Seibertron wrote:
It's not a problem. I think it's time to put HMW to bed. There's too few of you interested in this game any more. I'd rather focus our energies on the areas where Seibertron.com excels. I'll leave the game up for the time being, but it will no longer be in the primary navigation of the site.
I'm a bit late to this, but to just put in my 2 cents for what they are worth.
I look back at a lot of the sites I used to visit a even a few years back, and frankly this is one of very few I've stayed with. When I think of Seibertron, I think of Heavy Metal War. When I got properly back into Transformers during Energon (I had been watching beast wars and such, but had not bought any figures between Gen2 Bumblebee and Energon Starscream.) and started looking around the sites available, it HMW was one of the aspects that attracted my interest in Seibertron, one of the reasons why I signed on here when I haven't with your "competitors", and after I started actually playing I was hooked.
I have dumped the kind of time in this game that friends of mine dump into more complex MMO's, Minecraft and JRPG's, had friends sign up, spent time on the forums, lost countless hours creating back stories for my team and it's members, used more math figuring out details for characters then I've spent on personal budgeting and taxes, been angry at system wipes that reset everything and rebounded by trying not to make the same mistakes I had made the first time, dealt with the ups and down of the backstage drama with developers, enjoyed the interaction with fellow players, seen your personal disinterest in hosting the game (whether perceived or real) and finally, watched in the last while as newer official games (both console and IOS) stole what thunder most of us had left for the game. There were many times when I was living on my own, where I was staying up later and later to just get one of my guys into that next mission, a situation that continued thru moving in with my girlfriend, marrying her, and right up to having our first kid just over 2 years back. Heck, when I bought my first smart phone, the first thought was to see if I could play on the go. (Yes I could, but the interface and screen sizing made things very frustrating.)
I had another issue which limited my play that the game has nothing to do with, as between the death of my laptop, and my desktop being disassembled after a move last year, from which I still haven't reassembled (and won't until the basement renovations are done) my playing dropped my playing time, as my frustrations with my old phone browser had soured me from playing on my newer phones and tablet.
After Animated ended, and the Aligned/Prime shows and toys emerged, my fandom went into decline so (for lack of a better term) my needs for this site faded, and the thing that still kept me logging in was HMW. No matter how bleak my view for the current Has/Tak product or direction, HMW was there.
My biggest lament, was that the game was never able to take that step to the next level. Were the aims for V2 too ambitious, as it the lack of higher or technical support that doomed it? Were people turned off by lack of updates or fixes for minor bugs? Would it have been better to embrace the simplicity of the base game and strove to simply maintain that vision with regular updates to missions and alt-modes? The popularity of the other games we have seen has shown that the support for games are there, and even something like a bare-bones phone app (yes I know that would sacrifice page views) could have made a difference, if it had been available before Legends launched.
At the end of the day, Seibertron is your site Ryan, and it is your call what to do with it. I feel very sad that something that truly made your site unique seems (again perceived or real) to have been regulated to your back-burner long ago, and that this result could have been avoided (or at least delayed indefinitely) had more been done to support the back-end before the newer games came on to the scene.
Shut down the game if you will, and my team will roll out one final time into the sunset. I personally thank you for hosting it for as long as you have, and for all the good times that I will attach to it.