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Setting a Learning Curve In MMOs
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."
Here you go
"I may be full of crap about this game, and I may be wrong, and that's fine." -Jack Thompson
famous eve learning curve graph
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
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.
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.
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 curves are something I deal with every day (and MMOs used to be =p). It's all a matter of teaching. I'll use WoW as my example.
WoW does a very good job at teaching most of its game, but if you look closely, it doesn't guide players through a few things; for example talent builds and rotations. And this is where it's very easy to see and divide crap players with people that have spent time on forums learning about their class. People on countless sites (like elitist jerks for example) had volumes of arguments, spreadsheets, graphs, etc devoted to these things. Although any high level character can easily get by in almost every aspect of the game, to maximize the potential of a class is something else entirely. As a raid leader or for PvP, there were a number of times where I'd be much more inclined to take people who I knew understood the mechanics over someone whose gear was better. The initial point being, WoW is not simplistic, but it looks that way because they teach many aspects of it well, and they let people get away with being crappy at the other aspects without detriment.
That's not to say it couldn't be more complex. But that's not the point. Back in BC days, when you met a level 70 hunter talking about theoretically being able to lay up to 5 traps within a certain number of seconds when specced a certain survival spec and managing cooldowns properly, versus some guy's wife that takes over his hunter for a bit during a raid while he deals with an emergency at work, the difference is profound.
The point is to break complexity up into it's smallest pieces, present it clearly, motivate, and don't overwhelm with too much at once. Dish it out over time.
The first thing anyone needs to know is how to move around. Then go onto how to interact with the world. But in an MMO where there are a bajillion ways to interact, don't go over it all at once. If you need to know A & B for a task, first give a task that shows A, then a task that shows B, then give the task that puts them together.
Some games do this with giving some sort of documentation at some point during the game. They give you a bunch of text, or a sensei, teaching you A-Z and then they thrust you into situations that use many of the techniques. Those techniques go from easy to harder, combining more and more as you go along, and you're usually allowed to go back to the documentation if you need it. But there is rarely the "isolation of concept" in this method. I remember an instructor in FF8 telling me to read instructions about the system on the computer terminal, and a similar 'instructor' in FF7 thinking about it. But it was rarer in games like the Legend of Zelda.
In real life schools, we also often make these mistakes. We often immediately give the abstraction of concepts (eg: mathematical formulas) instead of first showing their real world equivalents. Or we give multiple concepts at once that can be broken down further (sometimes because we can't see that they can be). Or we don't motivate. Or we overwhelm with new concepts before the foundation has been able to sink in. A number of educators, (eg: Montessori), have been trying to get public schools to realize this for about 100 years, and it _is_ changing. But slowly.
Take the Pythagorean Theorem for example. This is something that is normally gone into depth in high school,
its how easy it is to play well, specifically w.r.t pvp, i dont want to join a game and straight away start getting 'pwnd' by everyone else before ive had a chance to figure out the controls, but that needs to be weighed up against having it so easy to play well that theres no challenge
The point about breaking things down that you make is valid, but I think you've picked a bad example in your last paragraph - explaining algebra via geometry is not teaching by breaking things down, but teaching by analogy - which is sometimes a good idea, sometimes not.
The reason is that everybody's brains are wired differently, so what's intuitive to one person is merely confusing to another.
I was taught algebra the 'old way', purely as a way of manipulating symbols, and you know what - it works great as a way of thinking. All those geometric representations are to me artificial, confusing, and limited.
I know some people (some of whom are quite smart) need to insert some numbers into an equation and see how it works out, to understand the equation properly. To me, it's the other way around - the equation itself is what's simple, the numbers just get in the way of understanding it.
And before you ask, my job involves building systems that work with quite hairy real-world data (automated trading algorithms), so this primacy of abstract perception doesn't cripple me any for practical tasks.
My memory might not be fully functioning but I recall WoW doesn't give you any help at all starting out, not even like use WASD to move around, click on things to attack them and for the start of the game is more about inventory management (i can only carry 12 things? ... okay...) rather then anything else.
Compare this to LoTRO which has a bypassable tutorial including here's how to move, attack things, search boxes, loot and also if a story element occurs this is what will happen.
