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Setting a Learning Curve In MMOs

Posted by Soulskill on 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."

10 of 156 comments (clear)

  1. I tried Eve... by abigsmurf · · Score: 4, 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.

    1. Re:I tried Eve... by Loki_1929 · · Score: 4, 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.

      --
      -- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
    2. Re:I tried Eve... by Sobrique · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    3. Re:I tried Eve... by fitten · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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 other and the winners took sovereignity of the system when the smoke cleared.

      Player organizations waging war on each other is the content. However, you can't have all ship pew-pewers to win wars and hold territory. In fact, that's actually a small part of it (time-wise, anyway). You have to have massive logistics and production... all done by players. Those 20 capital ships that were lost? All built by players. They arrived at the battlefield by players both flying them there and other players who have to fly other ships to the destination to open up jump points for the capitals to jump to (fly through enemy space to get there). Those 50 battleships that were lost? All built by players. To build all those things, you have to mine (or buy from someone who did) minerals from asteroids, minerals mined from moons (requires a station to do that), and your systems can only be 'yours' if you have sovereignity, which requires stations that must be set up and defended.

      Yeah... Eve is complex. But, there are those of us who like complex games. It's not for everyone and "that's OK".

      One thing that's really nice about Eve... I can play heavily for a day or two and then not play at all for a week or even longer and not have any withdrawal or even think about the game if I don't want to. The only thing really requiring a player to log in is if you make money in the game by running missions. If you have an industrialist, you can make money while not logged in (buy materials and sell your player-made goods on the market while you're offline). You also advance your character even when not logged in. So, when I went on vacation for 10 days over the recent holidays, I had zero withdrawal from the game, didn't log in a single time over those holidays, and didn't worry or really even think about the game at all. When I got back, I had more money than when I logged out before my vacation and a new skill almost completed so I had something new and shiny to play with when I logged in next. Plus, stuff that I had set up to build while I was gone was built and ready for me to use/sell.

    4. Re:I tried Eve... by brkello · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I really don't get this. Eve isn't any more complex than WoW. It just has an extremely poor user interface that takes a long tutorial to explain. Yeah, there is more potential loss. But when it comes down to it, you hit F1, F2, F3, F4, F5, F6. Combat is extremely simplistic. PvE barely exists.

      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 to it many times over the years and always come up with the same conclusion: it is a game I want to like, it is a game of extreme potential, but it always falls way short of the mark because it fails to deliver something that is enjoyable. I mean, you are in a space ship with all kinds of advanced weaponry...shouldn't that be fun? That and the game is forever tainted by CCP devs cheating. Single shard means that it will always be tainted by that and certain players/corps will always have the advantage over others.

      --
      Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
    5. Re:I tried Eve... by brkello · · Score: 2, Interesting

      You guys give yourselves way too much credit. Basic mechanics after 2 years? Give me a break. The game isn't all that deep. You read the forums to learn how to fit your ship, you run boring PvE mission to get more ISK to get bigger ships and run higher level boring PvE missions. PvP is mostly shooting up people who make a wrong turn or running around in vastly superior numbers. Expansions offer very very little new content. They might change that people can't abuse nano's anymore, but that is hardly what I would call interesting. You just go back to the forums and find out what the next over-powered fitting for your ship is.

      --
      Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
    6. Re:I tried Eve... by Walkingshark · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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 people that speed that up, but the whole fact that you have to jump through hoops to do that kind of thing turns me off from the game. I hate travel time in an MMO, when I'm playing a game I want to be playing a game, and if I have to do all the traveling I want there to be something interesting to do while I'm doing so.

      --
      The world you experience is only a close approximation of reality.
  2. Re:Hazy thoughts by SatanicPuppy · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.g. moving) it's in the area of "Okay, WTF do I do now?" and WoW nails that part. Your first quest giver gives you a quest that leads you to the next quest giver, who does the same. If you just follow the quests until you run out, without ever exploring, welcome to level 80. It's that simple.

    That is the easy thing about WoW. It's got nothing to do with the interface. Playing on a pve server, there is nothing to get in your way between lvl 1 and lvl 80 except ~12 days of mindless grinding.

    --
    ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
  3. Re:I'm sick of small curves by Don853 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Wait, what's the finishing goal? Die with the biggest pile? Die with the most STDs? Spawn the most children? Technological singularity? Completing some religious storyline?

  4. Re:I'm sick of small curves by AdamWeeden · · Score: 2, Interesting

    BINGO. A great example of this (for me) is Guitar Hero. I started playing last year and had fun on Easy and Medium. When I got to Hard it was such a steep jump for me that I would get booed off on a song 20% of the way through that I could play nearly perfectly or perfectly on Medium. So I was left with a choice. Do I spend my time trying to get better or do I invest my time more wisely? I chose the latter and decided to take up real guitar. This is not to say that games aren't fun and spending time playing games is wasted, but if you're grinding away for years trying to get better at a game, chances are in 10 years the game will be defunct or replaced, and that time would have been better served trying to improve a skill with more practical use.

    --
    I was quoted out of context in my autobiography...