Dear devs: do you just not care about board gamers at all?

[boarass]

After I posted my Wingspan rules explanation video to my YouTube channel, a friend of mine reached out to ask me why I didn't like the Wingspan app. At the end of our conversation, he said, "shoot. well thanks for the info! you saved me the purchase."

It seems like the devs don't care at all about the integrity of Wingspan as a serious resource management board game. At launch, the game was missing several key features, whose omission was egregious from a board gaming perspective. Since then, lots of random crap was added through several updates, but these omissions have been ignored -- and the ratings have climbed to "overwhelmingly positive."

I guess I have to give my congrats to the devs for their success in marketing a board game port to a wider audience while screwing over actual board gamers, but it's still disappointing.

For the record, here are the inexcusable omissions:

1) Online multiplayer -- unless you invite specific people -- is limited to 3-player games only
2) Online multiplayer offers only 5 minute and 24-hour time controls, which is not only limiting, but stupid, because 5 minutes/move is too long for a live game and 24 hours/move is not enough for an asynchronous one
3) When people take food, the game doesn't show what food was taken
4) When people take a face-up bird card, the game doesn't show what card was taken
5) You can't see how many bird cards your opponents are holding (!)
6) You can't see how many bonus cards your opponents are holding (this is possible to reverse-engineer, unlike #5, but it's still ridiculous)

This is a generous list, as one could also critique the game for not having a move log, not letting you see your opponents' names, not showing what people do as they do it, and not explaining what's going on when the player order jumps due to pink cards.

The Wingspan app is very pretty and very nice for people who want to look at pretty birds and unlock a billion achievements while playing multiplayer solitaire against AI. That doesn't change the fact that Wingspan -- the original, physical Wingspan -- is a high-complexity resource management board game, and in that light, the app is inexcusably incomplete and has been since it launched in September.

[Chupa]

I don't disagree with you but the beauty of it all is at the end of the day you can still play the board game, which was always going to be superior to a digital treatment.

[easytarget]

I'm laughing at what kind of person wastes even just the amount of time it took to type this screed,and equally amused at envisioning ever playing a game online or across a board with him.

[Dazrix]

Originally posted by easytarget:

I'm laughing at what kind of person wastes even just the amount of time it took to type this screed,and equally amused at envisioning ever playing a game online or across a board with him.

I concur.

Mate, bird cards I don't think are public knowledge in the actual game either. But in a game like this, no one hides them. Additionally, I don't think you need to know what food they took. Why is it relevant? They have the food now. You don't know their bird cards to prevent them from doing anything, if you know that they have a sandhill crane or canada goose you just don't let wheat stay on the board during their turn.

I think you're just whining. Nothing you've said struck a chord with me and I've played both tabletop and online and I quite like the app. I think there are some things that are silly (such as the invite player list not having any sensibility so you need a search party to go through all the names)

The 3 player multiplayer online is just for matchmaking. Why is it a big deal? I think it's ideal for matchmaking vs gameplay.

[boarass]

Originally posted by bshock727:

I don't disagree with you but the beauty of it all is at the end of the day you can still play the board game, which was always going to be superior to a digital treatment.

I hear what you're trying to say, but this basically reads as an argument against digital board game ports. Even if it weren't for Covid more or less preventing physical board game nights, digital ports have a lot of value, if for no other reason than to enable players who live far apart to enjoy their favorite board games together.

Originally posted by easytarget:

I'm laughing at what kind of person wastes even just the amount of time it took to type this screed,

I guess I'm laughing at what kind of person wastes even just the amount of time it takes to write the useless thing that you wrote?

Originally posted by Dazrix:

Mate, bird cards I don't think are public knowledge in the actual game either.

The number of bird cards is, though. Your assessment of what your opponents might do is very different if they have 0 bird cards in hand than if they have 10.

Originally posted by Dazrix:

But in a game like this, no one hides them.

What do you mean with this comment? The app hides them. Players' intentions are irrelevant, unless I've misunderstood what you're saying.

Originally posted by Dazrix:

Additionally, I don't think you need to know what food they took. Why is it relevant?

Because it may give an indication as to what bird they're going to play.

Originally posted by Dazrix:

I think you're just whining. Nothing you've said struck a chord with me and I've played both tabletop and online and I quite like the app. The 3 player multiplayer online is just for matchmaking. Why is it a big deal? I think it's ideal for matchmaking vs gameplay.

