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Setting a Learning Curve In MMOs
Posted by
Soulskill
on Tue Jan 06, 2009 04:01 AM
from the approach-rat-kill-rat-loot-rat dept.
from the approach-rat-kill-rat-loot-rat dept.
Ten Ton Hammer has an article looking at the learning curves of modern MMOs. Many of the more popular games, such as World of Warcraft, go to great lengths to make learning the game easy for new players. Others, such as EVE Online, have had success with a less forgiving introduction. But to what extent do the most fundamental game mechanics limit the more complex end-game play?
"The current trend in MMOG's appears to be make the game so easy and interest-grabbing right out of the gate that even a person with the attention span of a monkey chewing on a flyswatter will be able to keep up and get into the swing of things. Depth of game mechanics is still possible with a system like this, but it needs to be introduced not only clearly, but later in the game, after a player has played enough to be hooked and is willing to put in some extra time to learn about the more intricate game mechanics available to them."
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Link to results of a similar study (Score:5, Informative)
Eve Learning Curve (Score:5, Funny)
I tried Eve... (Score:5, Interesting)
And didn't make it past the tutorial. It was long, boring and suffered from information overload. Couldn't be bothered with it all really. Also not a big fan of games that are 'ruled' by super guilds.
I think the problem isn't so much the learning curve as giving players the motivation and chance to learn. Take WoW, you're eased into skills, the early instances don't require you to be especially knowledgable of what spec you should be for your role (as at that stage there's little variation in talents and equiptment). These instances even teach you the basics about how to group (not to N on stuff you can't use or gems, how to avoid wipes etc.) FFXI lets you solo for about 8 levels before it gets into the forced grouping, there's a relatively early quest that forces you to tour the major cities.
There's nothing wrong with having complex MMOs but you've got to ease them into the various aspects of it one stage at a time. Even simple play mechanics can suffer if everything is forced on you at once. To use WoW again as an example, one of the critisisms of the new Death Knight class is that as you're given one at lv.55, you haven't been levelling with the class but have a huge number of abilities and loads of talent points. As people haven't learnt the class in that way, it can be surprisingly difficult to play it properly and people may not realise they've bad specs or itemisation until it's pointed out to them.
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You Tried Eve? Which One? (Score:2)
In all fairness though, that tutorial is a good introduction to the game - if you don't get along with it, you won't enjoy EVE.
The problem with the tutorial is that it introduces you superficially (there can be no other way, actually) to all the games that are Eve. You sign up to be a combat pilot and the tutorial still teaches you about manufacturing and mining and trade and legume farming and whatever the hell else you can do in Eve (and there is *a lot* you can do). And because the tutorial touches on
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"And I'd hardly call Eve a major success... I'd agree, the Eve intro was horrible and put me off, another customer lost."
EVE is a major success. It's currently behind only WOW in the US/EU amongst full subscription MMORPGs. That is a distant second, but look at all the WOW clones the market's ONLY skills based non level based, non static class MMO is ahead of!
EVE has in excess of 300,000 subscribers and this past weekend set a new concurrent player record of 45,000. That is even more amazing when you rea
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If they only cared about dedicated, hardcore players they wouldn't go to great lengths to make the game as pretty as possible.
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Eve isn't designed for casual, rubbish players. In fact, if they got 500,000 casual, rubbish players, they'd simply be driven off by Eve's more unsavory elements in a matter of months anyway.
Eve isn't a hack-and-slash for morons; it's actually designed from the ground up to be tough. And it's designed for tough people - people who are tough mentally and who are tough emotionally.
CCP has enough challenges scaling Eve with the playerbase as it is. With it growing slowly and steadily, CCP is able to develop an
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Uhh, cutting edge in graphics? I'm going to let you guys fight this out and go back to my shooters...
Re:I tried Eve... (Score:4, Insightful)
So WoWbabies can go play their little kiddie game all they like.
No worries. We'll be off enjoying other games while you fiddle with your MMO spreadsheet thinking it makes you somehow better than "the rest". This is a surprisingly common Eve attitude. Whereas, for the rest of us, Eve is rather transparent. The only reason there's a learning curve at all is that it's intentionally obtuse.
