A B Ablabab
The Unholy Legion Of DarkStar
DARKSTAR ARMY
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Posted - 2013.07.10 23:51:00 -
[1] - Quote
I've read that most of the devs are hunkered down fixing core gameplay for Dust right now, that's great and a real step in the right direction.
But I've also read that academy is working as intended. Which.. oh boy I hope not.
Academy is a good start, but surely it's obvious the 'wall of text' style explanation when a new player presses virtually any button at all doesn't work.
Now in a way it does work, and it works the same way that spam messages do (bear with me here). It adds a deliberate barrier. "If you can't be bothered to read this, and you don't know EVE/Dust fitting mechanics already you're gonna ragequit anyway" in the same way that spam is deliberately unintelligent because it filters out those that might be savvy enough to cotton on later at the first hurdle.
I also think that we're missing some great opportunities to help new players, for example, spend some of that starting SP for them. (If 500k is a suitable starting SP is a topic for another day). And then give them some more choice than 'paper AV', 'paper sniper', and 'slightly-effective-AR-suit'. We all know where that leads...
The marketplace at the moment has a fitting suggestion system, that's full of AUR suits that require good skills to use. As far as I can tell that feature is mostly useless, short of giving a few people some ideas. If you've played Dust long enough to have the SP to run one of those suits you can fit your own damn suit, or you're at least engaged enough to learn by trial or ask other players.
Please consider adding to that fitting menu some variation of fits. militia fits would be fine, put them at the top for 5k ISK and let a new player go 'ohh heavy that might be fun' rather than having to learn the entire fitting and suit system (as well as how to navigate the market place) before they can use something that's not an AR.
At the very least please replace the wall of text with an interactive tutorial (or even video), AT LEAST to the fitting system. Just so it's not 'wall of text' -> 'the bars are all red' -> 'give up and use starter AR fit'
I would modify the idea of a starter corp so that some kind of community rep is always available to advise people. (Asking for help in a starter corp chat is like asking a blind man to tell you if your butt looks big).
Some of this stuff requires coders (interactive introduction, etc) but the fitting suggestion modifications and starter corp modifications should be trivial.
This isn't a thread about 'my ideas', because I'm not a game designer. I just want to help CCP help new players (and thus themselves), before Dust slips into obscurity and stops having the appeal of being a new thing for the Playstation community to check out.
Thanks for reading.
(TL;DR: CCP can improve the new player experience without needing lots of dev time.) |