Focus on the New User

[Berendol]

[quote author=Fink link=board=thinktank;num=1187839387;start=15#29 date=11/19/07 at 23:11:14]things that get "hashed and rehashed every year" generaly do so for a reason: they are recurring problems that need to be addressed, and their recurrence is a quick and dirty way of identifying more visible or high pri things to look at.[/quote]

I didn't address that in my post because the cause of these recurring posts was irrelevant to my idea, but I agree with you 100% on the reason why we see these things again. I've been part of each debate each time it's come around and I've even implemented various things to resolve it on my own servers in the past - whose source is freely available - and so have others. Yet, we still continue to have these debate rehashes. Ultimately, someone needs to take responsibility to write some code that makes the game a little more uber-noob friendly, while still squashing the noobs appropriately often after they've played for a little while. Or, in friendlier terms, provide a safe starting point, while still letting them make mistakes.

So there's my point: Someone needs to push code into the mainstream vanilla code, get it in place on the regular server, and sit back and watch the community reap the benefits of getting more potential long-time players and contributors on board once they see the value in the rich, extended, free gameplay we offer.

[udosdottir]

[quote author=Warrior link=board=thinktank;num=1187839387;start=15#26 date=11/18/07 at 19:35:54]
but ok, if someone has a good solution that doesn't involve removing townspeople, shout it out.
[/quote]

To find a good solution, i think we first have to do some more analysis on what really the problem is.
From every death there can/should be a lesson learned. And I think, dying from townspeople holds the important lesson, not to attack everything that moves. And I don't think an occational death to townspeople scares anyone off (maybe some players, but only those, that would also leave the game due to too many deaths to Farmer Maggot Dogs or whatever, anyway).
What's really frustrating is, when new players get the impression that they have no real chance to even *start* a game and start to find out, wether they like it or not. If they not occationally, but repeatedly die to townspeople, maybe never even reach the stairs.

Why would this happen to people? Two possiblities come immediately to my mind that require different solutions:

1) New players don't understand that they have to run from townies. Even after several deaths they still think they should, theoretically, be able to kill all that moves in town and give the game up, because they consider it too hard.

2) New players may have understood, that they have to run from townspeople, but somehow they simply don't manage.

I want to make a new suggestion to adress the first problem:

New characters are always placed in the tavern, which is fairly save. How about giving the new hero-to-be a brief introduction when he firsts steps on the exit. A message like:
"You set foot into a harsh town. Living next to the entry of hell itself has made the inhabitants leery of anything alive. They slit the throat of their own children in fear of doppelgaengers, and strangers are not welcome here."
I hope you get the idea, what I mean: Some athmospheric introduction that warns them about townspeople and makes clear that they are not friends. Maybe one could also add a hint, that 50ft is often saver then town. Of course it has to be short enough so it doesn't take too much time to read. Or maybe there could be a more extensive introduction, taking up the whole screen and can be read before the character is placed in town.


About the second problem:

Running away from monsters is not as easy as it may seem to the experienced player. It already requires some skill. We already discussed the problem about running in town and i don't want to repeat this now...
But the problem of running away from monsters is not only a problem about the character in fact running. Simply not to run into a dead end, into another bunch of townies, and the like is much harder for new players, then for those who have already done this so often. Unfortunately, I have no new suggestions here. - I liked Berendols suggestion, maybe not as the only measure to be taken, but it could ease the problem a bit.

There are probably more reasons why newbies die to townspeople. I had the impression Fink and Berendol were headed towards slightly different problems. Maybe wrong?

[Hades]

The Whole  tutorial introduction aspect you said reminds me of a idea I had and have plans on implementing on my server. As a lot of you know I was working on a help bot idea, but I forgot Mangband doesn't  support LUA making my Information useless, so I had another idea I discussed with Fink. Since the number 8 doesn't really do anything, we could tweak it like a store. When you start in tavern you must leave by exiting 8, so why not make 8 into a store? Not a store that sells items, but a store that has information? The help guide Mangband has built in is to hard to zip through and read, so we could have sections, example like "The Book of Macro" "The Book of Dungeon information" "The Book of Bree" etc etc.

