Focus on fun, information and suggestion
HellwireD
Join Date: 2015-01-18 Member: 200904Members
Join Date: 2015-01-18 Member: 200904Members
The implementation of restrictions is the easy way out, avoid it.
Picking this one as an example:
https://trello.com/c/omeldgkh/765-block-rookies-from-cc
Instead, inform that assuming the commander position as a rookie is rather challenging.
If a rookie attempts to command, the following two events are triggered:
Game start is delayed by 10-30 sec.
The team with the rookie comm receives a message indicating why it is advised to panic.
It is then up to the team whether they want to give it a try or eject. They could have agreed to allow a rookie comm. And of course the rookie may exit the commander position on his own during that time.
This allows for all scenarios to work while simply restricting access to the commander position will cause issues during sales with servers that have mostly rookies on.
As a general rule of thumb, if you want to retain players, stop thinking in restrictions. It's hard but you can do it if you try.
Since UWE has always excelled at removing fun from the game, the CDT would do good to turn that wheel backwards again. If something is fun or hilarious, it needs to be in the game. Rookies having fun will stay no matter how much there is to learn.
Try keeping that in mind when reworking babblers. Make them useful, make them fun.
This applies to every consideration about NS2.
Picking this one as an example:
https://trello.com/c/omeldgkh/765-block-rookies-from-cc
Instead, inform that assuming the commander position as a rookie is rather challenging.
If a rookie attempts to command, the following two events are triggered:
Game start is delayed by 10-30 sec.
The team with the rookie comm receives a message indicating why it is advised to panic.
It is then up to the team whether they want to give it a try or eject. They could have agreed to allow a rookie comm. And of course the rookie may exit the commander position on his own during that time.
This allows for all scenarios to work while simply restricting access to the commander position will cause issues during sales with servers that have mostly rookies on.
As a general rule of thumb, if you want to retain players, stop thinking in restrictions. It's hard but you can do it if you try.
Since UWE has always excelled at removing fun from the game, the CDT would do good to turn that wheel backwards again. If something is fun or hilarious, it needs to be in the game. Rookies having fun will stay no matter how much there is to learn.
Try keeping that in mind when reworking babblers. Make them useful, make them fun.
This applies to every consideration about NS2.
Comments
Im sold!
A player that leaves NS2 before he's out of rookie mode (only 4hours) wasn't worth it anyway.
Rookie commanders are mostly not fun at all. I agree however to avoid other restrictions, but I don't see CDT aiming for other restrictions.
Anyway. Hopped in the comm chair. No complaints and had one of the most interesting runs. Literally not one communication the entire game. Shells first. RTS. Kept my tree low. Literally everybody just knew what they needed to do and did it.
A true green comm can definitely ruin a game faster than anything else though...
Teaching them how to drop structures is such a pain
Learning to command is not hard, just by having a mic and using it helps a lot if your new to commanding, you may be surprised by how many that would be willing to help.
Steam sale. Rookies buy game. Group of friends (rookies) start a server (or go on one of the many rookie only server). Or there are only greens on a server (happens regularly). Nobody of them can command. And now?
You don't convince new players to stay with NS2 by telling them that they arbitrarily can't do half of the game. What if someone leaves but would have stayed if (s)he saw the RTS comm mode and got interested, seeing that NS2 is more than a convoluted FPS?
The amount of games actually ruined by greens is minimal, the greens themselves don't even notice at that stage, and the rest eject like they have it bound to mouse1 anyways. No need to fix a problem that barely exists just to make NS2 even more inaccessible to new players and possibly put them off the game.
TLDR: think of the rookies, not yourselves.
The rookie has totally nothing lost in the comm chair. He does not know the maps, the structures, the upgrades, the strategies, the teamplay, the goals, the weakness and strengths etc. If he wants to learn how to comm, there is a sandbox and vs.-bots. mode.
Also this trello card is overlapping with: https://trello.com/c/BvQL7Qda/758-improve-rookie-system where the whole rookie system is revamped. Rookie only servers (where they can comm all they want), mixed servers and No Rockie Servers.
The first thing a player in NS2 will notice is that he dies extremely fast. This due to the high damage output/hit point ratio of most attacks in NS2 combined with the delay of lag compensation and low server rates. New players have to adjust to this and realise: "That skulk at the other side of the room is in fact closer than it seems, I have to dodge now or die".
The game ending the moment the last CC/Hive dies is not intuitive. Most games end by having the whole enemy team wiped and their whole base destroyed anyway. But that's not all there is to it. To prevent Hive/CC ruses from being too effective, the spawn rate in NS2 is higher than in any other FPS I know. This leads to people getting spawnkilled several times before a match is lost. For a new player, this is an extemly negative experience.
