9. doba - diskusija

Tiny wrote:Dear players

The way work is done on the 9th Age is very different to what many gamers have been used to in the past. So we are compelled to give a few explanations to ensure understanding with the community, for whom we are doing this.

The 9th Age is currently in, what is known in the gaming industry as, pre-beta testing stage, and will soon enter the beta testing stage once the army book development teams get selected.

The current stage in the development of the game is a period when the product is almost always kept from the scrutiny of the public and these initial drafts are always prone to sudden changes. In contrast to most game developing projects we have decided to keep the public in the loop from the very begining, and it is this process that you are currently observing and participating in.

During this initial period before the beta army documents are drafted the imput of the community is valuable as a failsafe mechanism. All input is appreciated but the one optained through playtesting carries greater weight. Here we depend upon you as the community to help us out in the playtesting process (to suplement our own internal playtesting) so that we may produce the best game possible.

The current TAC document is here to provide a stop gap measure that allows players to play with their models in the 9th Age and is far from a finished product. In addition the TAC army lists will serve as a skeleton for the initial drafts for the future army books. Currently the TAC lists lack certain rules players have been acustomed to, due to streamlining. Most if not all of these will return in one form or another in the army books.

So we ask the community to help us out by testing the drafts we present you. Also don't be alarmed if you playtested an earlier version of the document, as this will also provide us with valuable information, showing us if the change made was validated or not.

At the moment we are focusing on the units far more than one characters because the latter are easier to balance, in order to help us out we would like to ask you if you could play with more units than usual in your games. When selecting army lists for you playtest games we would be thankful if you would take only the necessary characters and focus on the meat of the army, which is the units. Also through current playtesting it has been shown that the army size of 2000 points is best suited for testing units, since at that size of the game it is easier to notice if a certain unit is weaker or stronger than it should be compared to its cost. That said we are not telling you to not play your average sized games (at whatever points size they may be) as different sizes of the game are prone to providing different data. For the moment we are focused on balancing our game in the 2000-2999 point range which is an average game that would take an evening to play and is most often encountered in tournaments.

What is important is that you report your experiences from these games so that we may have appropriate data needed to produce a quality product for the benefit of all. So please remember all of this will be very hard to achieve without you, the playtesters.

As a final note we would like to thank you on all the feedback, and help you have already provided, and invite you to continue on this game developing journey with us.

The 9th Age team