Cause and effect

Wake

Hi.
I wanted to train a bit with Visio on Ishigawa's cause and effect fishbone diagram.
So, I picked up NS2 ;-)

The effect I named is "New players quit" (wich is different than Reg players quit).

matso

Mmm... "The Bounce And The Leak" is the terms I use for new player bouncing off after trying and experienced players quitting, respectively.

Nice to notice that you did not bring up performance.

Things are improving.

IronHorse

Frustration and Complexity being the two large ones.. Nice summation.

Complexity can hopefully be resolved by the new tutorials, and frustration by proper Rookie gating.

SantaClaws

Is game classification really a factor for people leaving? I'd imagine this is one of the things that attracts people the most. I think it was in my case at least.

I get that the high skill impact is off-putting, and perhaps the confusion of "which do I focus on", but that hardly has anything to do with the classification does it? I mean, I could imagine an RTS+FPS hybrid that was overly simplistic - and similarly I could imagine an overly complex FPS.

Wake

SantaClaws wrote: »

Is game classification really a factor for people leaving? I'd imagine this is one of the things that attracts people the most. I think it was in my case at least.

Right, my case too

SantaClaws wrote: »

I get that the high skill impact is off-putting, and perhaps the confusion of "which do I focus on", but that hardly has anything to do with the classification does it? I mean, I could imagine an RTS+FPS hybrid that was overly simplistic - and similarly I could imagine an overly complex FPS.

You get my drift.

I didn't really know under wich category to put this and I'm not really happy with this one.
Ishigawa's fishbone has methods (the 5 why) and is a collective work ;-)

My intention was to illustrate that it is a very useful method and synthetic representation.
It does a great deal helping to focus on BIG picture and avoid sunking in details.

zolja

That's overly complex. Try this:

Game Not Fun -> Players Quit

Simple.

d0ped0g

Skill segregation is the key thing that was always needed to address most of this. Frustration - solved by not being stomped by experienced players. Complexity - mitigated by having a space to mess around with the game's features and learn/discover things at your own pace rather than being thrust into a high-level pub game and be expected to immediately learn and play by the established meta.

I really don't think anything about commanders, or the RTS side of things, the asymmetry, "advanced" techniques (e.g. walljumping, fade movement), knowing how to survive with higher lifeforms or even how to avoid damage as skulk rather than being instantly shot to death all the time every time - none of that really matters to a rookie in a 100% rookie freeforall shitfest.

The issue is, the longer things go on without separating the communities, the less players there are, the less viable implementing matchmaking or even rookie servers. We have probably long passed the point of no return for these things. The game would require a fairly highly publicised relaunch (which would need a reason to do so - e.g. F2P, or an unprecedented amount of new features) with sales and shit to go with it to get the playerbase to a level where we could implement these things and thus reap the benefits of the retention it would accommodate.