The tech tree in NS2 is utterly random and illogical. The first thing a new commander will want to build will be sentries for base defence. Don't ask me why but it happens in every RTS, new players love to build bases and turtle. Sentries are hard/impossible to place right (you always need marines to protect them) cost a lot of res and have the requirements of robo factory and a sentry battery. I dont want to hear about the balance requiring sentries to be the way they are. My point is that they are extremly unintuitive and ineffective - i spotted the term "noob trap" on the forums.
Finally the resmodel is as unintuitive as it can get. With only one type of resources to be collected, one might think this is straightforward. Nope. The strange divide between the resource income from RTs into TRES and PRES is hard to grasp. While both come from the same source, they are strictly seperated from each other. Again, I don't want to discuss the neccesities and merits of having this divide. My point is, that it is unintuitive. Having the resource income split up is regarded as a neccesary thing to make the game work - i like to say "It feels gamey". Because of this feeling, people try to exploit this systems weaknesses as much as possible - Onos egg, commander pres, fade explosions...
The intuitive way to regard resources would be that every last resource counts. There should not be freebies.
A situation, where one player has 50 resources his team would direly need (for example reslock) should not occur - he can only buy a new weapon/lifeform he might not even want. As long as PRES and TRES are displayed in the same currency, this divide is hard to accept for new players.
Also this has not much to do with the topic.
I know this from Starcraft where newbs tended to start with the first building in the list, an initially useless upgrade/air defense structure.
Switching structure places in GUI in the "real order" (extractor, armory, obs, armslab, IP, rest) might help.
The other 1% is a) they know what sentries are going to do, unlike everything else, and b) the concept that players are required to defend a base is alien to most people. Though I was surprised to see barely any whips during the last green wave (but those aren't the first structures in the list).
Intuitiveness has to do with fun. People have fun building clog phalluses because the mechanic is so intutive. They are easy to place, it looks good and it is easy to understand the concept behind it.
But so many important things are not intutive and not fun. Just thought about another example: welding. Welders are cheap as hell, so everyone should carry one. For the sake of balance, it takes ages to repair a building or someones armor if you are welding alone. The real pain about welding (especially rookies) is, that people keep running away from the welder. This is partly due to the lack of communication but also due to the lagcompensation/server tick rate delay between realities of players.
It would be more intutive if welders had bigger range and did less (or no) damage to alien lifeforms. Since this is not a typical welder it could behave like a nano beam gun, imagine TF2 medic gun (lesser range though).
But I want my welder Onos kill :-(
But you are probably right, many elements of the game isn't intuitive unless you came from NS1 OR have read my ePaper manual :P
Part of this is the game has 3 core themes : RTS - FPS - MOBA, and new players don't realize how much complexity is in this game.
if it's two green sides squaring off, then rookie comms is OK. if it's two experienced sides squaring off, the rookie is dead weight on the side as it is. when they're in the comm chair, it's the single biggest nerf you could have, even moreso than a completely deflected gorge rush.
God, i have enough issues with non-rookie comms that forget to take res/forget to drop drifters. Alien comm is not rocket science. Be a greedy little bitch with res, support with a few drifter abilities, and keep your t-res low via upgrades and biomass. crags if you gotta, echo for some fun etc etc. Hop out of the hive to defend via tunnel or base... not rocket science.
And when you don't do it after the 5th reminder... that just aggravates me... what the hell are you doing instead? there's not that much to do.
But if it's a typical game of regulars and this person just jumped in and wasted everyone's time, it's not cool or fun for anyone.. including that rookie who gets yelled at.
I believe the only way forward is an enforced tutorial, then Rookie Only servers that you would be relegated to until you completed other tutorials that ease that learning curve cliff.
It's the only way to foster new players enough to retain them, slowly teaching them while also providing incentives to continue learning - preventing stomps and rookie commanders simultaneously.
If only there was some community driven group that recognized this problem and could act on it...
I may never understand why the much abused "rookie-friendly" tagging of servers still exists now. I literally saw a veteran player say in a server yesterday "Rookie Friendly does not mean Rookie Only" after a round. This was literally being said 2 years ago! Why is it still happening?
I will even reference one of my old posts 8 months ago where I suggest a simple replacement [Casual] or [Competitive] tagging option for server owners, rather than what has become the useless and misleading "Rookie Friendly".
http://forums.unknownworlds.com/discussion/comment/2199963/#Comment_2199963
Probably because it doesn't mean "Rookie Only"?
The idea of rookie only servers is a joke. The blind can't lead the blind. But really that's not even the problem. I know plenty of veteran players who are more than willing to help rookies understand the game. The problem is that all to often the rookies have no interest in learning, or they take any help as an insult to their intelligence and lash out.
I frequently see rookies stack the same team despite the whole server practically begging them to split up. I see them hop into the chair and not say a word about needing help (not to mention ignoring advice) and then suddenly find their voice once the eject vote starts to go out, and even then it's only to insult people for daring to eject them. And then, like I said, I see them get angry at the veterans who try to help them.
There's only so much anyone can do before they get fed up.