How about this learning curve go google "gunz online". Perfect gameplay only problems with that game were:
1)It had premium items that were over powered pvp wise.
2)Then there were a lot of hackers.
3)Network issues made clan wars impossible. (no lag just sometimes ally didn't load map or something)
4)Along with no environment to walk around in just stages.
5)No skill system or item upgrade/customize system.
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 everything a little bit, it touches on nothing to any great degree, and when it concludes the only sure knowledge with which you are left is that you are in space, alone, and going to die soon.
Now, in fairness, there are plenty of players who started out thinking they would be combat pilots and ended up as legume farmers -- and vice versa (unlike other MMOs, Eve does not lock you into a class), and maybe some of these actually changed their paths when they saw all Eve had to offer during the tutorial. But I don't think so.
Sit through the tutorial, learn the basics of how to make your ship move so you're not asking the stupid questions, then join a player corporation and ask the legitimate questions.
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 it's not for the feint of heart.
I know it's not an online game but it is an rpg and similar in many respects. This is a genre I've never gotten into before due to the learning curve. I normally stick to run and gun shooters like Halo, Gears, etc. Fallout 3 starts off with a nice tutorial that doesn't seem like just a tutorial. You don't have someone saying look up, look down, look left, now right like in some games. It starts with the story, with your birth, and then you have to do simple stuff that progresses the story and teaches you the basic controls at the same time. I didn't have to stop and think about how to do something or check the control mapping before proceeding. I found it to be quite intuitive.
How is it that one careless match can start a forest fire, but it takes a whole box to start a campfire?
Remember the profession system in SWG? One look at this indecipherable table with no explanation whatsoever convinced me to give up after a mere twenty minutes of playing. And don't get me started on the total absence of money drops (at least in the newbie area where I was stuck...)
Indeed. I would probably give Eve another go if a few things were done:
An overhaul of the beginning of the game. A specific quest line for each major aspect of the game (basic flight, combat, mining, trading, crafting, etc), able to be completed independently (after flight of course) such that a combat player could ignore mining and trading.
Add a customizable interface. The default interface is cluttered and ugly. I play WoW. I would probably not continue playing WoW if not for the custom interface addons, which make gameplay much better.
Overhaul resource gathering. This is a simple one. Copy the base mechanic from Star Wars Galaxies: Allow the creation of mining stations which automatically gather resources, and you merely have to swing by and pick them up.
Make flight FUN! Honestly, this was the biggest reason I dropped Eve right off the bat. I went in expecting Freelancer style flight with more realistic physics. I got a flight system that was as entertaining as navigating around Myst.
Work out a way for new players to catch up to "the big guys." With the way Eve levels skill points, it is impossible for a new player to catch up to a 3 year old vet. In WoW, a player who starts today would have a single character on par with a 4 year old player in a matter of 6 months.
there are only 150000 adults in the world
"...and five of them are hamburgers."
Squirrel!
But in an MMO sense. WoW did this very well, imo - you can start, and click a button or two, and gain levels immediately. Literally. My 7 yr old can make a hunter and master the basics easily.
Get to L80 and run a raid dungeon, and you'll find a bunch of adults trying out reasonably complex strategies, practicing timing and pacing, installing complex modification to the UI, in order to overcome challenges.
A specific quest line for each major aspect of the game (basic flight, combat, mining, trading, crafting, etc), able to be completed independently (after flight of course) such that a combat player could ignore mining and trading
They have actually done something very similar to what you have suggested. There are four Factions (there always have been). Each faction has three "starter" schools. If you create a character specced to be a "soldier" you will end up in a naval academy and have a tutorial agent that will introduce you to combat. If you start as an industrialist, you will get a tutorial for industry. Same goes for, I believe, mining. Any player is free to go to these schools and take the tutorials. So you are not locked in. Problem is, they don't do a good job of telling new players that all of these tutorials are availalbe, and where to find them. The starter systems are listed on some site somewhere. Really, all of these tutorial agents should show up in your agents folder. But they don't. Kind of weird. As to your other points, I'm not sure they will ever change combat. It seems like the designers want the game to be strategy based rather than reflex based. Resource gathering will probably never change to the lengths you suggest. I guess its supposed to be a timesink. And, as for skills, what new players should do, is specialize into one combat role (i.e., tackler, ewar, etc...).
