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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,
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.
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.