The failure of DW
 

I am curious to see what you think made DW be a failure...

First to vote... 100 percent of all respondants agree with me!

Sadly I forgot an Option :nope:

@ Bill Nichols: now its 50% heheheheheh

And back up to 66.67%

:yeah:

You forgot the most important option : make the game an engaging experience for would be buyers. The other options are all good and dandy but they don't address the fundamental reason why DW hasn't splashed into the mainstream.
And before you ask, yes you can make a naval simulator a fantastic gaming experience, be it placed in WWI, WWII, Cold War or even a hypothetical WWIII.
So I didn't vote, but you know what I think having expressed my opinion already in countless threads bashing DW. :D

After two years, I started DW again, just before putting up the pool.

I quitted just after the intro (at the main menu screen), because the intro alone was so exciting and w/o bs, that it's really hard and incredible to believe the game as died like that.

I vote 'bad programming' .. but I think more like 'little attention' .. if there was more support, more feedback, faster patches, addons .. it could rock. LWAMI guys did much more fixes in shorter time in their free time ! If there was 2 people working full time on DW support, it would have been visible. I guess it was only one, and it was not fulltime. SCS simply said: let's sell this old engine one more time, but let's not loose much resources on it. It never was priority project for them.
Those are the reasons .. but I don't want to critize this. It was just a business decision, and I think nobody was really surprised DE did not sell that well.

Too little subsimers ? Look at SH series. Yeah, they look sexy, but will sexy waves keep you looking at them through 30 minut long ride over Atlantic ? No .. there are subsimers out there.
Was DW too hard ? You could turn everything down, even play with truth on. Then it was just a 3d shooter.

Little attention ? They even had some active programmers and representants in THIS very forum. Silent Hunter does not AFAIK. They're more smart as they don't listen to every :censored: whine about this and about that. Looks like they're more clever yes ?

Bad Programming ? Please tell me you are kidding, or else tell me you saw the code...

By the way, LWAMI is the reason i got disgusted by DW. Very frequent patches changing unsignificant glitches affecting the whole gaming experience.

I would have stayed with stock 1.04, but nobody would play without the (ever changing) "PATCH" :mad:

You have got to be kidding Nexus7. Default DW even with patch 1.04 is fundamentally broken, if it were not for the pioneering work of lwami and then the guys of AT and RA this game would be 100% dead.
No one would be playing it.

I mean without lwami, the remote controlled helo would only be able to drop sonobouys. Thats a farce, SCS might as well not have included a frigate at all.

Without LWAMI and theyr substainers, Sonalyst would not have left.

By the way, how much dead is it ? 98% ? :nope:

No, I don't know about other virtual navies, but we on betasom.it have a dangerous waters section, where we organize course for the different units. We have missions each week in multiplayer, not the type of free for all, but missions designed around teamwork, objective based etc...
We have around 30 players and increasing, and 10-15 play regularly each week.
The french community on mille-sabords have a pretty healthy dw community also.
In the past years we even organized mille-sabords vs betasom dw matches. :woot:
So for us DW is not dead at all, its popularity is even increasing because people that tradionally have played SH 3 or 4 now look for another game. And they read the after mission reports we write after each mission and it ignites their imagination.
I can assume that playing free lance is more difficult, because you have to find players, and if they are in different time zones, say european and far east, or european and american west coast thats makes it very difficult to find a suitable time to play together.

No, SCS left because they considered DW a lost cause.
It had nothing to do with lwami or other mods.
SCS wanted DW to succeed, but they never unlocked the necessary resources to make that happen. So they left.