Chiefsfan wrote:I hope those at Wolverine Studios will take this in the spirit which it is given. A critique meant to help.
I am an avid football fan. Will not play Madden because I want strategy. Love Dave Koch's Actions Sports games, but wish they had fictional and career play. Like Out of the Park, OOTP, and think it is the Gold standard, but am mediorce towards baseball.
I bought both your games in 2019. Played them a little. Realized that I had lots of problems. Put them to the side.
Four years later saw your new games on YouTube.
1) Most of my criticism might go away but for the price of your game. I paid $39.99 USD for each of the games I bought. Do a quick comparison of game prices and you will see that you are at the high end. Not AAA, but AA at least. For that I should not deal with some of the things below.
We are always open to fair and honest critiques of our game and we will give consideration to those items however I think it is only fair for those reading this thread to see that some of your points are not quite accurate.
Oddly enough that football game you mentioned above that only has single season play sells for 49.00 and the AAA games retail from $70-100+ so I would strongly disagree that we are at the high end of anything.
1) Documentation.
9.99 per month will get you a monthly subscription to Microsoft Office 365 and access to MS Word.
Around $20.00 a month will get you an Adobe account.
You will only need these 1 month since you will only spend a couple of hours writing an MS Word file that you then use to create a PDF.
Keep the files as you can update them for later versions of the game.
We would love to be able to provide full documentation to all our games. If you think doing so would only take a couple of hours writing a MS Word Doc I would gladly pay you or anyone else for a couple of hours work to do that. For example we did a full documentation for Pro Basketball 2020 and that one is 134 pages long. Even the "quick guide" we provide in our College Basketball series is 18 pages long and is a very brief overview of the game. There is also a DDSCF User Guide that is included in the install and should be in your game directory which again is a 46 page document from a prior version which at least provides a starting point for most items in the game. In all cases those documents have been written by a community member who just wanted to help. We do not have the resources to provide a full written manual for our games on a year in and year out basis. Instead we offer tooltips in the game, have a help page in the game with some FAQs, we try to get videos up on our YouTube channel, we have an active community here, on slack and on discord where you can interact and ask questions and get answers to those questions from community members or the developers themselves and we have our support ticket system where you will get one on one answers from our developers. We feel it is best to put our time into actually developing the product and providing new features and features the community requests. I wish we had the time to add documentation writing to that list but we do the best we can with the documents we provide and make sure we are always available to answer questions.
2) You have recruiting down, but I am not going to buy Office Recruiter or Tech Startup recruiter. Recruiting is important. But when your came is Draft Day College Football you need to get the Football right. You don't.
3) Football
Pure text is better than really bad animation, which is what I got
You started this post saying "I hope those at Wolverine Studios will take this in the spirit which it is given. A critique meant to help" - I fail to see how making comments somehow comparing recruiting in college football to running a tech start up, claiming we don't do football and saying we have really bad animation are in any way helpful critiques.
Go to any website that tracks games and find out which ones put the game information, down, distance, clock at the bottom of their screens. None.
As Brooks pointed out our presentation is a TV style one and I happened to watch a number of different games this weekend and I did not see one where the game information was anywhere but the bottom of the screen. I am sorry if you do not prefer it there but it was there in the prior version you said you had in 2019 and I don't know what you saw on YouTube whether it was our community manager doing his Draft Day Dynasty series or our trailer but all of them would have shown that we did not change anything about that.
Paid 39.99 for a Football game that wants to run 5-2 defense and the wishbone in 20222
I also think its unfair that you are acting like a 5-2 defense and wishbone offense are a) being forced on every team in the game, b) the only options in the game and c) are fictional things that do not exist in the world of football. There are plenty of offenses and defenses to choose from and as Brooks said those particular formations were highly requested from members in our community so I guess other people like those formations. What is great about our game is that you are free to run whatever offense and defense you want so if you hate the wishbone you never ever have to run a single play with it.
Brooks responded very kindly to a number of your other points already so there is no need to rehash those. I am sorry you are disappointed with the game. I am also sorry you seem more interested in bashing our product and efforts, trying to make it sound like an office recruitment simulation with really bad football as opposed to bringing up legitimate things that could be done better, discussing them with the intent of making them better and more than likely getting improvements made in the areas you are hoping for because that is exactly what happens over and over again in our community. We have hundreds of community members who have found something they weren't super fond of in our games over the years and when they approach us in a manner of truly wanting to see improvements they find that our developers are extremely receptive and willing to work with them and that many times that even though initially they were frustrated with something about the game that after getting the chance to be listened to and interact with the developers they find improvements being made to those places.
With that said I will be closing this thread. We have no control over Steam refunds or any way to even see who has purchased what on Steam which is why we always encourage people to buy our games directly from us. I do not know if Steam will grant you a refund beyond their normal window but you certainly can try. I am sorry we are not able to produce a game you like and I wish you the best in finding one. Perhaps Dave Koch Action Sports will be willing to add in career and fictional play if you ask them to do so.