Saying Eve is for the intelligent is like making a VCR without a manual and no button labels and claiming intellect had anything to do with the trial and error it took to see which button does what. Perseverance, would be the word you're looking for, not intellect.
I should point out, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with Eve (I have an over four year old character there myself). It is what CCP wanted it to be, a sandbox where the players create the game around themselves. But claiming Eve is some kind of "high IQ version of an MMO" is indicative of self esteem issues, not intellect.
Parent
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I agree with you whole heartedly.
I've just stopped playing recently with characters that are fairly old. I got a bit bored with the whole idea, the in-fighting, etc. That's just me.
Sure, I've flown in 500 strong fleets against BoB. Was fun at the time, but I'm looking for something that's going to be fun all the time.
It takes all kinds to for different MMOs, saying one is superior (or requires an higher IQ) is like saying that strawberry ice cream is superior to chocolate.
I moved on, found some fun in LOTRO
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Several years ago, i played EVE for a year (my first MMORPG).
Went through the whole learning the game, joined a corp, mined my way into 2x Battleships, went to zero space and participated in PvP battles, made loads of ISK (EVE currency) playing the inefficiencies of the market for Tech 2 components ...
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Missions are just there to make money. The content of the game is the player vs player interactions, be it combat, trade, diplomacy or whatever.
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Actually, if players were fairly evenly dispersed, Eve could handle 500,000 players without a problem. Based on personal experience, with a fairly even distribution of players among all available systems (about 5200), Eve would do alright until it hit around 1.5 million players. At that point, every system would begin to experience some lag, and getting any kind of large-scale battles off the ground would be painful at best.
Regarding the graphics issue, that comes down to individuals' computers. Playing wit
Re:I tried Eve... (Score:4, Funny)
Suddenly, it all becomes clear: the economic crisis was actually caused by EVE rejects who, having no outlet, decided to re-enact the game with the real stock market.
Parent
Re:I tried Eve... (Score:5, Interesting)
Something you wouldn't understand without having played it for a long time is that Eve actually does ease you into it.
It has so much depth that if it eased you in at the kind of rate you're looking for, you'd still be learning basic mechanics when you've been playing for 2 years. It's a very unforgiving world in which you can experience loss like in no other game I've ever played, right down to the skills you've spent so much (real life) time training. It's a game where success or failure can depend on how quickly you can adapt to a radically changing environment with a vast array of competing counter-measures and strategies. Gaining a deep understanding of how everything stacks together and how to counter all kinds of various tactics and tools on the fly requires that you learn at an incredible rate constantly. And just when you think you're getting the hang of it, a new expansion comes out (at the rate of two per year) that vastly changes the balance of things such that new tactics and ideas emerge.
Really, if you don't make it through the tutorial, Eve probably isn't the game for you. That's fine, as no game should try to be perfect for everyone as it will end up being poor for anyone. Eve is really for those who want to be constantly challenged in new and different ways by intelligent adversaries using skills and tools that work together in extremely complex ways. It has within it the ability to play as openly as any life simulator, but with far more danger than anything else I've seen before it.
If the challenge of the tutorial turns you off, then the game itself will almost certainly turn you off as well. In that sense, I think the tutorial does a great job of both educating those who truly are interested in Eve's world view and in pushing away those who ultimately won't enjoy themselves anyway.
Parent
Re:I tried Eve... (Score:4, Insightful)
In particular, your second and third paragraph is typical of the response given by people when asked why they play EVE - the problem is, all of this interesting and exciting content doesn't seem to be represented at all in the tutorial.
Instead the tutorial seems to mostly just cover simple game mechanics (and often in a very poor way - does the game direct you about how to actually get back to the newbie zone if you leave it yet? That seemed to be the most mystifying thing to most people when I checked EVE out) and then dumps you with vast amounts of text-based information describing all the systems that weren't actually addressed in the tutorial.
While you may argue that this is good because it weeds out the weak people, it has the issue that a player checking it out for the trial will probably completely fail to notice all this wonderful complexity as it can look like just poor implementation unless there's someone supplementing the tutorial and encouraging you to persevere - which seems to be almost the definition of a poorly designed new user experience.