All that being said, rookie only servers will do nothing but make the same problems occur when these players move off of the rookie servers after their thirty hours or whatever. You don't learn anything by someone who knows as little as you do.
There's also the bigger problem: who is going to host them? In my experience, there aren't that many rookies on at any given time unless a sale is going on. So there's a chance that a server will sit empty a lot of the time, and very few people join an empty server. I just think it's a difficult sell towards admins who like seeing their servers full. I mean, I can think of one or two communities that may do it, but I guess we'll see.
To avoid such Situation i recommend to any admin using NS2+ and the Shine Administration plugin PreGame. Simply set a countdown in the plugin (im using here 30sec), so People have enough time to eject the commander before the game starts. NS2+ helps identifying rookies in commchair. This works in almost every sitiuation and so we can sometimes play with two rookie commander if both teams agreed.
An easy way to be free of any restricitions. If someone wants to know more about the settings, feel free to ask me
Similarly forced tutorials don't tend to work. What's the first thing you want to do when you get a new game? Jump in and play. And NS2 is multiplayer, so that means playing with others. There's a reason the RTFM acronym exists, because nobody does.
The problem as it has always been is that NS2 is like chess -- easy to learn, hard to master. The only thing we need to do to keep players is ensure they have fun. Just like any other game. And unfortunately, that's 90% down to the community. It's not fun for newbs when they get abused by experienced players, or forced out of comm chairs.
And the truth is the onus is on the experienced players to be patient and help, not for greens to magically absorb years of experience in an hour. Or don't do this, and watch them leave. So, swallow your need to win for a few games during the sales and be a patient mentor, or have even less people to play with in a year's time. It really is down to everyone reading this to put the greens first above themselves when you play with them. If you're someone who likes to stomp*, well... you're a dick.
* (lets be clear -- even if greens stack one side, it doesn't mean you have to butt-rape them. Just go easy.)
huehueuhe
"similarly forced tutorials don't tend to work"
Yes they do, observe Chivalry or Nosgoth or many others. Simple, quick, big picture forced tutorials work. I don't know where you think they do not.
What we know doesn't work: Optional tutorials and videos that you can skip, barreling into an NS2 game asking everyone questions and getting steam rolled with a confused and frustrated mindset.
"The idea of rookie only servers is a joke. The blind can't lead the blind."
Yes.. yes they can, and they do - in most games that are released. Between modern matchmaking being in most games and any spam fest battlefield game.
Your player retention sky rockets when you aren't getting stomped, unable to learn the very basics of a game. Look at the negative reviews for NS2 on steam over the past years.. its a very common theme and it is very understandable. It is the sole reason why people have screamed for years for matchmaking in this game and why it is the standard for others. Let me stress this point: A rookie learns NOTHING in their first hour of playing when they die instantly to a shotgun around a corner, every round. They aren't getting better from this experience - it's just putting a sour taste in their mouth.
Your comment is also ignoring the details: Besides just being able to fumble around and learn the basics on their own, they will have to pass advanced tutorials which LEAD THEM and teach them so that it is not just the blind leading the blind forever. It will be at their pace, too; when the individual is no longer challenged playing with a couple of rookies and some bots with commander AI, (this is how you solve the issue of too few rookies, not that that would be a problem since we could just have another free to play weekend..) then they can complete the necessary tutorials to learn how to play with the others, so that they aren't just a lemming when they join the big boy servers like you forecast.
What we know doesn't work: Rookie Friendly tag, the lack of fostering a safe learning environment and actually teaching rookies, all while providing incentives to do so.
I'm hours past rookie status but I am still not that great and there are likely people with half the hours that I have that could and do kick my backside. There's only so much you can learn from a tutorial, I have learnt far more about the actual gameplay from having commanders who put the effort in to help and order people about (it is appreciated), being with team members who know what they are doing so I can learn from them and also I learnt from watching the gameplay on the NS2HD channel on youtube. I agree with the blind leading the blind comment above, joining on a server full of marines blindly running out of base on their own all the time is going to severely limit your learning. Also, I think Marines that don't know what they are doing are at a larger disadvantage than Aliens that don't know what they are doing. Marines are the "go to" team for rookies, so that in itself will put people off.
That said, the steep learning curve is something that I enjoy about the game and I wouldn't ever want to see that watered down for "accessibility". Overcoming something difficult is not an invalid source of enjoyment plus I believe the difficulty keeps people long term interested in the game and there are quite a few people with huge numbers of played hours.
Can I have a trainer badge to show ppl I am willing to teach them?
There's some ways like creating a means to simply click on a player's name and say you were helpful, and with enough of these you get rewards (badges, skins etc)
Nothing is decided on at this time, in regards to rewarding such players - just kicking ideas around as we recognize where improvements are needed..
Something that really interests me :
http://www.engadget.com/2015/02/09/valve-opens-steam-item-trading/