Lyle is writing back

Something happened that I actually wasn't sure that it would happen, that is Lyle Lowery (Marketing Manager of Privateer Press) actually wrote an answer to my open letter concerning the launch of War Room. Lyle writes:

Hey Philipp,
Thanks for the email.  War Room had a rough start but we're continually working to improve it and I think we have made some great strides.  We've also learned a lot of lessons from this launch and we'll be sure not to make the same mistakes again.
Thanks for emailing me.  Maybe I'll see you at the next WarGamesCon or Lock & Load!

Lyle Lowery

Marketing Manager

Privateer Press

Well, this is more than I thought I would get since Lyle surely has been busy and had tougher problems to solve than writing back to me. On the other hand, this letter shows that Privateer Press *does* care about their customers even if this means they write back way later - but they do write back and don't forget!

Frankly, I am still not totally happy with War Room as I love to browse the cards, but I miss a serious list construction tool and the ability to quickly access damage boxes in games. I just finished assembling a Dire Troll Mauler made of metal and during the process (all pieces naturally fit together) I was thinking "man, if their War Room just had the same awesome quality as their miniatures!" Well, I trust that Privateer Press will do the right thing and I am looking forward to the improvements that are supposed to come!

War Room - The ultimate card browsing software?

After our last WM/H gaming day, I'd like to write down my experiences with War Room at game time. To make a long story short: I doubt it's ready for gaming, certainly not tournament gaming.

When I came to the gaming table, I was facing my friend Robi's Circle army and we agreed to try playing the game with War Room only.

Robi was hosting the game and I punched in his player name (Turambar), but weirdly War Room didn't make me join Robi's session, but our friend Sven's session instead... I canceled, retyped his player name, waited for the connection and on the second attempt it worked. Weird.

Then I downloaded Robi's army list. That went smoothly, but at this point I really miss auto-sync between my devices. Maybe it's an educational method to learn them better, but I don't really fancy the idea of having to retype all of my opponent's lists, too.

Then the game started and I realized looking up values and rules is just a mess, i.e. slow, if your phone automatically turns off the screen if resting untouched for a couple minutes. It is especially annoying if your phone is code protected like mine is. Having to retype the code every time you want to look up something is annoying. Of course you could turn off the code lock during game time, but still I don't like it. Yes, that's obviously not Privateer Press' problem, but it just makes me wonder if this is really meant to be used during a regular game. Unless you do it like my friend André and purchase an extra battery pack to leave it permanently turned on.

Well, then I tried to mark the damage when my first Troll got hit. I never attempted to do it before in a dry run, so I decided to tap the damage boxes on my iPhone. It was a mess.

Botond was trying to be helpful by pointing out that I could just tap the column number and then define the damage on the slider. Well, it didn't work because I couldn't hit the correct column number either as the buttons are just too small. Now that I tried it at home in a more relaxed setting to do the screenshot it did, but playing this game on an iPhone is awful.

Assigning damage to your warcaster/lock is ok on an iPhone.

This game really doesn't get better until I started picking up my iPad; the buttons are now large enough to be tapped, now I can even reliably tap the white circles on the spiral. However, with so much empty screen space, why did they not make this even larger?

War Room Updates

Well, War Room received an update from the iTunes Store pretty much half a week ago and so far I have only see improvements. All my purchased cards are nicely being shown without the worry of reregistration again. The app seems now to be way more stable; had never any problems on the iPhone 4, but now it seems to run even on my 1st gen iPad without crashing.

Currently I am still deeply missing these two features:

1. A list validator.
2. List synchronisation between my two iOS devices.

Wendell Hicken, the creator of iBodger, wrote a very good piece concerning usability, War Room, and the potential list validator.

Right now, my favorite function (due to a lack of those named above) is browsing the cards in the bus as I listen to good music. This gives me an opportunity everyday to learn more about the games and the miniatures it has. Of course I took an in-depth look at anything Trollbloods, but I have also started to read on Cryx and Skorne as they are tournament favorites and I don't know that much about them so far.

War Room app 1st impressions

Steamforged did this extensive video review of the new War Room app. In the meantime, bug fixes keep coming in for my friends with Android phones. Privateer Press has also published a road map and FAQ concerning the state of War Room and future developments; news are published there on a daily basis.

I really like the way Privateer Press cares for its customers and I think they do a great job, yet I also hope that this won't repeat itself in the future again!

Open letter to Lyle Lowery, Privateer Press marketing manager

Dear Lyle,

So we all finally got War Room, the highly anticipated app for mobile devices that promised us to dive even deeper into our fandom of steam powered robots and fury fueled fantastic creatures. I was really glad when I got it Monday night; from the smile on my face my wife immediately knew she could write me off for the next couple hours.

As soon as I started the app, I liked what I saw, although I also noticed a couple issues - not the troubling kind of issues, but nagging issues. It is very unlikely you read my blog post, but you surely noticed the fans venting their frustration in the War Room release thread leading ultimately to various statements by Privateer Press (1, 2). My friends fancying Android devices are utterly disappointed.

I guess we can savely say that this release didn't go as you envisioned it regardless of all the speculation on how this could happen. However, deep in this mess there are three factors that are the seeds to success:

1. You listened to your fans (I don't say "customers" on purpose),
2. You replied to your fans,
3. With the internet, you have the perfect delivery system for quick improvements and you are using it.

