new players to nexuiz

[The mysterious Mr. 4m]

You need to say "Press T for talking".

[Samual]

Bah looks like i've got some reading to do.. Sorry guys, I have no time tonight but i'll be sure to read through the whole post tomorrow morning.

I skimmed over real quick though and noticed something about Flying Steel wanting to remove bunny hopping and laser jumping to make the game easier for new players? If this is correct, I am now entirely disregarding Flying Steel's opinions on this matter. That is perhaps the worst thing you could do to a game when one of its key benefits is the gameplay.


Goodnight.

[Flying Steel]

No MASTER, it was the PRECIOUS! The PRECIOUS made us do its! Seriously though, that wasn't really what I was saying.


Those two features scare off new players, though. Fortunately, there are two ways to counter them without removing them IMO:

GRAPPLE HOOK AND JET PACK INTEGRATION INTO DEFAULT
(They have to be speed/endurance balanced with the other movement types and offhand instead of pickups.)

CHARACTER CLASSES IN DEFAULT
(Stronger but slower conventional movement classes for noobs, weaker but faster special movement classes for veterans.)

[halogene]

GRAPPLE HOOK AND JET PACK INTEGRATION INTO DEFAULT
(They have to be speed/endurance balanced with the other movement types and offhand instead of pickups.)

I disagree, at least regarding the current setup of hook and jet pack. Everytime I played on servers where these were enabled they completely screwed up gameplay. I know it is fun to swing around like a crazy gibbon, but I say if we must have a hook then please limit the range. Having a hook that drags you through the whole map is just screwing up the gameplay and making techniques like bunny hopping nearly worthless. Same goes for the jet pack, in my opinion you'd have to limit its range to a point where it is actually no fun anymore. :o/

CHARACTER CLASSES IN DEFAULT
(Stronger but slower conventional movement classes for noobs, weaker but faster special movement classes for veterans.)

At first glance I'd say that MIGHT actually work. Though this would require careful balancing. And we'd risk to make the game even more complex for newbies. So we'd need about three or two character classes that all can do everything but vary a little in speed/weight/hitpoints or so.

But then again will new players that choose the heavy character ever learn bunny hopping, if it is harder to do it right with that character?

[nifrek]

I'd like to follow on what GM said in reply to Oblivion. Altho I'm not as "oldschool" as him, I guess I was good at some point in the NA scene and I always enjoyed teaching and giving advice. Back then, I played a LOT. However, nowadays I only play a few times each month, sometimes not at all, or sometimes I play quite a bit for a few days. Anyway, about the "elite players" who join/leave without saying anything, I guess I'm one of those (mostly under aliases). Obviously, when I play on a public server, even tho I'm not as good as I used to be it's quite obvious that I have more experience and am more skilled than the majority (being honest, not trying to brag).

The thing is, I'm not really interested in the social part of Nexuiz anymore, hell, I don't even hang out on irc anymore. I sometimes still give advice when I see someone asking a question, or while I spec during a smoke break, but people spent so much time chatting about unrelated stuff like their girlfriends (or lack of), a movie they saw, or whatever, that after a couple minutes I do not read the chat at all, it's mostly a nuisance, I only look at team messages. I also get called a cheater often and get insulted for no reason. Sometimes I get spammed with insults in pm's. Yeah, that'll sure make me want to be helpful to newbies, right ...

I am NEVER disrespectful to newbies, or rarely to anyone else for that matter. The only times that could happen is when some semi-decent player is shittalking less skilled players, if I'm drunk, yeah maybe I'll get into the discussion and make sure that this semi-decent player realizes he's nowhere as good as he thinks and I'll try my best to make him look like a fool. Public servers don't need assholes like that, some kid coming from some other game and coming Nexuiz already with some skills and shittalking other newbies because they have some advantage. That really pisses me off.

I noticed that some of the "real" newbies don't chat at all either, some of them don't even reply when you tell them they're shooting at their own team. How do you fix something like that?

Basically, there seems to be 3 major types of newbies: The complete newbie to FPS's who uses a joystick and doesn't read chat, the complete newbie to FPS games who chats 90% of their time on the server either whining that everyone cheats or talking politics, and the player coming from some other FPS thinking they're amazing because they win on a public server.

