P39 Question for Arkan and Akilpio

[Mr Grumpy]

I wonder if any of the game designers for the newer games would be willing to push out balance patches for the campaign scenarios as more and more games are completed? In my mind it would be a great thing to have the campaigns become higher and higher quality as they are continuously refined through play. The reality is that there are so many variables to the big scenarios and of course it is challenging to adequately playtest them, but still these are the most rewarding scenarios. 

Obviously cannot speak for WDS, but my gut instinct is that they would not be interested in addressing balance concerns in the manner suggested.  They certainly are amenable to taking inputs for OOB and map corrections, errors and such (I see it all the time in their forums) but as far as balance issues are concerned I strongly suspect that they would say that it's too subjective and they'd be chasing it forever, and as they have told me on several occasions:  "their largest Customer base by far are Solo players", so they plow their man hours into fixing the AI issues.  Roughly translated, if those of us in the PBEM corner of the hobby want to correct balance concerns with Scenarios it is up to us to do it.

Once upon a time the Blitz had a dedicated group of players who spent a lot of time addressing balance issues - the section is still there - H2H - and that's the kind of thing we'd need to do again if we wanted things balanced for PBEM.  I do believe the scenario currently being played in the Long Way to Tipperary Tournament was a product of the H2H process that eventually got incorporated into the actual game product.  But I'm old and my memory could be faulty 

Yes I was the one that ran that group, we did approve perhaps 15 scenarios through the system although I had a "30 turns or less" rule as like a Tourney if I tried to approve larger scenarios I had issues with testers dropping out.

Some of the scenarios were stock versions and some were Ed's "_Alt" versions and your memory is not faulty the S43 Dime scenario being used in the Tourney was one of those approved scenarios, not perfect by any means but for PBEM the Blitz stats back up how much more balanced it is.  

Is it possible to get that program started again? What would it take?

I would need to look at the testing system that our webmaster created to try to work out how it operated as there is no manual and I haven’t used the system for perhaps 10+ years.
But just as important is access to completed scenarios, we really need WDS to host the scenarios in the relevant titles just as they did for my Dime scenario, so that is a conversation we should have with them before restarting IMO.