If you guys at least had updated the Map Editor through this game life, probably this would not happen

The thing is, it's always a good thing to check in with your players. A fair amount of their decisions haven't exactly been all that good, so if you have a reputation for that you should probably start checking in with your community and stuff. They just kind of ignore the community after we really do try and be nice and reach out so what can you really do if they can't even reply to the threads stating their opinion or view on it? They had a community manager so they could've done that.

As for the reliable source of income, tfm was their main income and still is. They should always try and keep that going and make sure to update and give it enough resources. After that they can give a bit more time into developing the games. Instead they kind of dropped tfm fairly hard and went straight into the games and they all flopped. Multiple flops isn't a good thing and they kept the games up for too long after it was unsuccessful, sapping their resources even more.

They just really need to sit down and communicate with the community because a lot of us are more than willing to help out but they need to tell us what is happening with them and talk to us, and message us at the least so we know they're reading and listening.

Garyforum a dit :

If you guys at least had updated the Map Editor through this game life, probably this would not happen

Inthebin's free space ground suggestion alone could have revived mapmaking and added a ton of new content to the game

Link

Soricfetita a dit :

but! I also think that the game should not be shaped by the will of the players

I completely agree with this.

People with actual good ideas are an awfully small minority, and you can tell by a quick look at any suggestions subforum.

On top of that, the people who suggest things or complain about things are a vocal minority, and their suggestions don't always reflect the interests of most players.

Speaking of players, TFM has a VERY diverse playerbase, with vastly different interests. It's impossible to cater to all of its audience with any given suggestion. And as far as I'm concerned Atelier 801 has done quite a decent job at catering to its apparent main audience/target demographic, which is young casual social players.

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But that's about what they have done right. They could've done a far better job at understanding the needs and interests of the different kinds of players, or their different sub-communities and I've complained about it in the past. And it's a very difficult task to do but I think they did have the resources needed to try at some point. Also being a Flash game doesn't help at all.

For example they couldn't implement a better way to register the finishing time for a map so we ended up with the competitive scene being permanently ping-based for 9 years, and we still have people who take racing seriously despite of that (and many other things which could've improved their experience).

There were also a lot of updates that no one asked for and that nobody in their respective community cared about. Speaking of racing you have the "rounds" system in which you "win the match" after scoring the most points during 10 rounds. The reality is that nobody in the racing community cares about rounds, or matches, or points. The game is all about getting the cheese first, skill and speed. That's only one of the many updates which show how little they understand their own game, minigames, and their players. I'm not even a fan of racing but even I can tell that much, how comes the devs couldn't?

The same goes for vanilla, bootcamp, or any other official minigame for that matter. And of course Transformice as a whole is filled with these little things that could have made the game better overall for most players but didn't happen, and things that most people don't care about but are still there.

The shaman community as someone pointed out was also kinda screwed, first with the skills and then with consumables. Shamaning is in many ways the heart of TFM and what makes the game stand out. But the game never expanded on the concept of building, instead it went sort of backwards, "build less save more mice".

If you see me in vanilla these days, all I do is troll. I literally go full survivor or surprise-invisible-plank every single time it's my turn to sham. I just don't enjoy it anymore, and having a laugh at mice dying is my only source of entertainment in the shaman game at this point. Also transforming into a cat, which is probably my favorite shaman skill to be honest and it doesn't ruin the experience.

And of course I'm just another player and all of my complaints and praises for this game are just part of my own point of view and they may not represent most of the players. But I'm pretty sure there's a lot of issues to be addressed for each individual sub-community or every different kind of player, and some of them surely feel like they've never been heard and their issues never addressed. My point here is that there is no single "big mistake" the company has done, there is no single issue or single solution to all problems. The game would not be better just by listening to every suggestion thread. There are lots of different communities and players and each of them has their own suggestions and complaints that would need to be heard individually. Otherwise we would end up with clothes in bootcamp, consumables in racing or free fraises for everyone. They can't just listen to any player, instead they should listen to individual communities and understand how their game is played.

This is definitely a shame and even though a lot of us are playing the blame game right now, all we can really do as a community is look forward and hope to see a difference. A lot of the people here are throwing out different accusations and why they think the game went bad but if we're being honest, the time was going to come eventually as the game is 9 years old and the foundations of which the game was built on (flash) has been predictably dying for the last few years now.

I don't think any of us can deny that the reason why this game has lasted for so long is because it is different and in a way, more special than the other games in the market right now due to numerous reasons. Don't listen to the players who are trying to tell you how to run your game because running a game and on top of that, a business isn't something that you can be told how to do, but something you have to learn to do and making a successful game last is something that very rarely is ever done. Do I wish some things happened differently? Of course but the only way to improve as game developers is to test the waters and experiment, even if some people disagree with the decision.

I want to extend on that idea that this game is special. Have you as developers thought about recreating the game in HTML5 to get the finances that you require to keep the company going? I am not talking about copying the entire game and then simply changing the code to HTML but actually taking the time to evolve the game where the foundations are still there (grabbing the cheese and avoiding obstacles) but build on top of that with better additions such as DLC's with numerous possibilities, one possibility are events that have story-driven narrative that can last several hours. A lot of players are still playing Transformice and not your other games for a reason, not that your other games weren't good but there will always be something special about Transformice and I think making it better even if its only for the next few years to recover as a company, is worth doing.

At the very least even if you discard the rest of what I said, I think the main problem for people is the lack of interaction between us, the community and the administrators. I think Discord was a huge jump in the right direction because it shows that you are humans behind the red usernames but I think you can do more. I have never seen an admin besides streaxx comment on the forum, the forum is here for a reason, talk to us, start local discussion threads, look at how your community is doing and reacting and interact with them. It also doesn't hurt to log on in-game every once in a while, maybe plan a date with your moderators and some funcorp and have fun in a funcorp room with your playerbase.

Good luck. I look forward to the future with some hope for Atelier801 and I hope to see the administrators not as some distant game developers but as common game lovers, talking and interacting with the rest of us.

Grim; You told them don't listen to us, and then suggested the problem is exactly what we said. No one has stopped playing tfm because of its age or because of flash, and you can't deny that it makes no sense to completely disregard your only successful game while developing the new ones. Valve didn't stop updating dota and csgo to work on their VR launch.

I can't agree enough however that this game is special. I've custom built a 4000$ pc and yet I still come back to this game quite a bit. I just wish I'd be given a reason to stay again.

i just wanna say that if yall close the games you don't even update or are letting die (like nekodancer and bouboum), you could save a lot of money per month, as i'm guessing you are spending quite a lot of money to keep all the games open-- and games people don't even play.

keep your energy on transformice and transformice adventures as those seem to be your best games so far. what really made the company struggle was deadmaze, and y'all lost a lot of money for a game that died hard, i personally don't think it was worth it.

either way, i wish the company good luck, and hopefully y'all can raise from the ashes like a phoenix.