Originally Posted by Malorn
In this discussion about sancs I saw several more great usability topics Hamma could ask about. 
Interesting things I saw
1) He immediately dismissed the pop-up that gave him an introduction to the game (without reading it). I think internet ads and Windows have trained us to click those things away as soon as possible. We just don't like pop-ups, so I can't blame him for doing that. Though I did find it amusing he dismisses a welcome pop-up and then claims he's confused and doesn't know what to do. Clearly need something more effective there.
2) He never once found Instant Action.
3) It took him about 15 minutes after he got into the game to find a fight. I think there's a good chance many players in our short-attention-span world would not have waited that long. He said after about 3 minutes "I'm bored"
4) Some of his "wow!" moments came when he opened the map and saw how big it was, when he saw the vehicle options at the ground terminal, and when he actually got into the fighting he seemed to enjoy himself. He also admired the graphics of the game, though I don't think he played long enough to realize there was a day/night cycle. He probably would have enjoyed that too.
Could learn a lot from this video as a case study. Its something I consider an important issue to the game. It's key to hooking new players. If you want people to shoot at and a healthy PlanetSide 2 community and a well-funded post-launch project then this should be one of the top concerns. New player retention. |
Tutorial problem! It's all a tutorial problem! He didn't know if the NC were his friends or foes, didn't know about bullets, and ATV roll overs! (though to be fair that last one happens to all of us a lot)
Good illustration there Malorn on exactly what I've been hearing from people who tried PS and didn't like it. The story always is that they got in and couldn't find a fight and so left. There are two solutions to this, have a tutorial (which I don't think SOE has much experience in just due to their games' natures) or to have players actively find and train new players which is something that shouldn't be necessary.
The problem with the pop up window is that people are both trained against pop ups and that they don't like being handed a book to read when they want to play. If you are going with the text method DO NOT PUT IT ALL ON 1 SLIDE. It blurs together and people will gloss over it as we saw as he starts to look at it and determines that it's too much and just closes it.
Tutorials are difficult for this style of game. One possibility is similar to PS1's eventual tutorial system with the VR areas and the arrows the lead you around to things (though the tutorial in PS has always been so buried under things it's almost impossible for a new player to find). You could do it via videos the first of which is difficult to skip and tells you where to find the rest of the videos (E.Y.E. I believe does this and has a text dump). Has the downside of making patching require a lot of changes to the system but doesn't present a barrier that has to be run totally through each character creation. Either way something needs to be done.