User Experience re-evaluated

Hi everyone,

So over the latest round of beta testing several things have come to our attention that need to be addressed. Player match-making is more difficult than we initially planned. People (especially subscribers) are having a hard time finding games that people stick around to play. Our first take on the problem was the "accept command" step that was added to the game launch system. This was a good 1st step, as it greatly reduced the number of games that were launching with no players at all sticking around to submit orders.

Our next step was then to figure out a way to track and remove non-active players from games. This is where the new "war department" page comes in along with the new game admin features like, "quit", "holiday", and "pause". This is proving to be a bit more complicated than we anticipated, but a preliminary version should be available shortly.

So far so good, however we think we can do a bit better. There are a few more changes to the game that will be added over the next month or so. "Full" 5 vs 5 team games will soon be available to subscribers only. "Team" 2 vs 2 games will soon be implemented and also available to subscribers only. "Duel" games will continue to be available to all players (not just subscribers) and we started planning a single player version of the game (not just a demo) that will allow people to jump into a game right away (this will obviously be against an AI opponent, something we didn't want to do but is apparently necessary). We will also be expanding our ad placements within the website. Initially the ads will be viewed by all players however we hope to enable subscriber filtering, shortly after the ads are enabled.

Anyway that's all the latest news for The Campaign of 1863.
Onward to victory!

Jeff