More specifically, what problems did you have before learning the ropes of the game? We figure we are losing 90% of the players because of the UI and other barriers, and that doesn’t even count the ones scared away by the ASCII graphics.
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What do you think is scaring people away?
You may want to ask this question in a forum where you meet more people that actually *have* been scared away.
The Bay12 forum consists mostly of people who haven't. We're probably still a decent source for the feedback you want, but I'd consider asking the same question at a bigger games community, like IGN, Gamespot, or perhaps Qt3. Chances will be higher to meet people who actually have been scared away there, and even if you don't get many answers, you can write it off as a subliminal advertisement.
To answer your question: What frustrated me the most in the beginning were the following two things:
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1. The UI, and specifically, the inconsistency of it. I have absolutely no problem with an ASCII UI, and I can live (teeth-gnashingly
) with an inefficient UI, but it's the inconsistency that really made me cry out in frustration when I was learnig this game.
Example: In the "u"nit list, I see the current jobs of all my dwarves, but I can't change their labor allowances from there. To do this, I have to zoom to the "c"reature, go to its "p"references, and choose "l"abor. That's inefficient, but here's the point I'm getting at: During this process, the scrolling mechanism changes twice - and what's worse, if I hit the key that *does* scroll the unit list while looking at a dwarf's labor assignments, then it doesn't only fail to scroll the list of labor asignments. It also moves the cursor on the map *away* from the dwarf in question, possibly activating a totally different dwarf, and I have to find the previous one again to correct that.
Another example is the space key - it's sometimes used for confirmation, sometimes for cancellation, and sometimes for selection ("m"ilitary screen). This makes it very easy to accidentally do exactly the opposite of what you want. What's worse, sometimes the action is labeled as a cancellation, but it actually does confirm the action and just closes the menu (e.g. when assigning animals to cages). As a result, a new player never reaches a stage where he intuitively hits space to perform a given action, because doing things intuitively in the current UI is ususally a recipe for disaster. The player has to constantly re-evaluate whether the key he wants to press is the right one for the action he wants to perform *in the current context*.
A third example is the mechanism of marking an area. In some menus it's done by moving the cursor to two diagonal corners of the rectangle to be marked, and pressing "Enter" on each. In other menus, you have to press the "uhkm" keys to shape the rectangle. And if you mistakenly choose the wrong mechanism (which will happen often to new players), then you may end up having to re-enter your command al over again - if you want to build a drawbridge, and mistakenly press enter on one corner of the area where you want to build it, then you end up with a one-square drawbridge and have to cancel and redo the command. Again, this inconsistency is confusing the players - instead of learning one method of marking areas, or perhaps two alternative methods that can be used in each menu, they have to learn both methods *and* have to learn which method works in which menu. In terms of how much time and effort you have to invest to learn to navigate through a game's UI, the latter is just a totally unnecessary overhead.
A fourth example is the differentiation between things like like "d"esignations, act"i"vity zones, "b"uildings, and stock"p"iles. There may be in-game reasons for treating each of those differently, but for a player who starts learning DF, all four are very similar - they are just commands that specify what you want to do with a given area. The fact that there are four distinct mechanisms to do that, each with its own set of menus and commands, and each of them *necessary* to learn, is highly confusing. New players will often (for example) type "i" when they want to define a traffic zone, mark the zone, then find out they can't specify a traffic zone in this menu, then search around in which menu they can, probably just entering all other menus until they find the right one. Again, it's not the presentation of the UI that frustrates people, or how many keystrokes you need to perform a given action, it's the seemingly (for the player) arbitrary split of one function into four distinct and very different menus that does.
The same goes for the mechanisms of gaining information about the things on the map - "q"uery, con"t"ent, "v"iew, and loo"k" are very similar, and the player has to remember which one to use in which situation. Choosing the wrong one means you have to cancel out and look for the right command.
