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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."
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.
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.
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 with the high-end graphics makes everything gorgeous, but it also reduces your FPS on anything but brand new (within the past year) mid to high end hardware. If you have a middle-end PC from two or three years ago (fairly common), the new graphics will be fairly slow for you. If you have a middle-end PC older than that, it's unusable.
One of my computers is a Core 2 6600 with an nVidia 7300 graphics card. It's not a powerhouse gaming rig (it's primarily just a coding workstation), but it's probably around the average of what your typical gamer has when you account for Eve's worldwide distribution. On the new, high-end graphics, I get fairly decent performance, but things get choppy when there's a lot happening at once. On the older graphics engine, everything runs great all the time.
So would you prefer to be forced into the high-end graphics when you're in the middle of fleet combat? I'd rather have the option, myself.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
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,
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.
The Eve tutorial is not bad...the game is. I tried to play it and the missions are all of the generic take this package here...return and take a new package there. repeat. Oh and by the way it takes 40 minutes to fly each way. zzzzzz.zzzzzzzzzzzz......zzzzzzzzzzz...zzzzzzzzzzzzzz
For me, having to sit and watch a starfield screen saver for 2 hours is not fun.
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 ...
That's when I quit and started playing WoW (which at the time had just come out).
Now that I've played many more MMORPGs, looking back I can see that EVE was mostly composed of time sinks designed to waste players' time:
- To get anywhere in the beginning of the game you have to spend most of your time mining (slow and boring), buying stuff in one system and selling in another (see next comment) or doing highly repetitive quests.
- Once you move beyond the original systems your start spending most of your time traveling. For example, if your trip take you through 10 systems (not at all uncommon) it will take about 45 minutes on it's own through systems that pretty much all look the same. Zero space is huge and far from everything so you have to travel a lot to and from it and between areas there.
The whole economy of EVE is highly relying in there being masses of people doing the grunt work of mining asteroids for metals which are then hauled to a place with manufacturing facilities to use in making ships and weapons. These are then used (and destroyed) in battles in zero-space. Of all the steps in this process, the only one that is fun is the last one (battles in zero-space)
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.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
Eve "server" is a cluster not "one" server...nodes are assigned certain star systems and if load reaches a level warranting it, nodes are altered to handle the load (sarcasm)wow, load balanced clusters, how F*CKING innovative...(/sarcasm). Most nodes are set to handle a few thousand players at once, just like most other MMO's ...as to the comparison to WoW level of subscribers HAHAHHAHHHAHAHHAH, you so funny....(or you believe the liers called CCP).
Let's not forget that the actual number of subscribers is cut drastically when you figure in the majority of players have more than two accounts...paid for by game time cards, purchased with isk (in game currency).
So lets rethink how many people are subscribed, and just how can CCP survive off "in game" currency (unless CCP is selling isk online for REAL MONEY...in violation of their own rules...one has to wonder)
Many ex-players have suggested there are fewer than 150k total people that play the game, which includes all of CCP.
Less than 1% of WoW subscriptions, sure, you can call that a success if all you wanted was to sucker in a few people to pay you for the right to play in your private sandbox...where you can do what you want when you want and 'F' the player-base...be the dungeon master and get paid to lie, cheat and cover up the truth when caught.
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.
And therein lies the problem for many and the draw for a few. Replace the space backdrop with anything - the Wild West, a Tolkienesque fantasy world, a giant black box - and it remains the same game. Is there really no problem with players creating the entire game content themselves? Couldn't you just stop paying the $15 a month and be better off playing DnD at local gaming shops?
mmmm...forbidden donut