Of course, there's also cool newbies who are friendly, but they're buried under 100 feet of assholes and there's not a lot of "veterans" who would endure the assholes long enough to notice the cool newbies. I know that I don't, you can blame me for that if you want.

[Flying Steel]

I disagree, at least regarding the current setup of hook and jet pack. Everytime I played on servers where these were enabled they completely screwed up gameplay.

That is very true in my experiences as well. BUT the key thing is you have to slow down jet and hook to not break things.

Like start with cutting jet pack horizontal and vertical acceleration each in half. Or quadruple fuel consumption. Then rebalance grapple hook to have double or triple its fuel consumption.

At first glance I'd say that MIGHT actually work. Though this would require careful balancing. . .

But then again will new players that choose the heavy character ever learn bunny hopping, if it is harder to do it right with that character?

I think so, because they'll still come in contact with people pulling high speed stunts, that they might eventually want to try for themselves. But they won't be getting totally destroyed by those high speed players early on, getting fed up and leaving before they have a chance to learn the rest of the game.

[Samual]

No MASTER, it was the PRECIOUS! The PRECIOUS made us do its! Seriously though, that wasn't really what I was saying.


Those two features scare off new players, though. Fortunately, there are two ways to counter them without removing them IMO:

GRAPPLE HOOK AND JET PACK INTEGRATION INTO DEFAULT
(They have to be speed/endurance balanced with the other movement types and offhand instead of pickups.)

CHARACTER CLASSES IN DEFAULT
(Stronger but slower conventional movement classes for noobs, weaker but faster special movement classes for veterans.)

No, and no.

Well, MAYBE -- MAYBE -- for character classes if someone can do it effectively, but even then that would have to be for 3.0 and not 2.6 (It would break older maps as well).. Changing that in a minor version is FAR too much of a difference.... Other than that, no, I doubt that will ever happen.

Anyway... I started playing at around the release of 2.4.2 (Although I knew about the game since 2.3).. I suppose i'm not an oldschool player in this sense, but I have tried every Nexuiz release so far (Literally... I downloaded them all and tried them out.) There are some things I notice about older versions of Nexuiz which just attract me a bit more than the current game.. Namely, the entire game before 2.5 was more lean.. It was cleaner and seemed to be more solid. This is what I believe is the current problem with Nexuiz, I think Nexuiz had 1 too many twinkies and it's now bloated. Now, i'm only able to change the balance of the game for 2.6... But if it were up to me, I would go for a leaner experience to the player, simpler HUD with simpler style of the game itself. Basically, i've constructed a list of things which I think would benefit Nexuiz in the long run, and would attract players better.....

-- #1: Remove/don't add guns which have radically abstract ideas behind them which don't match the rest of the game style. Fireball is the prime example, it simply doesn't fit the game... HLAC actually did fit the game in my opinion, but there are already weapons similar to it and I chose to simply remove the HLAC and replace it with a modified Crylink secondary which was in a way similar to it. This cleared up some of the weapons and made them slightly more unique. As for the rifle, i'm not entirely sure it should still be in the game at the moment. I removed the reload and div0 created a new secondary for it, but people still don't seem to accept the weapon very much. Personally I like it now, but we'll see how it pans out. Now, i'm also against the idea of rejecting new weapons.. That is, if you have an idea for a weapon and you code it, I probably wouldn't reject it unless it's not a unique weapon and resembles other weapons far too much.. I would reject it if it doesn't match Nexuiz gameplay though.

-- #2: Focus more on performance development. Although I know LordHavoc is trying his best, it seems the engine is only getting slower.. If you do a comparison of the "medium" setting between all versions of Nexuiz, you'll see a huge decrease in performance over time.... Actually i'll end up doing some physical benchmarks between these later and post the results on the development forum. Anyway, it seems that more and more players are leaving Nexuiz now simply because it doesn't run on their computers properly any more. This begs the question, is the performance scaring away new players as well? If so, something needs to be done here.. Now... I don't know enough of the engine to do these optimisations to make the engine run faster... In fact, only one person does, LordHavoc. This is also true with about half of the commits done to the engine lately... Even div0 doesn't know what LordHavoc is doing most the time, and we simply don't know what is stable and what isn't.. Or what ends up hurting performance and what helps it. I know LordHavoc is doing his best, but something really must be done to increase the performance of the engine (Other than removing features.... That's not beneficial really)