   When you inspect the book, like you would any other item in a store, it has information you inspect, and using the space bar like any other to go through to pages of reading, this solves a lot of issues, it solves the newbie not knowing what to do, and it solves the information aspects of asking questions since all the newbies questions will have answers in 8.  

   Again, this is an edition I want to put on my server PWMangband so I will probably be working on the information in the books very soon and I'm more then willing to share it if Mangband.org wants to use it, it's a small edition to any server with big rewards.

[Berendol]

The Whole  tutorial introduction aspect you said reminds me of a idea I had and have plans on implementing on my server. As a lot of you know I was working on a help bot idea, but I forgot Mangband doesn't  support LUA making my Information useless, so I had another idea I discussed with Fink.

Have you ever played a realtime game that used LUA? I find it's only ever worked well client-side. There have been some stellar successes with using it client-side, such as World of Warcraft. There have also been some infamous failures using it server-side, such as a "physics sandbox" mod for Half Life 2 called Garry's Mod, which uses it for the physics. The whole thing crashes if you squash a few dozen watermelons or crates with a rocket-propelled train car. Seriously, that's a major shortfall there  Imagine firing an RPG into a wall of 100 flammable explosive barrels, only to have your computer crash... kinda takes the fun out of setting the whole thing up. Now, using LUA for far less complex things such as your help bot might be good, but I think there might be simpler, more suitable languages or even a simple XML-based syntax that you could use instead. Look at some DCC fserve bot source code from the golden mIRC days. Simple triggered things like that would be great.

Since the number 8 doesn't really do anything, we could tweak it like a store.

You have to modify the client to make this work, since it still treats it like the Home in single player Angband 2.7. I did it on DServ, but had to distribute a special client. Look in my change log to see what files you need to change.

When you start in tavern you must leave by exiting 8, so why not make 8 into a store? Not a store that sells items, but a store that has information? The help guide Mangband has built in is to hard to zip through and read, so we could have sections, example like "The Book of Macro" "The Book of Dungeon information" "The Book of Bree" etc etc.

   When you inspect the book, like you would any other item in a store, it has information you inspect, and using the space bar like any other to go through to pages of reading, this solves a lot of issues, it solves the newbie not knowing what to do, and it solves the information aspects of asking questions since all the newbies questions will have answers in 8.  

   Again, this is an edition I want to put on my server PWMangband so I will probably be working on the information in the books very soon and I'm more then willing to share it if Mangband.org wants to use it, it's a small edition to any server with big rewards.

That's a very interesting idea. Guides like that could be useful, and maybe there could be super rare guides that drop in the dungeon... like guides to killing certain monsters, with information about their weaknesses.

Just don't forget the question mark key, which is used for help and tutorials. You know, you can put whatever you want in that documentation. Maybe we should have a message that ISN'T in the MOTD that says something about pressing "?" to get a simple tutorial document, and have anything more complex available from your nifty bookstore.

[Hades]

Hehe, TomeNet uses LUA, I was orginally making the help bot for that game, so I was useing LUA, but the Tomenet Dev Team was being pretty snotty about the whole idea and everytime I asked a question I got nasty responds, so I left tomenet and back to mangband.

  About the whole ? key turtorial I find it insuffient for the demands of the game, I know myself don't want to go through pages and pages of information just to find the one selected topic I want, which is why I wanted to create the help bot in the first place to answer specific questions. The I came accross the idea of 8 becomming a turtorial center, since mangband isn't a heavily active game, often people are alone in the depths of the dungeon and have questions about the game but no one to ask. It's much easyer to just walk into 8 find the book with the topic you want to address and read it.

I think that way would be much more appealing to the today world. I know it is for me. In my opion, we have to fine tune this game. And this is one way to fine tune it for the "New users" And even the old school players could make use of the feature. I think the small changes it will take to make this will have bigger rewards to come.

   And addressing your idea Berendol, my help bot has a whole monster database, and a unique database, which is kind of like you were saying, the database I made tells you the exact speed,health,damage the specific monster or unique does and tells you what it resist what it doesn't. So I very much like your idea about the book thing but I think their should be another store to have that kind of information since you could always look it up anyway.