The problem (imho) is not that the UI is complicated or not nice enough to look at. Players of massive simulation games expect the UI to have a bit of a learning curve - if a game allows you to do many different things, then it'll take a bit longer to figure out all these things in the UI, nobody expects DF to have a UI as sleek as "Doom". However, as laid out in the previous paragraphs, DF's UI is not only complicated, it is complicated and
inconsistent. And imho that's what's causing unnecessary frustration and what throws many people off. It's like telling your players "Here's a complex game, and we'll make it extra hard for you to learn it by confusing you with lots of different and even contradicting UI mechanisms."
So, when the UI is concerned, I don't think it's a specific menu that's scaring people away. It's the inconsistency of the whole UI that causes input mistakes, so that people have to redo their input and/or try to repair any damaged caused by the mistake, which causes frustration and scares people away.
Suggestion: Redesign the UI in way that there is *one* confirmation key, *one* cancellation key, *one* "select" key, *one* method of marking areas that works in every context (having a second one as an alternative isn't bad, but at least one should function independently of context), and *one* method of scrolling. That would go a *long* way in preventing people from getting frustrated over the UI.========================================
2. The AI. Apart from the UI, it's the *A*I that's most frustrating, and in a way the two effects exacerbate each other.
Example: It's easy enough to order dwarves to stay inside, but then they do the famous entry dance. One solution to this is to draft all your civilians into the military and station them somewhere safe. However, doing so is a convoluted and error-prone procedure for the starting player because the "m"ilitary screen works different than most others. Hence, he feels that the lacking AI forces him to deal more with the inconsistent UI. Feeling this way is an easy method to become frustrated and eventually be scared away.
Another very common example: The AI currently cannot evaluate whether building something would cut a dwarf off from the rest of the fortress. This leads to the well-known problem of dwarves starving behind the walls or floodgates they just constructed. There are workarounds, but each of these requires the player to spend even more time with a convoluted and inconsistent UI just to prevent a stupid action that *could* be prevented by a smarter AI in the first place.
A third example would be dwarves building a multi-storied tower and inevitably crashing down with their freshly constructed, unsupported floors and walls, because they can't figure out that their construction will cause a cave-in. Again, there are workarounds, but these require intense micro-management of building jobs assigned through a complicated and inconsistent UI.
I know that the AI is going to be improved, but I suggest to raise the priority of fixing AI stupidities that cause such stupid dwarf deaths. The reason is that especially these deaths are extremely frustrating for a new player. Think about it: You invested a lot of time to learn the UI, you finally managed to find your way around all these different menus. You learned how to direct your dwarves' actions and you've grown attached to them (the ease of growing attached to one's dwarves due to the wealth of information that DF offers about them is one of DF's best mechanisms to keep the player interested *despite* all the frustration). You finally learned how to design a drowning trap, or a two-story tower with fortifications, and then you see that one of the dwarves you've grown attached to has died, because he couldn't see that sealing himself in a one-square room behind a wall might be a bad idea. I suspect that this is a *major* factor in scaring new players away because it gives them the impression that even if they do learn the whole UI, they still won't be able to enjoy the game because the AI will kill their dwarves anyway, even in situations which a three-year old kid could master. Losing dwarves in a goblin siege is frustrating too, but it's an expected part of the challenge, even by new players. Losing dwarves who stupidly walled themselves in is *much* worse for a new player's motivation.
Suggestion: Upon starting a construction that makes a tile inaccessible (like a wall, or a floodgate), have a dwarf perform the following check: Start at the NW corner and, circling around the construction, determine how many different areas the immediately adjacent tiles would form. Then, check whether these different areas will still be accessible for a each other after buolding the construction (simple pathfinding check). If they aren't, then have the dwarf construct the building from the side where he has access to the largest area afterwards (DF already keeps track of pathing zones, so the framework for such a check might aleady be there). Alternatively (if there's no function to determine the size of a zone), have him construct the building from the side that allows access to the biggest number of other zones afterwards.These are, imho, the two best improvements that could be done for new players: Have a consistent UI, and prevent the most stupid dwarf death through AI blunders.
Thanks for listening, and thanks for asking our opinion.
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Topic: What turns you off about DF? (Read 315062 times)