Flames of War Rambling

Flames of War – The Player Survey 2022

I will admit that I find myself thinking far too much about my favourite wargame, Flames of War.  I love seeing people’s views, on Facebook, Instagram, and at events.  This got me thinking; Do we hear from a wide cross-section of the hobby or just more ‘committed’ players who do the tournie circuit?  Are some of the issues people talk about on the FB pages that bad, or do we just not hear from those who think everything is fine?  Is what a FOW veteran thinks about the game the same as a newbie?

For a while I had been thinking that it might be interesting to get some actual hard stats/evidence of the views of the community on the game hence I started work on the ‘FOW – Player Survey 2022’.  Its aim is to allow some analysis of players, their gaming habits, their view of the game and also their thoughts on some aspects of V4.

Why?

Firstly general interest for us, our readers and the community.  Let’s learn some more about our community and how they feel.  Secondly, there are some questions there of interest to Breakthrough Assault in terms of preferred content which will help inform us what our readers would like to see.  Finally to help inform BF with real evidence and in a constructive manner about how the game is played and perceived.

  I will stress that BF has not requested this survey, it is not in partnership with them.  That said they will receive the overall results and my hope is that it may be useful to guide some future developments of the game we love.

Let’s Do it!

The Survey can be found here:

FOW – Player Survey  2022

All questions are multiple-choice and the survey should take no more than 5-10 mins.

Thanks for taking part.  I will leave the survey open for a month and then do some write-ups with some analysis and a breakdown of the results.

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18 comments

Scott Duncan

You need to check the link. In the meantime I will order a cheesy cheesburger with cheese fries
    Mark Goddard

    Thanks, sorted now
      Scott Duncan

      Mark, Well done. Bit more work on spelling would be good. Mispelling of Australia and Scenario
Thomas Dudley

Thanks for making the survey, hope you get a good sample size. Nice to see people wanting to improve the hobby and not just complain.
Alex Trenchard

Completed the survey. I know these things only have so much granularity, but it would be interesting to put some sliding scales on some of these.

E.g. I did answer yes to tournament play, but that’s because I attend Reading Warfare as my one con per year. It feels like I’m probably not in the same bracket as some other far more dedicated players!
Leichti

As a non-tourney player the question about balancing is not important for me. I missed a option there like “undecided” on later questions. But as a answer is requested I opted for yes…
Rex King

The survey is very li.ited in its evaluation especially concerning balance.
For example Soviet mid war is OK for tournaments but half the units are still massively overprinted, especially the units which were the most numerous.
All the armies have overpointed and underpointed units so it’s not that one army is better than another but more like its not worth taking half the units available as they are massively overprinted but you always take certain units as they are so undercoated.
The Soviets for example are the best British tanks in the game.
    Mark Goddard

    Hi Rex,

    It is limited and designed for fairly big handfuls. There are loads of things I’d ask but I have to balance that with the ability for people to do it quickly. Otherwise you just get hard core players who will take the time. Also I am using the free version of the software so quite limited on the form questions take.
Rex King

Fair point Mark not critacising just found it difficult as most armies have ridiculously high and low point units so hard to say which has the worst.
Good idea to get a feeling of people’s opinions though.
See you at the Nationals
Krister Berends

I habe participated in the survey, but I must ad, that my gaming group an me don’t play V4. We only play V3.
The player base desintigrated with the introduction of V4 in Germany. Nearly no one play it.
    Frank the Tank

    I would say that isn’t completly true. My local community im Hannover plays V4 since the start as we didn’t saw any sense in staying at V3 if we want to find new players.
    I know that a lot of players stopped playing with the release of V4 and tournaments went down also. But our local decision was good as we now are bigger the ever. We wouldn’t have so much new players if we stayed on V3. And tournaments are getting more now V4 is nearly on similar level for variety of armies as in V3. Now with Covid being less an issue helps also.
    And ETC showed that a lot of people love to play FoW regardless of edition.
    So if you want you are invited to vist or play in a future tournament;)
      Krister Berends

      In the middle of Germany, where I come from, there are nearly no tournaments, like Aschaffenburg,…
      And thanks for the invitation, but V4 is not for me. I loved V3 as an historical tabletop. But V4 is a working tabletop system with historical miniatures, but not an historical tabletop.
      So I can’t convince myself to play V4. Tried it, but it didn’t worked out for me/us. So we stick with V3.
      Tournament were alot of fun, so we miss it alot.
        Vicente

        A mi me pasa como a KRISTER BERENDS, que no me adapto a la V4.Mi grupo si juega V4, pero yo cada vez menos, porque aunque lo intento no lo consigo. V3 tiene una profundidad que dudo la alcance la actual version. Y es cierto que la V3 necesita ajustes en algunos puntos, pero eso tiene facil arreglo.
    Les Parsons

    They could have added another question asking , which version of FOW do you play ? As at a guess some will still be playing V1 .
camouflage_cat

I think that some questions of the survey would have benefitted from additional answers or the option to be left unanswered as not to skew the results.
Q6 (Do you play any non BF games) would have needed an option “none”, I have played some other wargames in the past, but would not consider myself playing them any more, despite still having the models. To complete the survey, I had to check a technically wrong answer.
Q7 (On average how many games of FOW do you play a month) would have benefitted from an option between 0 and 1 or maybe the question should have been rephrased to allow for other time spans, e.g. How often do you play FOW with answers like e.g. once per year, once per month, twice per month, etc.
The questions whether MW/LW are well balanced would have needed a third option like “i don’t know”. I do not play MW so I do not know how it is balanced and I do not have enough experience with LW to judge the balance there. So answers from players who do not have the necessary experience would not skew the results.
I also think that it would have been interesting to know, whether players consider themselves a casual player, historical player (strifing for best historical accuracy in games), or competitive player (or a combination of those).
I hope I do not sound overly critical of the survey, as I think the survey is a really good idea to get some information on the playerbase. I am aware that it is not easy to come up with a good survey. I am looking foward to see the results.
    Mark Goddard

    Thanks for the ideas. I’ll incorporate them for next time

André Silva

Done !
JOHN SIFIS

Great job, great task. Players’ comments should have been always pointed.
We all love the game and hope that BF will take under consideration for further improvement.
Not only FoW , but TY as well.

Comments are closed.

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