{EDIT}

  On second thought, if we downgraded the ? turtorial to make it small, and just have it point out specific Need to know things, like how to chat for example that would be great, and have a message telling the new user to do so. and the "nifty store" could be used for the more complex things as you said. People just don't like reading tons and tons of information, especially with me having ADHD I hate it, hehe... So downgradeing things to just going stright to the point and the book store addressing specific needs It would be an awesome upgrade I would imagin.

[Berendol]

OK, Later, if you're writing documentation for the game, someone else needs to proofread it.

On ToME... Let's not get started on that can of worms. They distance themselves from MAngband for a reason. So, let them do their thing, and we'll do ours, and I don't want to see a flame war about it.

In my arrogant opinion, we really don't need instant in-game spoilers on everything. That is a very long way from meeting the needs of new players - even the pros don't need that much information to be available. Seems to me like a large waste of time for very little gain, when coding abilities like that could be put to much better use on features that would actually enhance the gameplay as opposed to knowledge of the gameplay. Keep it VERY simple if you're going to make any kind of 'bot'. That's generally a good rule to abide by.

Now, your creation might be a hit if you made it into a web-based portal that does that, so your efforts aren't quite wasted. We already have a few different pieces of Windows software that do exactly that, and the plain-text definition files are readily available for perusal, but there isn't anything like Thottbot or Allakhazam for this game. If you're playing MAngband, you can also be browsing the Web. I've toyed with the idea myself but never actually completed a full working prototype.

My idea for 'guides' was more along the lines of human-written hints regarding gameplay techniques and semi-rare findable guides with one or two simple sentences about a specific few monsters, rather than complete spoilers. Kind of reminiscent of the 'rumors' you can get in some variants, whose names escape me at the moment. I'm sure we can all contribute some one-liners and short blurbs to that one, and it doesn't require scripting in the game engine.

Yes, we need to cut down on the base help file. It's gotten more people started than anything else we have, though, so we need to decide what to keep and what to move somewhere else. At some point, though, you have to say it's Not For You if someone isn't willing to read some documentation before they play. This ain't McDonalds - you gotta do a little work to get anywhere. We need to figure out the balance here.

[Hades]

I completely agree, and I apologize, somtimes I step over the line or reality and hopeful thinking. I just like to throw idea's out there that I have in mind a lot of times without much study of the probability factor of them.

One of my main efforts though is to try to make this game more playable to the outside world. I still think the game could use some more work on the balanceing aspect of new players. So I only try to throw out long needing solutions to try to make this clearly difficult game a little bit less difficult to the new players. I think this is one thing we need to focus a lot of our attention on. We have a lot of great features that we could expand to do so. And that is what I simply try putting on the table when I throw out my psyco crazy idea's =).

[Berendol]

You bring up good points. Everyone here has had some good ideas in the course of this thread. Threads like this are the ideal things for us to see on this forum.

I think it would be useful if everyone who's made utilities and other useful addons for the game would write a post "by request of Berendol" that concisely lists all of their work and status of related projects, so we have kind of a menu to choose from for future work. I see a lot of progress made on separate trees and independent work, and if we could only have a list of who's done what and where, then collaborating might be easier.

I don't suppose anyone has written any scripts or programs that generate spoilers in Wiki-friendly formats? (Please specify which Wiki format if you have) I'd like to see a separate post about this one too. That way we can discuss ideas for such a beast if it doesn't exist.

Back on topic, though. Keep coming up with ideas and posting them here. Good, bad, or ugly, let's see them all.

[Fink]

...was killed by a Battle-scarred veteran ---68
...was killed by a Mean looking mercenary ---30
...was killed by an Aimless looking merchant --- 3
...ghost was destroyed by a Battle scarred veteran.--- 22

Huh, didnt even think of squint-eyed rogues - they actually clock in at 8 deaths and 11 destroyeds.

[udosdottir]

We probably will have to make the fundamental decision whether we want to really *change* the game or some of its core parts to find more and new players, or whether we only want new players who can somehow accustom themselves to the many difficulties of the game that most of you mastered over the time.