This just makes me sad. The developers of a board game port released it with core functionality missing and you're just ... letting them get away with it. By your logic, any consumer who is frustrated about a business that performed bad behaviors is "whining" regardless of what those behaviors were. Just because nothing "struck a chord" with you, personally, does not excuse the Wingspan devs for releasing an unfinished game and showing no signs of ever planning to finish it.

The weird thing is that you ask "why is it a big deal" right after you yourself point out why it's a big deal. The point of a board game is to play it with other people. Right now, unless you have friends who also bought the app, you cannot play Wingspan with any number of players other than 3. You don't think it's a big deal that we can't play a 2-5 player board game with 2, 4, or 5 players? Okay, that's nice for you I guess, but it's an objective omission of a core game feature.

The attitudes of these replies is really disheartening. If you all are representative of the general digital board game consumer population, then any digital board game developer reading this thread sees a green light to do shoddy development and get away with it. Why are you arguing for the rights of developers to sell you incomplete games? Does it not concern you that while Wingspan's omissions don't matter to you personally, the omissions of some future board game you care about might?

[easytarget]

Your response merely proves my point.

[ephemeraltoast]

I don't think your concerns are ridiculous to have but your tone is bizarrely over the top. They are INEXCUSABLE omissions and the devs JUST DON'T CARE and everyone who likes the game right now is a filthy casual who likes to drool on themselves while they look at the pretty birdies. Yo, the app version is explicitly marketed as "relaxing," which should be a clue about what they were aiming for. If you barge in here and call us all idiotic plebes for enjoying the game in that way maybe don't expect us to care about your critique. I mean, good grief.

[Drewsko]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysgR5Txe0eY

[boarass]

Originally posted by ephemeraltoast:

I don't think your concerns are ridiculous to have but your tone is bizarrely over the top.

The only thing that's bizarre in this thread is the lengths people are going to in order to justify a developer's bad practices.

Originally posted by ephemeraltoast:

They are INEXCUSABLE omissions and the devs JUST DON'T CARE and everyone who likes the game right now is a filthy casual who likes to drool on themselves while they look at the pretty birdies.

Selectively capitalizing certain words in my post in order to make me sound silly doesn't constitute a logical argument, nor does putting words in my mouth. I mean, they are omissions, and they are inexcusable. It's a 2-5 player board game that you can only play online with 3 players. That's inexcusable, i.e., there is no excuse for shipping a digital board game app with that kind of omission.

Originally posted by ephemeraltoast:

Yo, the app version is explicitly marketed as "relaxing," which should be a clue about what they were aiming for.

I agree with you that this is how the Wingspan app was marketed, but the board game is strategic and deep. That's kind of my entire point here. The devs knocked it out of the park in the marketing department, spinning a serious board game as a "relaxing" affair, but in doing so, they ignored the needs of board gamers. What's annoying is that all of the issues I listed could have been fixed but the devs just didn't feel like it, and threads like this justify both their laziness and their indifference to fans of the physical game.

Originally posted by ephemeraltoast:

If you barge in here and call us all idiotic plebes for enjoying the game in that way maybe don't expect us to care about your critique. I mean, good grief.

Again with the words-putting-in-mouth thing. I read through my entire post again and the only thing I can think of that might make you extrapolate in this inaccurate manner is this:

"The Wingspan app is very pretty and very nice for people who want to look at pretty birds and unlock a billion achievements while playing multiplayer solitaire against AI."

I guess I can concede that this sentence could have been written better. I do think that the Wingspan app works best if you A) don't care about playing against other people, and B) don't care what your opponents are doing. I could have expressed that without sounding as judgy, and I am sorry that I didn't. At the same time, the fact that people are willing to use one poorly written sentence as an excuse to tone police me, dismiss my points (which no one has come close to refuting), and justify a bad developer's bad practices says more about them than that one sentence says about me.

[Drewsko]

Caw Caw Caw!!!

[jerojasro]

I fully agree with @boarass.

This adaptation feels as if somebody in management said "we must do an online version of Wingspan; make it feel alive, make it *pop*", and put together a team where none of the members had ever played the game, and didn't know the first thing about it or about board games in general. It honestly beggars imagination, both in terms of actual bugs, and of poorly thought-out mechanics in the interface. I'm rather mad about how much they botched this port. Some complaints of mine follow.