And overcoming long odds in a battle. And finding that needle-in-a-haystack logoffski cheating bastard. And playing market games. And exploring. And, yeah, for running around being a pest or throwing weight around, or whatever. As well as the social aspect of it. I know most of my corp in real life, so it's good to hang out.
It's not purely about griefing, but there is a lot of it. There's can flipping and high-sec ganking and all that. But mostly, for me, it's about running around trying to get into an epic fight.
In the three years I've been playing it, I've had some experiences in Eve -- real physical reactions -- that movies, TV, games, have all failed to produce. It's a very visceral experience, because you aren't just losing pixels in an internet spaceships game. You're losing time and effort, like it's being taken from the real world. I suppose that why people take it so seriously. There's been more than a few times my heart's racing, head's pounding, sweat coming down your brow. And my experiences in this regard are not unique.
But in the end, causing epic emo-rage does have a mighty strong appeal to a lot of people, myself included. It doesn't happen often, but it's a strange feeling that comes over you when it's there. For example, not too long ago I was flying around in 0.0 with a buddy, just bored, looking for ratters or a fight or whatever. A new-ish character in a frigate comes through a gate on the other side of the system. It's an obvious alt, given his corp. Buddy asks if we want to take it. Of course! Frigates and shuttles are like pinatas, small and easy to crack open, but you never know what good stuff might fall out of them.
So he fools about with it over at his gate, and it manages to get away to the other gate in the the system, where I had been. I'd jumped through while the frig was in warp, and burned it back to the gate, waiting for it to pop through. Sure enough, gate fire and there it is. A zealot against a condor doesn't make for a long fight. I'm surprised I even got a lock before he could warp off, but I got the pod, too. Not a good pilot. And if he'd been smart, he'd have seen me leave local as I jumped out and surmised what was happening. But instead of safe up and log out in the previous system, he got spooked and panicked. Too bad, so sad. It's like they say: The lessons you pay for are the ones you learn.
Normally, we'd pop the wreck, no traces and all that. But I figured I'd have a look inside. (An old friend had found a few billion in BPOs in a shuttle some months back, so I got in the habit of checking even small wrecks.) Lo and behold, what do we have here? Some high grade implants, couple T2 items, a bunch of POS-related skill books, and some BPOs -- mostly ammo and weapons but if you squint you can see the Orca BPO sitting amidst the pile.
I think we pulled around 3 billion for all the stuff that we managed to get out of there (we had some folks in his main's corp hot on our tail, and had to dodge two other camps). But the best part? Oh, the emo-tears. Tiny fists were shaking with mighty force at the cruel injustices of the Eve universe. I had some of the most hilariously angry evemails I'd ever read. I mean, the guy was pissed at me. Like, personally. My response was along the lines of "Don't run 3 billion through 0.0 unscouted and you won't have losses like that" but that only egged him on. I guess everyone in that area has a pact with everyone else, except we weren't part of the deal, being interloping evil pirates and all. Oops, his bad. We weren't blue to him, so why would he think he was blue to us? What made him think we were there for anything but shooting at people? Yeah, so it wasn't a fair fight, not in the slightest, he was right about that. But that doesn't mean I particularly care.
We got promises
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Look at FFXI: its a great game, despite what some may say about it. The Keyboard controls are SUPER COMPLEX, and that keeps some of the less mature gamers away and where they belong, WoW
Playing EvE is like playing D&D at the end of 3.5 with every book ever published for the game. After five years of development their are wheels within wheels. Just explaining to somebody how to PvP in a Rifter, without getting concorded, melted by gate guns or otherwise killed by the environment can take several pages. It can get overwhelming at times, opps I told you to safe spot but forgot to tell you that you can get probed down in a safe if you don't have a cloak on your ship. Oh but think before putting on a cloak as it'll bork your locktimes, but you're in a rifter that has fast locktimes, but the cloak costs more then the ship!
Quest lines? this is not WoW.
WoW's UI? You mean that shit which reduces the need for player skill by automating so many things that you may just as well use a bot?