To achieve agreement might be a fight hard enough, but at least to me it seems neccesary to change some fundamental parts of the game. -- For example it simply takes too much time to get a character who can at least try to take the final fight. Warrior, it seems to me, is generally considered the best player active atm, so: How long in realtime, not playtime, in total did it take him/you to win? (real question, not rhetorical, maybe i perceived this wrong and it was actually less than one year?) I for myself can accept to be online for play and not for the win, but i was one of those newbies that hung around for some time (and i hope to be back, as soon as my time admits), but it seems not many do.

Again, i want to stress the two different approaches i mentioned before. On the one hand: get good documentation and tutorial for new players  *and* on the other hand: make the game better, easier and more fun for all.

Btw here is a new idea (maybe not so new, it seems simple enough that probably someone already mentioned it elsewhere): You already have implemented the wilderness. Why not ask at character generation: Do you want to start in Newbietown?
In Newbietown there are noticeboards and tutorial books and all the stuff we fancied about, lying around. There is a dungeon that is only 500ft deep and where you cannot really die, but your ghost is immediately revived with full equipment in the tavern along with some advice. You can leave the town when you want and walk to the nearby 'real' town, but once you have left Newbietown you can never return.

[nubnub]

Problem: It is almost completely unconsciounable in my book to put monsters in town that spawn all over the place that can completely tool a new player. This is just completely lame, and sucks. Games need a safe breather spot, where the player is able to focus on their equipment, talking to players, buy, sell, etc. The *dungeon* should be the dungeon, *not the town*.

Possible Fixes: Drop battle scarred veterans (and, heck, any other townie that can kill the player) from town. Let them spawn out in the out-of-town levels if we feel it's really important that they still be in the game, but whatever we do with them, we should just straight-up not be spawning them where the new player is hanging out getting sorted.

As a new player, I feel completely confident in saying that this is exactly how I feel. I keep getting chased by these angry mobs of people, I can't go too far away from the starting house at night (Farmer Maggot's dogs will eat me), if I get lost amid the sea of shops that are all owned by the same few people I need to be careful getting back to the town center or I'll get killed, etc.

Also, this is a very minor complaint, but I actually do get lost in the town; I've tried looking at the map of player owned shops to find my way back to the dungeon, but it isn't marked, so I usually get killed by a dog or something first.

As for people not knowing about the run key, maybe I'll start leaving filthy rags and shards of pottery around that have "Shift+Direction to run" inscribed on them.

[Jug]

Hi nubnub,

Also, this is a very minor complaint, but I actually do get lost in the town; I've tried looking at the map of player owned shops to find my way back to the dungeon, but it isn't marked, so I usually get killed by a dog or something first.

Come to think of it, so do I, this has been annoying me for years. Thanks for bringing this up, I've raised a ticket and we'll implement some better way of navigating through the town and near wilderness in the near future. I even get lost in the actual town centre and frequently run towards what I think is the shops but then realise I've actually gone out into the wilderness.

[Jug]

This is an oldish thread I'd just like to give an update on a few of the points raised here.

Floating eye endless-paralysis loop sucks
This never happens anymore. Floating eyes teleport themselves when they attack.

BSV's in town suck, and are fun for noone.
The tough townies have been turned passive and no longer chase down and attack characters in town. They wander around harmlessly (for the most part) and only attack you if you annoy them.

The WindowsXP corrupted display bug sucks.
and
Use Jug's new client
These issues no longer exist as described. There is no "Jug's client" anymore. There is one official client and it's available on the download page.

The documentation sucks
The ingame help has updated from the 10 year old one it now lists all commands first, and there is some up to date documentation in the Documentation Section. We are missing an introductory tutorial badly, any help with that would be appreciated.

No character screen that tells me what resistances I have
There is one now. C to get to the character screen, press h for history and then h again for full resist info.

[Ace]

I will try to post one by saturday, and add it to the forums, for review and advice from the best players available ;) This way we will have a high quality and useful document.

[Jug]

Cool. Bear in mind we have this newbie document which covers a fair bit of detail. But lacks a simple step by step MAngband getting started thing.