posted here. But I certainly am not seeking it out. I don’t much like it, for the aforementioned reasons I stated and you mentioned.
This is actually very interesting, and @TheWombat touched on this as well. It’s not supposed to be a ‘preview’ in the sense that I know the word. We weren’t aiming to give actual impressions of the game to inform any kind of pre-purchase decision.
The only purpose of the article was to collect and highlight what games we know exist and are coming out in 2019. And yeah, we went with the positive tone because computer war games is an under-served niche and I for one am just glad these kinds of projects are still getting made.
All the genuine critique, in theory, is mean’t to happen at the review stage, although I take @Navaronegun’s criticisms on that particular point. I generally don’t go for many actual previews anymore because as Wombat pointed out, they’re problematic.
With specific regards to the use of “operational”… probably my bad, I don’t really fall anywhere on that particular debate so it’s likely I let too many mis-uses of that term slip through.
@Navaronegun Completely fair, and for what it’s worth I’m sorry. But on the other hand I don’t think it’s fair that you can expect to casually back-hand our content and our writers like that without some kind of response.
I know you don’t seek it out, but just like you want me to talk about something else, surely if your own opinions haven’t changed (because we haven’t fixed what you dislike), then do your opinions really need re-stating?
Your use of this term indicates to me that you may be being a bit too oversensitive in your reaction to criticism.
I’ll respond to your question about what would make me read Wargamer. One is a rewrite if that preview blurb here that I ‘ll do later; an example of how to do one without being breathless (part of that is not copy/pasting sentences from the developer’s site or whatnot). Another, which we’ve discussed would involve you having reviews that actually use critique and different methodologies (compare/contrast, etc.). But the last time you showed up here (once again, to defend content) it was expressed by you that doing so was in the too-hard-to-implement category.
Well SPQR charged two weeks ago and Empire of the Sun 3rd Edition charged two days ago. Anti-divorce measures will certainly have to be activated.
Yes, because he isn’t making some kind of governmental policy statement about The Wargamer - he’s posting his opinion on a messageboard about games, specifically in a thread about wargames. I can’t imagine anything more appropriate to post in a thread on a discussion board about wargames than someone’s opinion about wargame media coverage. He is discussing it with a bunch of people who - if he were repetitively stating an opinion that they already knew well and wasn’t contributing anything new - would be reasonable in asking him to tone it down. But they’re not. The editor of said outlet asking him to tone it down? Not so reasonable.
FWIW I completely agree with his original point.
I accidentally ordered the Panzer - France 1940 expansion (also just charged) three times because each time I saw that it was coming out, I went and ordered it. That’s my explanation. I can’t imagine a use for three copies. I must be getting old. I have written to GMT to try to credit back two copies, but if that doesn’t work, you know where you can find a copy, cheap!
I ordered the Frederick one like 4 times. Then they canceled it. I didn’t know whether to be disappointed or relieved.
I ordered Next War: Poland during the GMT sale and then went into some kind of haze. I came out the other hand having backed the P500 for Next War: Korea’s second printing AND the (then) recently announced Next War: Vietnam. I’m not entirely convinced I need them but I can’t bring myself to cancel the orders either…
I thought long and hard about NW: Vietnam. Mitch, the designer, is a friend, and we are working together on an Opeartion Attleboro title which will turn Silver Bayonet into a series, but the hypothetical thing really doesn’t interest me much anymore. I finally decided to get it for Vietnam completist reasons, really.
Their P500 system seems to be a bit easier to navigate now that they’ve updated the website and resfreshed their ordering system, so hopefully I won’t pre-order 4 copies of a Frederick the Great title again in future. Barring human error, of course…
It’s so easy to go down that P500 rabbit hole: oh, there’s this and this and this? Ordered! Despite my cooling of ardor for the COIN series, I have backed the Philippines one because … dunno.
I did the same. I too suffer from COIN exhaustion, but I’m a sucker for the Philippine Campaign and Insurrection since grad school and when I bought and read this for a paper (University library stack sale!! One dollah!).
So if its the Philippines, I’m in.
The 1899-1902 conflict needs a real-deal Military History-focused wargame treatment with theater/political framing. I should try to hypnotize Kim Kanger into doing it. COIN, if ever attempted on it, would never do it justice.
Yeah - the GMT Sale was my first foray at ordering from them as between shipping and customs, you don’t pay much less than you do here in the UK (and the prices here in the UK are disgusting). But then I saw that they’d brought in EU Friendly shipping on p500’s and I was like… oh no. Backed a Blackbeard one for my wife, backed the sci-fi Exploration and Expansion game. Paths of Glory Deluxe…
Luckily I’m very much a ‘theme’ person so a lot of the COIN games haven’t grabbed my fancy. Got Pendragon, and now Falling Skies, but that’s it.
I find all these protestations disingenous,
spells out quite clearly what is their business on their website… and I would be surprised if The Wargamer business would be something else than “helping publishers and advertisers unlock audience value” or not furthering that mission. You guys do product placement… as pretty much any non subscription media organisation on the Internet does these days.
If I link from time to time to The Wargamer is because, afaik, it is the only website that carries a relatively speaking broad coverage of computer wargaming news. I think that some bloggers do a better job covering stuff, but they only cover the stuff they like… which may or not overlap with my own tastes and interests. So far I can deal with the subliminal marketing, others have less patience.
I mean UoC was one revelatory. While the art style of 2 is, IMO, inferior, the stuff I’ve seen of the actual design still looks great.
I am cautiously optimistic on that one, for sure.
Yeah I loved the bobbleheads. The new look is just vanilla like the Order of Battle series.
I’m still waiting for Red Storm to finish development and ship.
All I want is someone to use the German Generalstab symbols… I managed to teach myself to read those things, dammit!
The developers of Strategic Command are on the Single Malt Strategy podcast - it’s a good interview.
Although they go into a lot of detail about how hard it is to make a map/campaign in the editor - it’s making me feel a little disheartened about my project to recreate the War in the Pacific map in SC:WaW.