Flight IS fun. It's not Star Wars. It's not Freelancer. If you want to play those games, go play those games. EVE focuses on a larger scale. Hell, we wish we could get rid of all the dopeheads who've gotten delusions of being Luke Skywalker from the game.
As for skillpoints. Specialize. And, it's not WoW. A fairly new player who's learned the game mechanics well can beat veterans. It's just a matter of getting past 2 things: Psychological blocks regarding "level"/age, and to actually engage the brain. KNowledge of game mechanics and the act of using your brain is more important than the skill points. There's even been a few hilarious events lately where swarms of pilots in noobships(the utterly weak starter ships) have taken out highly skilled pilots in Heavy Assault Cruisers. Meanwhile, in contrast to that, WoW is all about memorizing encounters, using specific UI addons and stringing up macros, and little else.
WoW does a very good job at teaching most of its game, but if you look closely, it doesn't guide players through a few things; for example talent builds and rotations. And this is where it's very easy to see and divide crap players with people that have spent time on forums learning about their class. People on countless sites (like elitist jerks for example) had volumes of arguments, spreadsheets, graphs, etc devoted to these things. Although any high level character can easily get by in almost every aspect of the game, to maximize the potential of a class is something else entirely.
And this is where the game and most MMOs fail for me. There is no point in maximizing your potential, because you can easily get by in almost every aspect of the game without it.
I want to see my efforts in optimizing my character be the difference between surviving and dying, not finishing it easily and finishing it even more easily.
As a raid leader or for PvP, there were a number of times where I'd be much more inclined to take people who I knew understood the mechanics over someone whose gear was better.
This shouldn't even be a question. Knowing and understanding the mechanics should be paramount... not hey, there are a couple places in the game where this would be a slight advantage.
That's not to say it couldn't be more complex. But that's not the point. Back in BC days, when you met a level 70 hunter talking about theoretically being able to lay up to 5 traps within a certain number of seconds when specced a certain survival spec and managing cooldowns properly, versus some guy's wife that takes over his hunter for a bit during a raid while he deals with an emergency at work, the difference is profound.
Profound, and yet simultaneously almost irrelevant. A band of semi-conscious players of average intelligence who played the game and their class a few hundred hours are nearly always "good enough"; there is rarely really a need for someone 'that good'.
The only time I ever encountered real challenge was when doing content that was beyond my level, and the game actively punishes you for it. You actually accumulate XP slower for the effort. The only other time was when someone fucked up and you are trying to recover... but its not that hard to avoid fucking up, and since dying has practically no penalty, people aren't particularly motivated to avoid it.
Warhammer online is equally bad. If you are supposed to be able to do it, then its easy. There is simply nothing that is 'hard' that you are supposed to be able to do. If you encounter something 'hard' it means you probably aren't high enough level, or didn't bring enough players. I have yet to encounter anything in either WoW or WAR that was "hard" and yet was also designed to be done at my level with the number of people I had with me.
Everquest had that sort of difficulty. You'd walk into an area designed to be done in a small group at level 25 and thered be a level 40 critter in the area you simply had to avoid. And every now and then a 'named' would spawn that was tougher and hit harder than the usual stuff you were fighting -- but you could still kill him if you played well. He may have been tougher but he was still -designed- to be killed by a small group at level 25.
Its not that playing well in WoW doesn't make a difference, its that its doesn't make the difference between winning or losing an encounter. If the encounter was designed to be done at your level, as long as you don't completely fuck up, you'll defeat it without all that much trouble.
To be fair the raid game is more challenging. But
a) you have to suffer through the rest of the game to get their
b) you have to play often and regularly enough to be part of a raid
There is really no option for "good players with lives"; I can't be in raid guild. I don't have time for it. I want to be able to log in when I can with 2 to 4 friends and do something challenging. I simply don't have the flexibility to be online when 12 or 20 guild-mates are scheduled to do something.
I have to chime in and recommend EVE University as the first corp to join once you've done your tutorial, had a quick putter around and are ready to really learn how to play the game. I have no affiliation with the corp, but know more than a few people The corp is 100% player run by experienced players who teach everything from PVP skills, ship fittings, industry, mining, missions, working as a team, etc. Their core purpose is to help noobs get in and up to speed, and will give you a huge leg up. I now fly with in 0.0 who have been in the corp, and have nothing but positives to say about them.
