Afterwind, a story of missed opportunities

Greetings Helly here, tomorrow, on the 29th of September I am going to write a post about atwar in a abstract manner. This post will talk about what I believe made atwar so popular, why it declined, and what I believe we need to do in order to fix some of the issues we face today. Please I ask moderators to allow an honest discussion about what we can do for the future of atwar if it is to survive. I ask that you remove trolls and shit posters so we may have a serious discussion. I am writing this before hand as a disclaimer to the mods so if they have any problems with my future post to contact me so I may change it to comply with their standards, thank you.


I am going to focus on the first few parts what made this game so exceptional for me, then later on ill explain what I think could make it better, and what issues I believe are hurting our community the worst.





It was 2011 on Christmas break, I was apart of another community known as conqueror! http://www.conquerorgame.com/index2.php. A group of friends logged on and told us about another strategy game they found called afterwind, they boasted about how unique it was for a browser game and told a bunch of us to give it a try. So on December 9th 2011 I made my first guest account and hopped into a game, I picked south Africa because I was afraid of the other players and wanted to be able to expand and gain land. I immediately relised how large the atwar world map felt with so many player fighting for map supremacy, it felt bombastic and large, and full of opportunities to gain power to compete with the other players.

For me the opening presentation for this game was amazing, id never felt like I had so many opportunities for strategy before in a strategy game, best of all every player was another person competing so the maps felt dynamic and ever changing. Fast forward to may of 2012 and after casually coming back over the last few months I decided to make an account so my progress would save, and thus HellRaiserX666X was born and my career on atwar began.

Now I wasn't the best player ever, infact I flat out stunk at this game, my strategy was basically to be as annoying as possible and hope I could ally fag my way to survival, this did not work so well because most of the time people would decide to kill me immediately and if not I would of annoyed them into back stabbing me, you see I trolled because I was to poor at the game to be recognized for my skill. After a summer of playing like this I was approached by a player known as forever alone. He asked me if I wanted to join his clan he was rebuilding after a former leader known as bonker2 had purged the clan of its members, he told me I was rough around the edges but I had some unique ideas on game play and he thought id make a good addition to the clan, aswell he thought I was funny and liked my style. I decided id give it a shot, I was getting tired of being gang banged and raped by better players and I thought a clan could help me live longer in games. So I joined Stalins Martians as a rank four at Forever Alones request.

To summarize afterwind sucked me in with its unique approach to risk style province capturing and multiplayer play. I stayed because I enjoyed the interactions with other players while trying to gain superiority in each map. The politics and conversations where a key point to my enjoyment of the game.






Now its around march of 2013, iv met many people in stalins martians, Myself, Vdog, Dbacks, BertanK, Dburris, Snackwels, and many other members had begun clan warring and training to compete and win. Day in and day out we would clan war and and inner 3v3 learning new expansions and discovering new tactics to gain an advantage in combat. This was probably the most compelling time for me in atwar, it felt like we where all working twards a common goal greater then ourselves, pulling each other up and working twards being the best we could. I had never had an experience like this in a online game before, this made me extremely happy I had the group of people I did around me, they where so talented at afterwind and this made me want to get better and better myself.

So to summarize atwar had a plethora of first time experiences I had never been apart of before in any game prior, it gave me a sense of accomplishment id never felt before. This led me to come back time and time again to find my friends waiting for me, so we could continue our quest for 1st place.





As time went on, things became less and less amazing as time and time again we would do the same things over and over, couple that with the fact my good friends for years where also getting tired with the game and moving on. I believe this could of been avoided with proper meta evolution and new features to keep game play from stagnating, never the less around this time 2014-2015 I decided to liven things up for myself, I started making maps so I could invent the experiences I craved and missed so much from my first few years. So I took a break from competitive and focused on teaching myself to make maps, ofcourse just like when I found this game I was god aweful at it, but I kept on trying and so my first map was finally released, Hells Fallout World, https://atwar-game.com/map/?id=3452 . And so yah I was aweful but I had joined a small group of people who could actually call themselves map makers, and map after map I got better and better at it. The point being is this game me a new goal and hours and hours, days and days, Months and months, of new goals to work twards lengthening my time on atwar and keeping me interested.

So for me afterwind got me hooked with its unique gameplay and opportunities for political intrigue with real people, It kept me interested with its clan based competition and the friendships and skills I gained the harder I worked twards becoming the best, and finally I kept myself busy in my free time making maps, combining those three aspects kept the game interesting for years and years on end for me.




That's it for today tomorrow I will continue with what I believe is holding atwar back and what we can do to fix it, I need some more time to think about how I want to write these next few parts so bare with me sorry for the delay!