LAN Experience

[drEaPer]

Hi

I just had a couple of LAN games with my mates, and I tried to get em into DW. They like sims but they rather play flight sims.
Since DW wants to be appealing to a wider range of people, I thought I should post what happened.

First I explained all the sub systems to em, and they quickly got the idea, they even unterstood TMA quite fast.

We played for about 6 hours, 4 missions. Always 688 or Seawolf.
They actually had fun but the fun ended when they felt that things got overcomplicated where there was no need for it.

Some examples:
Their subs both had an ESM contact, so they went to PD to exchange their info. Then they wanted to merge them in TMA and found out that it didnt work. I told em that they can make a manual solution and merge that, but they werent really satisfied with that.
Another thing that made em upset, was that there is no warning when you want to raise a mast while u are too fast. They broke lots of masts, and were really frustrated that no warning came to tell em that it isnt a good idea to raise the mast now.

Promoting stuff to the link also wasnt working well. Sometimes a sub didnt show up, but it was at 56ft with antenna up, other times the sub showed up but had no name next to it.

What made them also go crazy, was the fact that they couldnt tell the NavMap to merge their ownship contacts with the links data contacts. They just didnt understand why they should have so many stuff on their screen when they exactly knew that a certain Ownship contact was the same contact that is already on the link. They asked for an option to tell the TMA: Take link No.XXXX as a solution for M02. I told them it doesnt work that way but they were just annoyed by having the same ships multiple times on their nav maps and when trying to select a contact that was under another contact (link) they had to scroll in and out alot. They were also confused about the fact that a link contact has a different number for different players, and that made communicating harder.

Later in one of the games we had another issue with the link: The SW was at 50 ft, floating wire antenna deployed and radio antenna mast up. The player promoted a contact and said:"Its on the link". We said: No it isnt.
After a while we found out, that you cannot promote a contact to the link when you also have your floating antenna deployed.
He retreived the floating antenna and re-raised the mast and it worked again.
I guess this is a bug.

Then the 688 player found out about the UUV, jus to get more frustrated. He wasnt able to promote contacts to the link that were marked by the UUV, and he wasnt able to use the UUV in active mode.

What they also didnt like was searching the USNI reference for a certain ship, cause the ESM didnt tell em the country origin.

In the end they were just ranting about how clumsy the interface feels and that you get so little feedback from game so that I didnt managed to convince em to buy DW when it is available, which was my initial goal.

I just thought I post this here, cause those guys were seeing the game from another perspective than we do, after a while you just get very used to a game.

Well, I still love DW, but we want more people, so maybe this feedback is welcome.

see ya