-- #3: Clean up game modes and simplify some game mode attributes. There are several game modes which I would consider as bloat to the game at the moment, as they simply aren't played and/or they aren't done very well. Now, I don't exactly want these game modes removed, just simply improved. (Except Runematch, Runematch we can do without.) Heh it's hard to say my opinion on this without sounding like a game mode nazi, but it's really that I just want game modes which people enjoy playing... Other game modes are simply bloat and should probably be removed. Now, there are some improvements I can suggest (Yeah, i'm not just going to say "This is bad, remove it" and leave it at that..) -- For one, improve the spectator system with LMS/Clan Arena/Arena. At the moment, it entirely fails and feels very buggy, and I think improving it by making it a very responsive and clear experience without glitches would make the game modes more appealing to players. As for Nexball, I have no idea honestly... The only thing I could suggest is improving collision between the ball and players, but of course there really isn't much you can do there as it's pretty much the best it's going to get. That and perhaps improving the HUD for nexball itself as right now the artwork is a bit sub par, along with the ball itself. (A soccer ball? Really?) With CTF, make the experience more streamline and improve roles.. Perhaps even add a sub-system which controls player roles and informs them of this, as well as telling players to product certain objectives.. Now, that sounds more complex, but I believe it could be done in a clean and simple way if done correctly. This idea actually came from LordHavoc, and at first I wasn't very sure about it -- But after we talked for a bit, I think it could be a good system.. I'll explain it later if someone requests. As for onslaught, I honestly have no idea at all other than FIX ALL THE FUCKING BUGS WITH IT... </raeg> I started it on my server recently from SVN, and I must say it's entirely broken in many ways, especially with warmup and many other things. I have no idea other than that for getting people to play it, although the interesting thing is that when I did run it on my server I had a full server even with those bugs. So perhaps onslaught actually COULD be good if people gave it a chance. Keyhunt: I have no idea, just needs more exposure imo. Anyway, the BIGGEST influence I think we could possibly do is add a "How-to-play" system within the game which pops up for new players by default until they opt-out of it.. This would guide the players through what they see while playing a certain game mode before they even play on the server itself..


I really do have more to discuss for suggestions/improvements, but i'm too lazy to type them up really.. Besides, honestly this whole reply i've typed up seems a bit bad due to rather bad sentence structure, I really shouldn't do this when I have a hangover. ^_^ -- Regardless, i'd really prefer to do this over IRC with everyone later where replies can be done instantly and ideas can be discussed quickly.. Perhaps we can all organise a time and a channel where we can discuss all this on Quakenet, as I think this would be a better method of discussing problems.

[Samual]

Nice that no one has replied to comment on my ideas... Thank you very much >.>

[tZork]

i guessing most ppl see that massive textblock and go "gah, tl;dr". at least i did

After actually chugging tough the text, id say your saying... not much in many words

#1 irrelevant for new ppl. they know none of the guns anyway.

#2 Better performance is always nice and good, however its impossible to compare timedemo values from distant version since the way its calculated changed over time. I do feel the strain on the computer is quite a bit higher now then in say 1.x tough. I also think much of that extra load is media / features added and enabled by default. As its quite possible to get nexuiz playable on fairly modest hardware i dont think this is a big issue wrt to topic. perhaps default settings could be a bit more conservative tough.

#3 as fro as new ppl goes, the focus should clearly be on the most played modes. ctf, dm, minsta. the last one is proly the most streamlined we have atm. in general much of Nexuiz codebase would do well with a major cleanup. just who has the time, knowledge and patience for such a massive task?

[Flying Steel]

Nice that no one has replied to comment on my ideas... Thank you very much >.>

I read all of it but I don't understand how it relates to the topic of attracting/keeping new players. I don't think new players really care about these issues, like tZork said. Streamlining the arsenal and game-types would be more general purpose improvements that new players won't notice/appreciate.

I'm not sure if you are really considering this issue for what it is. There's something(s) about Nexuiz which is keeping it unpopular and thereby potentially endangering its long term future. These something(s) need to be identified and solutions developed otherwise you might as well just ignore this issue altogether and make general game improvements as you see fit.