Parent
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The interface as a whole doesn't lend itself to being intuitive so much as it lends itself to being highly available for quick access to an enormous amount of stuff on a moment's notice (particularly useful when you're under siege by a half dozen people and you're trying to wiggle your way out of it). The tutorial is really there as an introduction to the basic mechanics simply because there's no other way to learn them. While people in the "newbie" chat are extremely helpful for specific questions, asking
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To clarify the newbie zone issue I mentioned (I did a bit of research to jog my memory, it's the "Deadspace training co
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The idea seems to reduce to the claim
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The one thing they really do need to change about the tutorial is the invention step - when you have to make a character named "Villiard Wheels" that you can link to in rookie chat, whose bio page has a step by step instruction list to be able to do that part of the tutorial, then it's too advanced at that stage of the game.
While you can get use to it pretty quickly, the invention/research/manufacturing system can be a little daunting at first, especially if you've only been playing for an hour or so and al
Re:I tried Eve... (Score:4, Insightful)
Something you wouldn't understand without having played it for a long time is that Eve actually does ease you into it.
So basically, you have to have played it for a long time to really understand the tutorial? Yeah, I know that's not what you meant, but it's still effectively what you're saying. Either way, the tutorial sucks. Period.
It has so much depth that if it eased you in at the kind of rate you're looking for, you'd still be learning basic mechanics when you've been playing for 2 years. It's a very unforgiving world in which you can experience loss like in no other game I've ever played, right down to the skills you've spent so much (real life) time training. It's a game where success or failure can depend on how quickly you can adapt to a radically changing environment with a vast array of competing counter-measures and strategies. Gaining a deep understanding of how everything stacks together and how to counter all kinds of various tactics and tools on the fly requires that you learn at an incredible rate constantly. And just when you think you're getting the hang of it, a new expansion comes out (at the rate of two per year) that vastly changes the balance of things such that new tactics and ideas emerge.
Not really "depth". Mostly just complexity and change for the sake of complexity and change. Which is great, for the small niche group of people that really get off on that kind of thing.
Really, if you don't make it through the tutorial, Eve probably isn't the game for you.
No doubt. But then, that means Eve just isn't for very many people, which means their ROI for the game is a lot less than it could have been. Which is basically the whole point of TFA. Sucks for them, but it doesn't really matter to me one way or another. There's plenty of other better MMOs to play.
That's fine, as no game should try to be perfect for everyone as it will end up being poor for anyone. Eve is really for those who want to be constantly challenged in new and different ways by intelligent adversaries using skills and tools that work together in extremely complex ways. It has within it the ability to play as openly as any life simulator, but with far more danger than anything else I've seen before it.
You're right, there's definitely not going to be a game that's going to be perfect for everyone, but it's definitely possible to make a game that's a lot more fun and appealing to a lot more people than Eve is. (There's about 11.5 million WoW players right now who could give you some insight on that.) And it's also possible to change the first stages of *any* game to make it a lot more fun and appealing to newcomers, enticing them to stay on and thereby increasing your playerbase without changing a damn thing in the last stages of the game. Eve just fails at it, that's all.
If the challenge of the tutorial turns you off, then the game itself will almost certainly turn you off as well. In that sense, I think the tutorial does a great job of both educating those who truly are interested in Eve's world view and in pushing away those who ultimately won't enjoy themselves anyway.
Not necessarily. Or are you trying to say the rest of the game sucks as badly as the tutorial? Because it's very possible for a tutorial to be very shitty and the game to be a lot more appealing later. For a great example, see City of Heroes/Villains. The game is interesting for about 5 minutes, and quickly becomes very frustrating - until you start getting your better powers and enhancements at about level 20 or so. Then it starts to get fun. LOTS of fun. But not many players stick around that long, because the first 10-15 levels are mostly a lesson in frustration. I'd *HOPE* Eve's failure is mostly the same, only magnified. Because quite honestly, of games I've tried that enjoyed any kind of real popularity, the Eve tutorial was easily the worst 15 minutes I've spent.