Another option if PVP is your thing is to get into a Faction Warfare NPC corp, get some cheap disposable fully insured frigates or cruisers, join some gangs and learn. Go onto BattleClinic forums and read up on the "cheapfleet challenges" for some VERY cheap solid PVP fitouts. You will pop, multiple times - but every lost ship is another "ah, so if I had" or "i see what they did there" that builds your knowledge, and being around a FC and gang who know what they are doing is an excellent springboard.
From a personal perspective, I started as a miner in a mining corp about 4 1/2 years ago, and got so disenchanted I quit the game (and the lesson there is don't join the first group who invites you!). 2 1/2 years later, I came back to check out the new graphics (released a little over 1 year ago), bumped into some Aussies who took me for a spin in low-sec space for some PVP fun, and worked out what I REALLY wanted to be doing in game. Now live in 0.0, participate in PVP from solo through to 500v500 fleets, dabble in industry to keep some isk rolling in and to provide cheap goodies for myself and my corpmates, and enjoying my play time immensely. Sure the action isn't constant like a FPS - but I find PVP with real consequence (you die and the ship is gone - rather than just "meh, I die I'll just respawn and my gear comes back") gives you a real rush.
I haven't tried Eve, but I played EaB for a while and really wanted to like it, but got turned-off by the boring travel times (well that and I would get lost too which really sucked because then I would have to do MORE traveling around/waiting.)
From your comment about waypoint files did you last play the game before the Warp To Zero change?
There's no more "5k slowboating" after warp anymore - I think it changed about two years ago. When you manually warp to a bookmark, stargate, station, whatever, you land at/on/really very near it.
WTZ decreased travel times substantially. Shuttles or fast frigates will let you run around at 30-45 seconds per system.
Autopilot will still drop ships out of warp 10k off gates - there's an advantage to being at the keyboard, and also to give the pirates some thinking time to be evil to AFKers.
Coming (hopefully) this year to EVE: Walking In Stations. Ie, Avatars. :)
CCP knows that the current players are the unusual people who identify with "being a space ship" and that adding in an immersive avatar component can only help the game feel more accessible.
The best thing new EVE player can do is join a corp, right at the start - the large-scale teaching corporation EVE University in particular. Friendly people who help, and don't intentionally blow you up. :)
Good for them. Too little, waaaay too late.
EVE's population graph has been growing strongly since launch, and still is.
When I play an MMOG, I like it to be at least *somewhat* social right from the start. That means, when I first log in on my first character I like to see at least one or two other people running around preferably right away, but definitely within the first hour or two. So tell me, how likely is that to be the case in Eve by now?
Look at the window called Local and say "hi" - you'll be talking to everyone in your current starter solar system. If they ask for help, meet them outside station in their noobship, join their fleet and warp into the mission with them.
When I pass through the starter systems (generally to pick up skill books) there'll be anything from five to thirty players in there, many are new pilots. Not only is EVE's population growing steadily, but EVE's PvE missioning system doesn't tier content into geographically remote zones in the same way. You'll find hardened mission runners running Level Four missions in the same systems as new guys running tutorials or Level 1s.
You'll also find yourself subscribed to Help channels that are helpful, and a NPC starter corporation of a couple of hundred people - a mix of new pilots and bitter old hacks - to ask for advice.
Right. So basically, in the end what it boils down to is if you *really* want to join the game and have fun now, you have to know someone already in the game with sufficient connections and resources to give you a good jump start.
"Helps to" != "have to". Most corps recruit new "unknown" players, though they may be more cautious with their trust if there isn't someone to vouch for the new players.
And, if you're in a bad spot, lose a few ships at the beginning and really need some cash to get you out of a spot, ask (nicely). The ISK that's vital to a new pilot is almost nothing to an old one, and pilots can be remarkably generous if you show that you're trying to help yourself.
Or you could join Eve University - a thousand-strong neutral corporate with 60-120 players online 23x7, dedicated to helping players (new or old) make the most of the game and teach them the ropes.
In the harshest MMO we find possibly the most largest single open-door philanthropic MMO organisation. Funny old world.