Bax Zanith wrote:I don't know. I never played an online FPS untill dust. I did just as bad as our noobs are now, but I thought that was just the tippicle "your so pathetic when your new" mentality of MMOs. I stayed, and ilearned the hard way how things worked.
Same and having started many alts, I can see where we might be losing some. For something that is supposed to be all about community, this game makes it very hard to get in touch with anyone. I think we're actually seeing very little of the population coming to the forums. I'd bet most of them don't even know its here. They downloaded the free game, tried it out, were lost and posted in local which may or may not have active vets looking in and said, well feck it and leave.
The menus are not intuitive. We can claim they are as much as we want but when you play something for 6+ months, anything "seems" intuitive. Part of my job actually entails designing intuitive interfaces for users. This interface misses the mark in every way.
I also remember way back when I started the game, there was an in game mail that described everything and in the load screens it actually explained visually the lifecycle: 'you purchase items, you use items and lose them in game, you use earned sp and isk to purchase more skills and items' That is no longer in the load screens. Now its basically 'skirmish: this is what a skirmish is...', etc.
The new "improved" academy literally says: open battle finder and join battle. You get thrown in battle and press buttons to see what happens which may or may not be easy depending if you're used to fps. You get out of battle and it says congrats, now go level up any skill. A new player is either going to spend hours reading on skills not knowing which is better for any reason other than to just try it, or skill into the first thing he sees. Congrats, you leveled a skill. Now go play the game.
It doesn't tell you how to do these things, you just press buttons until menus fly out. it doesn't tell you how to use chat. It doesn't tell you about your default corp or even squad finder, which is why so many of us have to repeat over and over: don't go solo, find a squad. There is a level of basic general introduction that needs to happen if you are not going to create an intuitive interface and we don't have one or the other right now.
TL;DR: Lack of connection with community and a very non intuitive interface create a big enough disconnect to dissuade more people away from this game than we probably realize.