Why don't league games use FoW?

Why don't league games use FoW? Do y'all generally prefer games without FoW?

I love FOW personally, though I am expert in neither.

a9977321 wrote:I love FOW personally, though I am expert in neither.

Yeah, I'm not great at this game, but FoW is just so much more fun.

I will admit—FoW on AWBW has an enormous flaw: You have no idea what happened near your units—particularly the dead ones—during your opponent's turn.

If an enemy unit passes through a live unit's field of vision, you won't know. If you lose a unit after it's surrounded by enemy units, you won't know. If you're attacked by two low-health artillery vs one high-health artillery, you won't know.

That said, I still prefer FoW. It's far more dynamic, and comebacks are at least somewhat likely (though the questionable CO Power charging mechanism does its best to thwart that).

Back when this site was much more active and had a thriving community, the league that you're familiar with was not the only league. In fact, you can still find some of the old leagues if you know where to look, but no games really take place and most of the participants have left those leagues. I'm not even certain you can still join them anymore.

Anyway, the moral of the story is that the league you're familiar with (Global League) is designed around clear weather and no FoW. There were, however, other leagues in the past that focused on FoW or alternate weather etc. There are also unofficial, player-organized leagues with their own rules (well, at least one such league) that are still active, but those are typically tight-knit communities that accept new members by invitation only.

Xmo5 wrote:Back when this site was much more active and had a thriving community, the league that you're familiar with was not the only league. In fact, you can still find some of the old leagues if you know where to look, but no games really take place and most of the participants have left those leagues. I'm not even certain you can still join them anymore.

Anyway, the moral of the story is that the league you're familiar with (Global League) is designed around clear weather and no FoW. There were, however, other leagues in the past that focused on FoW or alternate weather etc. There are also unofficial, player-organized leagues with their own rules (well, at least one such league) that are still active, but those are typically tight-knit communities that accept new members by invitation only.

Thanks for the history!

In your opinion, what killed AWBW? Bugs and outages? Slowness and interface issues? People just moving on?

start wrote:

Thanks for the history!

In your opinion, what killed AWBW? Bugs and outages? Slowness and interface issues? People just moving on?

All of those probably contributed to some degree, but mostly I think it was just people moving on. There used to be a really active community here and over the years people lost interest. The more of the community that lost interest, the less of a reason that the rest of the community had to stay around so it dropped pretty substantially. Also, keep in mind that much of drop in activity probably had to do with age. I think a lot of people who used to use the site are around my age, give or take (I'm 25 now). That means that most of them were probably in the high school or age range during the site's heyday. I think what happened is that a lot of people probably lost interest as they went to college or got jobs and careers, and it just so happened that this was around the same time for a lot of users. Not everybody stopped right away, it was more like a gradual progression of spending less and less time on the site. (Ironically, I first found the site in late 2008, during my first semester at college and I've been active since, with only 1 year of hiatus in the middle)

Anyway, site activity dwindled for a few years and after a while we were left with a mostly stable, semi-active community holding out. It was pretty steady for a couple years, but during that time a major outage hit. The site was down for weeks, and when it was back up, it was extremely glitchy. The map editor was bugged and you could only edit the first 330 tiles (or something like that). The games wouldn't always load. Weird glitches happened sometimes when you moved units. Error messages showed up everywhere. It was just plain ugly and a lot of players, myself included, looked for other similar sites to use as a replacement (you can probably find that thread on this forum). When the site finally recovered fully, a lot of the active users didn't come back, leaving us at an all-time low.

I don't think we've lost a significant number of users since then (it was a little over a year ago I think), but we've certainly had our ups and downs in site activity since then. The players who are still around just don't tend to commit as much time anymore. Some of the most active players these days are the new players, like you. That's actually really great, but unfortunately, most new players who show up will be active for a few months and then disappear, so the community never really grows too much.

Anyway, that's just my take on it

Thanks for that detailed answer. If you've donated considerable time toward this community over the past several years, I'd consider sharing your story somewhere!

Technical issues are still an enormous problem. Even when AWBW is working, it's the slowest website I use. By far. It's really frustrating

I definitely understand how much work is required to maintain an application with a legacy codebase[^1]—I'm not blaming anyone for the slowness or bugs. But this place is unlikely to experience a resurgence unless it's overhauled. And I don't know who would overhaul a site that's infringing upon someone else's trademark...

What keeps you around?

[^1]: According to http://www.amarriner.com

I remember joining back then at around 2012 or so. I was actually more active in the forum than the actual site and the game, and so was more active with members who were hanging around the meebo and IRC chats. Eventually this group kinda split. Half were more focused on playing games like Dwarf Fortress or something which consisted of the older members like GlenStorm. The other half were more prominent in League and Minecraft and were the younger members, me included. I think the first group went into the #Glensucks IRC or something and the second half now hangs in a Skype chat.

Even before I joined, AAA himself was pretty active and so were a lot of the older members. Whenever Grandpa Glen told stories of the past it made me think that was the Golden Age of the site.

[JAM] wrote:I remember joining back then at around 2012 or so. I was actually more active in the forum than the actual site and the game, and so was more active with members who were hanging around the meebo and IRC chats. Eventually this group kinda split. Half were more focused on playing games like Dwarf Fortress or something which consisted of the older members like GlenStorm. The other half were more prominent in League and Minecraft and were the younger members, me included. I think the first group went into the #Glensucks IRC or something and the second half now hangs in a Skype chat.

Even before I joined, AAA himself was pretty active and so were a lot of the older members. Whenever Grandpa Glen told stories of the past it made me think that was the Golden Age of the site.

Are there any other strategy games you play?