Parent
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People like to think Eve takes a degree to understand and they pat themselves on the back for being able to play it. It just takes a little more reading and is a lot less fun than other MMOs. I have gone back
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I find myself in the same boat. I want to like EVE, but for me the endless amounts of travel time to do anything in the game is a huge turnoff. Its the same reason I stopped playing Counter strike as well... too much time spent waiting to play, not enough time actually actively doing something (other than clicking "ok now warp me to the next waypoint so I can watch my ship slowly glide into the warp gate and do all this again 7 more times). And I know there are some kind of waypoint files you can get from p
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The biggest thing about Eve that people I've talked to don't like is that they can't 'fly their ship'. Eve is not a space flight simulator.
The biggest thing about Eve that no other game has is that the vast majority of the 'game' is player generated content, in effect. Nobody talks about how fun it was last night to grind that Guristas Extravaganza mission for the 1000th time. What they talk about is the 500 vs. 500 fleet battle in some system that resulted in 20 lost capital ships for one side or the ot
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It takes all kinds, I guess.
I haven't played Eve, but WoW does NOT represent a good learning curve, at least for me. I played for a few day-long sessions (enough to finish any single-player game on the market, experience shows), and I found myself playing an incredibly boring game where I fought easy enemies until I became strong enough to move to the next area to fight new easy enemies ad infinitum.
I'm told that the game gets interesting when you max out your character. What sort of boring, lifeless person
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Well said, and all true.
I also tried Eve and didn't get past the tutorial. The first big turnoff was finding out that I didn't actually have a character, only a ship. Sorry, space-based games have never really been a favorite of mine, and to play a game as a "ship" just wasn't very appealing. But that aside, it also didn't take me long to realize that I would be spending a LOT of time by myself, and that when I did run into other players, most likely the first thing that would happen is I would get stopped
I'm sick of small curves (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm getting quite sick of games with small learning curves - the ones who's mechanics you can master in less than a month without any special instruction. The ones that become a game of who went deeper into the dungeon for the better armor, who buys the more expensive weapon, who can snap-aim better (which takes skill, but is not a particularly interesting one). Give me something rewarding, where I can be playing a year or two later and still improving my skill. Items are cool, but after a while they don't cut it.
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You know I think I found THE game for you!
Its called 'The Big Blue Room', also known as IRL.
The graphics are absolutely amazing, its completely open ended yet has a finishing goal, amazing how they got that to work.
Its a total challenge, especially when your trying to mix gear upgrades with achievements.
You should try it some time, you might be pleasantly surprised.
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I tried it, but my avatar rolled too many 1s, and they won't give me another :(
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"(Score:-1, Troll)"
Ohh come on! Get a funny bone, or maybe go outside of your parents basement for a change :P
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Re:I'm sick of small curves (Score:5, Insightful)
Learning to code? Learning a musical instrument? Martial arts? Latin dancing? Anything with a 2 year learning code is a hobby (or a job), not a game.
Parent
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The initial curve is small though. Pick up racket, hit ball over net, wait for return. Not exactly rocket science and to get to a reasonable level takes a short amount of time unless you're really not co-ordinated.
Re:I'm sick of small curves (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you're doing it wrong, and here's why. In the interest of full disclosure, I play WoW, Counter-Strike, and QuakeWorld. Also, I can't understand EVE (but I tried).
I'm getting quite sick of games with small learning curves - the ones who's mechanics you can master in less than a month without any special instruction.
Depending on your definition of "mechanics", mastering them should be quite easy in less than a month. For example, one can learn the mechanics of Chess, in a day or so. The rules aren't particularly complicated, but to reach any level of interesting play, it can take years.
My point is that the mechanics *should* be simple. When they're complex, you end up with EVE; and I think there's a general consensus that EVE is impossible for outsiders to comprehend enough to appreciate, let alone play for themselves. I've tried playing it, and my experience is that the game is completely inaccessible to those with anything but a dedicated interest in playing EVE. My guess would be that most EVE players are probably close friends with other EVE players, or they would never have been able to overcome the learning curve (or lack thereof) in the first place.