In order to join an online game with a friend, I have to go check the steam chat, click a button ''there'', and then go back to the game. I should not have to leave the game in order to join an online game.

When I click to accept an invitation to join an online game, while in the main screen of the game (the one where one selects single player, online game, options, etc.), the game shows some nonsense message about not having enough slots for the game, even though the invitation was accepted and there were no issues. It shouldn't show those messages.

When the game starts and one must choose which birds/food tokens to keep, clicking to select birds has no effect, while the board view is selected; one must change to the other board view in order to select birds. It should not matter what board view is in effect for selecting birds.

The bird cards are incomplete, they don't have the icons for the additional goals (photographer, historian, etc.) and because of that the game also lacks the goals for those bird features.

The birds hunted by prey birds are rendered with the wrong icon; instead of showing the little bird-like jolly roger used for these birds, it shows the icon for the bird flock.

When choosing a bird card to place on the board, the click "goes through" the card, and triggers a click over the board, which usually lands on the "take bird card" area of the board, instead of just selecting the bird card to place.

While executing the brown actions of a bird, while using the board view of the reserve, it's not possible to switch between the two visualizations of each bird card; this is a problem if one needs to check what's a bird's special action while running the whole brown-actions-pipeline.

Whenever I play a bird that allows me to play a second one in the same ecosystem, the game highlights not only those that I can play since they belong to the same ecosystem, but also highlights mistakenly some that I can't because they belong to a different ecosystem.

When I take food from the feeder, and I take a worm/seed using the dice side that has both options, I can't see which one I took, because the game keeps showing me the worm/seed side of the dice.

While in the per-ecosystem view of the reserve, the bird cards already played in any ecosystem are floating, and moving a little bit. That's tremendously annoying to me, and there's no option to disable that.

The game layout wastes lots of space, and ends up putting the action description for each bird separate from the other bird features, forcing the player to click back-and-forth to use all that information during a move.

The in-game help is triggered needlessly everywhere; I can't let the mouse cursor rest over ''anything'' because the damn thing will suddenly pop out, even though I don't need it.

The whole interface has terribly poor discoverability; every single player I know that has tried it has struggled tremendously to figure out for the first time how to perform the actions they want. This has happened to both seasoned Wingspan players, and to computer-savvy players, even those already familiar with online gaming and Steam.

When another player finishes her move, my screen gets re-drawn, needlessly.

The game takes a ridiculous amount of time to switch turns, on the order of 5+ seconds, even though the connectivity here is OK and there is ''nothing else'' consuming network bandwidth. The same happens whenever occurs an event that involves actions from several players, like the hummingbird's each-player-takes-one-food, or all-players-take-one-card.

When I'm looking at another player's board, and another player finishes her turn, my view gets re-set to show me my board. This is quite jarring.

At the end of a round, the game occasionally will skip showing to me my results for the round goal.

The game manages to use two CPUs at 100% during the whole match, and takes up to a minute to start on my machine. I understand the need for that in a 3D game that needs to render complex scenes at 60hz+, but this is a board game; other online services for playing board games don't have this kind of issue. I'm amazed they managed to waste so much computing power for doing something so simple, and keep wondering whether whoever programmed this is only capable of architecting things by putting them inside a game loop and recalculating/redrawing everything continuously.

The bird animations (the ones shown in the pre-game screens) are rather tacky, in my opinion, and actually unnecessary.

[jerojasro]

Also, they left out the scientific names of the birds. This is quite an oversight, specially for non-north american players, since most of them, specially those who know about birds/birdwatching are more likely to know the birds by their scientific name than their common name.

The cards are also missing the little icons with the regions where the birds live, and their interesting-facts area.

[falco708]

I think the game is fine even with all you said OP
honestly it's decent choice from devs to have made all you said and it is for the best

[StooBush]

"24 hours/move is not enough for an asynchronous one"

If I had to wait more than 24 hours for another player to take a single move in an async game, I'd never play with them again.

Personally, I think the game is a very good port of the board game. There are certainly valid critiques of the implementation, but starting a screed with "devs don't care" is hyperbole at its worst. I'm sure the folks at Monster Couch put their hearts and souls and long, long workdays into building a lovely game.

Be more constructive with your criticism, and people might actually listen to you instead of mocking you.

[OmegaOm]

Need a competative ladder ranking system.

[The Worst]

I thought this game was about birds, not sealions.