Test Server Feedback

I've just spent an hour playing through the revised new player experience on SiSi and taking a few notes, I thought it might be helpful to expand on them here.

- The new UI elements are great. They have a boldness and clarity that makes them stand out from the rest of the UI. They look as if they are overlaid onto the client, should they be set to 'always on top'? I occasionally lost my tutorial window beneath others.

- I absolutely love the auto-resizing tutorial window. The previous system's need to scroll to read the last line was very irritating (I hope we see this implemented with other, less intuitive UI components).

- I was hugely impressed with the rubber-banding contextual pointers. Although I'm not sure what is gained by the info box chasing the target across the screen. Perhaps it might be better to have the info box remain on the periphery whilst allowing the rubber-banding and indicator circle to roam around the screen with the target. (I would dearly love to see this technology find wider implementation, eg. an update to the 'locked target' display.)

- Further to the above, many UI elements gravitate to the middle of the screen, with every window by default opening on top of one another in the screen centre. Is there any way these windows could automatically attempt to place themselves side-by-side to prevent irritating overlaps? It would be great if the UI could automatically make better use of screen real estate rather than cramming everything into the centre.

- The language used in the tutorial text is very bland. I appreciate that it is important for it to be simple and clear, but there is an opportunity here to include some backstory references for colour without detracting from the concise delivery - perhaps in the form of links to relevant Evelopedia entries or a "more info" side button. This would also be a great opportunity to contextually introduce the client browser and web-based resources.

For example, in 08: Mission 1 Complete the text reads: "If you ever enter a station with no ships available, you'll be given a free Rookie Ship, so you're never stuck without proper transport." Who is giving out these free ships? The addition of the occasional reference to CONCORD, DED or other relevant lore could actually make the text more engaging and memorable and could be a gateway for interested players to get involved in that aspect of EVE too.

Another example of opportunity for colour is in the floating info box of the very first enemies encountered. It presently just says "This is an enemy ship (not as good as yours)". With respect, this is a pretty lacklustre description. Why are these ships enemies? Why aren't they as good as my ship? I was in Minmatar space, so the ship models used were Rifters - a new player might henceforth assume the Rifter is substandard and to be avoided. Rifters are clearly superior to the Rookie ships, so how come these ones aren't? Even something as simple as "Poorly maintained pirate frigate" or "Dilapidated scavenger ship" would give the same information whilst having a little flair.

- The revised method of learning to fit ships is much improved, being clear and simple whilst using real modules.

- In 12: The Next Mission (Warping to missions again) the contextual dialogue box by the Agent Missions menu is empty. Is this intended?

- 13: Weapons: Projectiles (Loading Your Weapon) Contextual indicator box reading "This is your weapon module" appears over the HUD dial and obscures the cargo button whilst the cargo is discussed in the main text body.

- In the same section, I have some issues with the sentence: "A small stack of ammo has just been placed inside your ship's cargo." Firstly, how did this happen - without an explanation, it's a little immersion-breaking, isn't it? Also, "cargo" refers to items held within the "cargo hold".

- I love the mouseover contextual weapon information - this is so much better than the previous Right-Click -> Show Info -> Attributes Tab -> Scroll. It's even better for missiles, which would then require the user to calculate Flight Time x Velocity just to get a range.

- I note that throughout the text, there tends to be an over-reliance on the right-click menu. This option is almost exclusively mentioned despite there often being an alternative method in the context-specific Selected Item window.

- In The Minmatar (Leurtmar system) Academy Mission deadspace environment, the Wreathe and Hoarder large collidable object models are intersected, creating a bizarre (but quite cool) superhauler.

In conclusion, the New Player experience seemed much improved in many respects, especially visually. The feel of the new UI components is much slicker and more appealing. However, given the amount of text the new player is being asked to read, it seems very dry and unengaging - I think the writing could do with more wit and depth. Also, an audio component would be hugely more attention-grabbing.

On a related point, I also left a suggestion elsewhere about leveraging the explanatory animations used in the recent Alliance Tournament as CQ assets. As the animations are already made, they could be a cost-effective and valuable library resource for new players. I left a comment in the Features & Ideas forum, but I'll repeat it in the next post...

Hey,

Big thank you for taking the time to not just play through the NPE on Sisi but also to provide some feedback. I cannot comment on everything in the post, only the stuff I was directly involved with, but also please note that a different team is taking over the NPE entirely and so I can't speak about its future.



This was actually a conscious descion on our part. We had a bunch of people play through the tutorial and found that even though we taught them the selected items window they more often then not instinctively went for the right click menu. At one point we had the tutorial specifically name the Selected Items window with a UI Pointer pointing at it. However later when we mentioned the Selected Items window people would still not know what it was. After much discussion and more user testing we decided that by focusing on one method, the one that people seemed to more naturally trend towards, we could make the tutorials better and players would be less confused.



This was also a rather conscious descion on our part. The tutorial is rather long as it stands and one of our goals going through the NPE this time around was to cut it all down as much as possible. There is a good chance we may have cut to much and finding the right balance between lore and length is a hard thing to do. Even adding a single sentence to each page adds up to a whole lot of extra text. Again though we went in with the primary goal of cutting the text down as much as possible and so we did. Hopefully in future iterations we can look at ways to bring that lore back into it without exploding the amount of text in it.

Thank you for your feedback. :)

Didn't the new "Player Experience" team only get announced in February in this Devblog? Why the change of guard again?

Ironic that they were tasked to establish "why people lose interest in EVE" and now they're going.

For now we're erring on the side of trying to focus very hard on teaching, and trying to throw in as few unnecessary concepts as possible. As a fiction-head I'd love to be doing more of what you're describing, but as a designer I'm not confident enough in our revised NPE yet to start throwing in references to the backstory and links to the wiki when our overriding goal is to get people through the tutorial as effectively as possible.



On an unrelated note, the blank tooltip was fixed internally this morning :)

I also hear there is a dev blog about some of these things: http://community.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=73075

Shows you how much I use the forums. /derp

Thanks for the heads up.

I completely understand the need to keep it simply in order to prevent confusion and I think the text as it stands does a pretty good job of that, but just a little colour (and even humour) would go a long way to keeping the reader's interest. As it stands it feels like a turgid school lesson. At the moment the lesson is being taught by a supply teacher who doesn't care about the subject matter and doesn't know the pupils. A dull teacher teaches nothing.

I can't help feeling this decision is as a result of a worrying new culture at CCP, with everything now being exclusively player-led. CCP Unifex underlined this in his recent Gamasutra interview, pointing out the army of designers and only 4 content writers:


That doesn't mean the content still made by CCP has to be lacklustre. I think it's symptomatic of a growing over-reliance on players to provide the fun.

With due respect to the designers, I think the language used could be more effective. The NPE experience as you have remade it is still something that will put players off because it is boring. The tutorial should be an experience - something that hints at the wonders and the glories that await. New players should be on a rollercoaster ride from the start, they should be getting little moments of "oh, that's clever", "haha, that's funny", "oh, I'll have to remember that to check out later". Instead they're getting an uninspired shopping list of hoops to jump through. The total reliance on the visuals to impress will only be partially successful without the new player being connected to what they're looking at. "This is an enemy ship" does not cut it.

The latest tutorial revision, whilst technically impressive and quite tight, is less "rollercoaster" and more a "dull train ride into work", that will still put off some players.

I'm sorry to be critical of an otherwise excellent improvement, but I am genuinely disappointed at what seems to be a growing trend of sterilising the EVE experience.