Tutorials and overcrowded start zones

[YakkoForever]

The new player experience is critical to game success.

often game similar to SB fail at this resulting in having poor launches. There are 4 major problems that I would attribute to these unhappy launches. the first issue it lag and high population density. the second issue is grind heavy starts where you have to do a 1 or 2 of work to get to the actual game. the third issue is players being very rude to others players in the form of griefing. The forth issue is a lack of instruction or tutorial.

1) the issue of lag is a difficult one to address and fix but luckily FB seems to be on top of this issue. I would note that while FB 's solution is very good there are things that can be done to help prevent peoples computers from melting if they have the graphics turned up a bit too high. the first of these things is multiple spawn locations but FB already plan on this. Another thing that can help is getting players to move away from the starting zone quickly. this would be things like giving players ships within 30 minutes of starting or getting them to run to different areas quickly.

2) the second issue of grind can be addressed by avoiding bad leveling systems and heavy gating.

3) the third issue is actually in a pretty good state. Having everyone start in a safe zone really helps mitigate this issue. griefing will still happen but it is pretty much impossible to predict at this point.

4) tutorials are important even in a open world game. good tutorials help the new player get started and helps them learn more about the game. FB actually have already started to add what I think will make a great tutorial system. the job system makes a great vehicle for tutorials. I would give new players a few simple jobs that can earn them enough starting cash to buy a starter ship. the jobs would educational like teaching then how to mine with a pickaxe or how to bolt together a ship frame. ideally these jobs would have trees/paths where you learn a bunch about part of the game like a mining job tree or a building job tree. alos at any point player should be able to leave the job they are on and if they have the money buy a ship and fly off into the sunset.

 

[Mci]

There are missions at the stations to help you get your first ship. These missions double as your tutorial, so it should cover a lot of ground to repair some of your concerns.

 

[Vexus]

First impressions are very important. A new player loading into Starbase, staring at the amalgamation of 99 other robots stationary overlapping each other, everyone with low frame rate, and no clear idea what to do...

would still not hurt the game one bit in the long run. It's too good. The meaning behind every action will drive people to push through even slightly negative first impressions.

But yes, first impressions are important. One way to make sure you have a better initial experience is finding that fine line between too many starting locations, and too few. If 1000 players load in at 100 different stations, no station matters. No start location matters. Just 1 in 100. If there is a single location where players spawn, then it's too few, with 100 robot-butts in your face from the moment you spawn (like in the 15-minute video, when the player respawns and is greeted with the rear-end of another robot). This would hurt frame rate and might impact the experience, although I think as players make any movement and spread out this is not much a concern.

I like having a reasonable number of different start locations. One idea would be different outposts that are themed based on what players will want to do. You would have:

• A Mining Outpost starter station, where players who want to begin mining have access to mining jobs, mining tools, and a few starter-mining-ships as their first ships.
• An Engineering Outpost starter station, where players who want to bolt parts together and create parts-of-things have access to those types of jobs, robot arms and ships tailored a bit more for that style of play.
• A Ship Building Outpost starter station, where players who like to focus on ship building can get jobs for assembling parts into functional ships.
• A Combat Outpost starter station, where players who like to fight can get their hands on weapons, do training missions shooting at targets, and get recruited by factions.
• A Transportation Outpost starter station - maybe this group gets jobs to take minerals from the mining outposts, deliver them to the engineering outpost, take parts from there to the ship building outpost, and then deliver finished ships to the combat outpost.

That's not a full list - there could definitely be more. But some potentially themed way to a) be grouped with like-minded individuals in terms of style of play and b) maintain some kind of network that makes every player's action matter. This would also mean you don't have to teach everyone everything from the very start. Not everyone is going to care about shooting a gun, or mining, or ship building. If they had to waste time in the beginning learning everything they're not interested in, it could be bad. Instead if they got a more tailored approach to what they're interested in, they will be much more willing to pick up details regarding the other game functions on their own time in the future when they feel ready for it.