Vrain Matari
Mikramurka Shock Troop
Minmatar Republic
2
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Posted - 2015.08.08 23:09:00 -
[1] - Quote
Many agree that Dust is in dire need of a better NPE.
Many also agree that the purpose of an NPE tutorial/walkthrough is not to teach noobs 'how to shoot a gun', but rather to give New Eden immigrants a handle on the several non-trivial and interconnected systems that comprise a viable merc's working knowledge in Dust. This point is not in dispute - veteran players have repeatedly demonstrated, for the benefit of CCP and the playerbase, that a new toon in low-end gear can be viable against almost all pub-level opposition and easily capable of slaughtering noobs by the dozen in the academy.
There is far more going on here than simple map knowledge - core skills, racial characteristics, suit classes, vehicle classes, richly varied weapons classes, shield characteristics, armor characteristics, active ewar, passive ewar, squad mechanics, off-map assets, equipment(big topic!), spawn mechanics, cloak mechanics, integrated warfare, installations, game glitches/bugs. That's on the battlefield. Also WP mechanics, sp mechanics, ISK, AUR, boosters, trading, BPOs, APEX off the battlefield.
Any dev or player insisting that the broad demand for a tutorial/walkthrough is about 'shooting a gun' has their head so far up their exhaust port that they most likely suffer from a tongue scalded by a regrettable too-oft licking of their reactor core.
Imo 'how to shoot a gun' can be translated to merc-speak as 'too expensive'. There is nothing wrong with 'too expensive' as an answer, it's a reality of development for Dust at this time...but....this is an issue that will not go away: whatever the future incarnation of Dust, it will also suffer from this same issue.
We face a classic dilemma: we need a quality NPE but it's too expensive/time consuming.
I believe it's worth considering a collaboration/crowdsource solution to the NPE: a set of narrated first-person training 'matches' where noobs never fire a gun, but are there to look, listen and learn.
The basic idea:
- Record a match from the point of view of several players on both sides, say 3 per side. Call them Red(R1, R2, R3) and Blue/Green(1, 2, 3). Maybe also devote a player on each side to keeping the overhead map up.
- Publish this set of 6 or 8 videos to the playerbase.
- In some kind of open-source collaborative venue, players post time-stamped text of what they want 'Sarge' to communicate to the player at that particular point in time, for some or all points-of-view. Sarge can start and stop time, rewind, speed up/slow down playback and also switch the player's PoV at will. Sarge is just a voice in the player's head, but he also has control of a '
magic pointerholographic projector' that can produce on-screen effects.
- Community/devs argue, plead, vote, mud-wrestle to decide how to order the PoV-switching and narration to best educate noobs.
- With a final training mission in hand, CCP adds effects from Sarge's magic pointer to the video to highlight and make explicit what we're trying to teach the player.
- CCP publishes the PoV observer missions in the battle finder. Players can run through these at any time for as many times as they desire. On the first few run-throughs they get sweet loot just for watching.
That's it, but on a final point of immersion 'Sarge' should prolly be working for the merc recruiters that issue public contracts. His/her mission is to try and make a recruit 'worth their ISK'.
Cross-posting to F&I.
PSN: RationalSpark
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