I’m just wishing I had a way to quickly look up model information whenever I have a question, including small questions between when I stop the car and when I get out.
The old app opened immediately on my devices, now I have to wait a few minutes for the app to update before I can confirm Israfael’s RAT. A few minutes is an eternity when I just want to glance at my device and get on with my day. I’m a weirdo, so when I have 30 seconds of downtime in my day or when I am driving, my mind often wanders to Warmachine–list building and tactics etc.
I really miss Warmachine University (thanks Juckto et alia!), which quickly answered my model questions on the fly. (Plus, WU was amazing at clarifying rules and their interactions!)
If we had access to the database, it would be trivial to make a simple, fast website with all the model information. Who knows? Maybe it would spark a WU for MK4.
Considering all the work they just put in to making the database more secure after the summer rules leak I wouldn’t hold your breath.
It would definitely be awesome; I play a ton of Destiny 2 and they have a public API that folks have used to build lots of neat apps. However it’s also been used to mine data about upcoming content more than once (and Bungie has a lot more technical staff than PP does).
Hopefully once print to PDF is out of the way the App team will be able to take a breather and then look at some optimization to help that startup time issue.
Yeah. Also, once the print functionality is working, I can just make a PDF of at least my own armies.
I don’t completely understand the problem of leaks, so this is just an ignoramus wondering: Does the detriment of potential leaks outweigh the benefits of empowering fans to make their own resources? Hmmmm…
In very brief: leaks create expectations where there should not be any, which has an outsized impact on discourse. (You get a lot of polarized opinions and hurt feelings because something that doesn’t exist “sucks” or “they nerfed my model!” and all that.)
Additionally, models might be in development for 6-12 months. As we saw in the physical book era, where models were sometimes “released” up to 18 months before their models appeared, that time span undoubtedly had a negative impact on sales once the models finally became available for purchase.
Stuff should bake out of public view and away from public consumption until it’s ready.
100% what Michael said. Leaks make it harder for the dev team to experiment because now any changes they make will be compared against rules that were never finalized. They need to be able to try stuff and adjust without players jumping down their throats about it.
It also sucks for the art and lore teams to not be able to reveal stuff when it’s ready. We all knew the Wyvern was coming months ahead of time, so when it came time to reveal the art there was a lot less drama to it. Plus you lose out on that juicy speculation of “oh what is it gonna do, what do you think the animus will be?” etc etc because everyone is just saying “I hope it’s exactly the same as the leak” or “They better have fixed it” depending on how they felt about the leaked rules.
To go back to my Destiny example: Years ago they used to do these secret missions to get exotic weapons. One day you’d be wandering around a zone and suddenly there’s a portal that wasn’t there before that takes you to a timed mission that isn’t explained. It’s mysterious and exciting, you don’t know what you’ll get for rewards or how the mission is going to progress.
Then dataminers figured out how to get hidden weapons and achievements out of the API and started posting them on social media days or weeks before the secret mission went live. Now Bungie just doesn’t bother doing them secretly because they aren’t exciting when everyone knows they’re coming so there’s no excitement or suspense.
I can well live without a separate public database but hopefully serious effort is put to optimize the Warmachine App. The slowness is exceptionally bad considering pretty much every app I’ve ever used. If the mk3 Warroom was able to function well without long waiting times it surely must be possible now too.
But when we have examples of literal billion-dollar tech corporations that can’t follow through with that, why is it sensible to expect a small company to be able to shoulder the cost of multiple environments or code branches?
(Here’s a better one: hey, people who caused the data breach last year, don’t do that. )
it’s not even just the leaks, though that’s no doubt a big part of it. It’s also just a lot of extra work to maintain a public-facing API in the hopes that someone does something with it.
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