Seriously, I was most notably impressed when I noticed Lane Daughtry of Tinkerhouse Games started to respond in the War Room release thread, too. You are doing all things right that crisis management handbooks tell you to do and I am very confident that these things plus your company's success are rooted in your company's culture. Ever since I noticed the nagging issues in War Room I knew that on one point, they will be a thing of the past because you take responsibility and fix it. I still think that the 60$ on the Ultimate Bundle are one of my best investments in wargaming ever.

Both you and I know that a company's marketing department not only promotes products, but also collects customer feedback. I deeply believe that Privateer Press' success is deeply rooted in the the way it interacts with the community with the Press Ganger program just being one example. However, considering your track record of interaction with the community, I have a very simple question:

Why didn't you let fans beta-test the app?

One way to learn from this mess is to do the tech talk and look at the things gone wrong in the software development process. However, let's leave this to the techies because you have a weapon that is minimally as powerful, i.e. your fanbase.

Yes, I know there are reasons why a company doesn't want to release information too early. However, look at it this way:

You were trying to replicate an excellent app that already existed, so it's not like you were to reveal something new and groundbreaking there. We took this stuff for granted. We expected your app to be even better because (a) it comes directly from you and (b) we expected you to copy all the things that made  iBodger great. Furthermore, postponing the release several times with you stating that you "don't want to pass on any opportunity to make improvements to the app" made us expect a perfect and finished product.

However, if you had released a beta, you would have immediately found fans to test the product. You are close to your fans, you know how to talk to them. You could have collected feedback on how this app is doing on Android devices, an ecosystem that is hard to betatest. And even if the feedback from fans may have been harsh during the design process, they would have closely observed the improvements and built up excitement just the way they did passively waiting for the product. However, in that scenario nobody would have had to burn their midnight oil and frustrated feedback would have come in quantities easier to manage.

I didn't read the entire War Room release thread with its 1000+ posts, but I noticed that people are generally complaining about the product, but not about the company. Heck, people even opened a Thanks for War Room threat in your forum despite the flaws it has - and I wholeheartedly agree with them! You know, this is quite the opposite in comparison to a competitor of yours where people love their products, but don't miss any occasion to wish them to hell. Your fanbase and the way you communicate with it is your biggest strength as you carefully nurtured it over the years. If I am in the position to make any suggestion, I only have this one: whenever you embark on an exciting new journey (one could also say "risky journey"), allow your fans to participate even more closely. They will love it, you will love it, and your competitors will be left wishing they could release innovative products just like you do.

Cheers,

Philipp

War Room first impressions

After getting my greedy little hands on War Room here are my first impressions:

War Room is a 150MB download from your iTunes Store so it takes a while to download depending on your connection speed.

Once you start it, you need to be quite patient as it is loading up. It will also automatically pull the latest updates from the server.

Once it finished loading, you can create your own account.

Once you created your own account, you can start using the app. However, at this point there isn't really any use to it as you are missing the faction decks.

Now you can purchase either single faction decks, all faction decks for a game (Warmachine or Hordes) or a bundle with all decks for both games. The more you buy at once, the cheaper the price for a single faction deck.

The paying process is very painless because the iTunes Store already has your credit card information. You hardly notice you are spending money. Yes, I bought the big bundle.

Once the payment process is completed, you already have access to the faction decks in your purchase. In other words, you already have all the necessary data after the initial download, paying for the decks just unlocks them.

After setting up everything on my iPhone, I started the app on my iPad. All it takes is to log in with your new account, after that everything is updated automatically via the server. However (accuse me of bitching, but I don't like this), the app notifies me that a second device has been successfully registered with a maximum total of two devices allowed!!!

After the initial start on my iPad, the app didn't recognize I had already purchased all faction decks and kept asking me if I want to buy them. I turned off the app, restarted it, logged in again, and then found the "Restore Purchases" button at the very bottom of the Store. Once I hit that, everything worked on the iPad, too.

War Room works on the iPhone only in the vertical position, on the iPad only in the horizontal position. I guess that was the only way to do it in order to use the screen space efficiently.

If you have an iPhone and an iPad, you want to look at it on your iPad. iPhone is good enough on the go and doesn't feel too tiny, but it's on the iPad where the app shines.

Whenever you open a new faction deck, it takes a while to load. I wish there were a way to make these loading times shorter.

Browsing the cards and creating an army list is a breeze. However, compared to iBodger I really miss the collection feature and its filter. PP, put that on your feature list.

Also unlike in iBodger, you cannot manually enter the army size - the app only lets you pick the standard army sizes in the rule book.  PP, put that on your feature list.

All in all, I give this app 8 out of 10 points.

War Room ships

War Room is in the iTunes Store now and I am downloading it as I am writing these lines!

I will buy the Cygnar, Mercenaries, and Trollbloods faction decks for sure.

However, the most nagging question is if silly me will buy a new 3rd gen iPad just for this app to have all those graphics on a retina display. The other option would be a Nexus 7 which will be handier to carry around plus I don't really like Apple's new approach to Google apps on iOS. However, reading through Vowe's latest reviews [1, 2], I guess the iPad still wins.