If you have a chance to watch the Portal "Director's Commentary", they explain precisely how the learning curve was developed for that game, and the rationale behind it based on feedback testing.
The ones that become a game of who went deeper into the dungeon for the better armor, who buys the more expensive weapon, who can snap-aim better (which takes skill, but is not a particularly interesting one).
But not true. At the highest levels of play, all people are geared similarly with armor and weapons, and they can all aim. It's already assumed at being at a high level of play. Competitive WoW players already have their full sets. Competitive Quake players have insanely good aim. That's why, when you reach that level of play, you no longer have to worry about armor or aim. It's built-in. Check out the discussions going on over at the Elitist Jerks [elitistjerks.com] forums for WoW. Or go watch some QuakeWorld videos [qwdrama.com]. Or if you have the patience to setup nQuake, go download it and watch some QuakeWorld demos [challenge-tv.com] .. or Quake3 for that matter.
Sure, you might find cases where the winner is decided by having a super rare WoW-drop, or where someone's lightning gun or rail gun is what wins the match based on exceptionally good aim. But for the most part, it becomes a game of strategy.
MMO's are very big into number-crunching, like the kind you'll find at Elitist Jerks. FPS's are very big into demo watching and strategy. Keep in mind, however, that it's only at very high levels of play that you'll see this.
The good games, in my opinion, are easy enough for anyone to pick up, but complex enough that only the most dedicated can reach the highest levels of play. WoW does this very well. Quake is too inaccessible, and suffers from a lack of players (even bad ones) as a consequence. Counter-strike has a different problem, where the game isn't very good at high levels of play, but it is very accessible. The FPS is difficult to get right in a way that doesn't alienate newbies or pros. EVE is an enigma in the sense that it even survives at all. (Someone feel free to explain this to me.)
Give me something rewarding, where I can be playing a year or two later and still improving my skill. Items are cool, but after a while they don't cut it.
And that's why there's a casual gaming market. You're asking that a game neither be too hard that you can't pick it up nor too easy that it doesn't feel rewarding. You should pick a game that has both a large enough following that skill makes a difference at the end-game stages, while it is accessib
Parent
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I may find the game boring (it really is has nothing to offer to people who PvE), the user-interface to be poorly designed, the combat to be simplistic and a snore
Complexity != Difficulty; It's about teaching. (Score:2, Insightful)
But to what extent do the most fundamental game mechanics limit the more complex end-game play?
None. Follow me here. They're correlating complexity with difficulty and the 2 often do seem to go together, but what complexity really goes with is time it takes to learn. If complexity is broken up into its smallest pieces, the difficulty only comes with unclear presentation, presenting too many pieces at once, or presentation when there is no motivation to learn.
I'm in the education profession and I used to be addicted to MMOs, including a lot of WoW (but luckily got out just before WotlK). Learning
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I agree completely, though I'm the opposite of you. Every intuition I ever had about algebra was wrong. Every. Single. One. And the system isn't designed to give you any concrete applications: the word problems are just reading exercises wrapped around a symbol problem with only one solution.
Geometry, on the other hand, I found to be trivially easy. Likewise linear algebra: that was the only class I've ever been in where every first impression intuition I had was absolutely correct...It was all concrete to
for me its not learning to play (Score:2)
Ultima Online (Score:2)
If you really want your head to explode, try Ultima Online - more than 10 years of updates, events, rule revisions and tweaks gives it one of the scariest learning curves I've seen. If you've never played it before and tackle it without a tutor or guild, even a year into playing you can find yourself still researching commands, mechanics, subsystems, clever house art tricks, long-lost passwords to secret areas and the origins of obscure items.
There's a real sense of accomplishment for "learning stuff", but
Fallout 3 (Score:2)
Star Wars Galaxy of Hurt (Score:2)
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The thing about a good interface is that you don't need those things. WASD is pretty much standard, and iirc WoW also lets you use the number pad and the arrow keys if you prefer.
Attacking things is likewise not rocket science. You just click on an enemy and auto attack kicks in.
Eventually you start wondering about the crap on your hotbar, and click those things, and more stuff happens, and it moves on from there. Very straightforward.
The places where people get lost in MMOs are never in the basic things (e