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[TomiTapio]

The forums are rather civil. You cannot fix the few errants by asking nicely!

Success is getting two waves of migrants and walling off the outside world and the caves, and farming underground crops forever, and smelting 2000 iron ore at the safe magma smelters.
All you need is food and happy thoughts for the dwarves.

[jseah]

Actually, I think claims of difficulty and overcomplexity might be a bit overstated. 
Difficult might be applicable to nethack, it screws you over for not knowing obscure bit #2417.  (I reference the engraving of "Elbereth")
Dwarf Fortress is challenging.  But the difficulty can be planned around. 

I came into dwarf fortress 40d through boatmurdered, and dug around on the forums for quite a while before even starting a proper fort.  I dislike losing, even the avoidable death of one miner makes me itch to savescum.  So far, none of my forts have died to... well, anything except FPS. 
(I built a waterwheel perpetual motion machine on my first fort to power the pumps for my moat, and took excessive care with plumbing; triple safeties and emergency shutdown FTW.  Although I'm sure it helped my first experience was in 40d and goblin ambushes were massacred with a hail of copper bolts and iron serrated disc traps... ~50 of them...)

I think the important thing to tell new players is to start by spending a few hours reading every last thing on the wiki before even genning a world.  And then spending another two hours learning the controls and keys for every menu before even unpausing the game. 
It's not a game you just jump into.  At least not unless you want your feet bitten off.  =P  You research it and plan, down to the plump helmet count vs expected consumption.  And if you don't want your dwarves to die, you add safeties to everything. 

[cerapa]

I think the important thing to tell new players is to start by spending a few hours reading every last thing on the wiki before even genning a world.

I think thats the bit people have difficulty with. Personally I like reading every single tidbit of information, but others might not.

[NW_Kohaku]

Actually, my learning curve with the game was reading Boatmurdered, then looking at the wiki.

Three days later, after I felt I had read enough of the wiki, I set out (Alllll the way back in 40d, no graphics, no mods).  I made my first fortress, occasionally stopping to read the wiki some more.  No real need to ask any help on the forums.  I worked up to having a queen in that first fort. 

This game isn't that complex, it's just giving you an overwhelming number of options all at once with no tool-tip explanations.  You make a farm, a food hall, some housing, some industry, and wall the whole thing off for protection from a military threat that comes at you in a gradual trickle.  This game is less complex than many other games I play, like the Sierra City-Builder games such as Emperor or Pharoah. 

Once you have gotten past the existential threat of dying of either starvation or military attack, both of which are easily handled within the first spring through massive halls of traps and a single farm, there are no threats to you, aside from exposing yourself to something like FBs or HFS.

This game is, simply put, far too easy and simple, and far too much has been made of the meme of its supposed complexity.  It's simply a game that doesn't have a good manual or tutorial that comes with it (and there are plenty of tutorials and manuals and a whole forum for asking questions), as compared to, oh, say, games like SimEarth or SimFarm or Outpost which were both complex AND had absolutely no help for a player, and seriously just expected you to keep losing until you got it right.

Finally, as I've said before, this game is famous for one thing above all else - it's supposed difficulty and complexity.  Why are you trying to strip that away from this game?  That is pretty much the only thing that makes DF unique (at least, in a good way, I don't think we want to sell DF on the glory of bad graphics...), so why water it down?  If anything, why not crank it up to eleven?

[breadbocks]

Its not like you die IRL if Urist McMiner falls into magma.

This seems like a flaw. I wonder if Toady will patch this out for .13?

OH GOD NOT AN UNEVEN NUMBER! I want a chance at living. The odd numbered ones are buggy-er. The even ones have the crashes gone. But if dieing IRL is added in, there WILL be a bug that kills you on embark.

Honestly, I suspect the OP was talking about me, and honestly, I don't care. But don't go all "I
 wanted to, but I won't". Anyways, I once read a post replying to a post commenting about how confusing the forums were saying "The DF forums should have a learning curve equal to that of DF itself". I myself wholly support that, and as such, I frown rather deeply when people don't get into the spirit of things.

[NW_Kohaku]

Honestly, I suspect the OP was talking about me, and honestly, I don't care. But don't go all "I
 wanted to, but I won't". Anyways, I once read a post replying to a post commenting about how confusing the forums were saying "The DF forums should have a learning curve equal to that of DF itself". I myself wholly support that, and as such, I frown rather deeply when people don't get into the spirit of things.

Oh?  What did you say?  I'd like to know where this has its roots.

Mostly, I'm seeing plenty of flak from the almost continuous stream of "I hate farming" threads that have been cropping up like weeds lately, so I figured I was the savage barbarian at the gates, although the second Shurhaian post seems more like it's about a Gameplay Questions thread.

[Rotten]

The problem is, a lot of people come in hearing about the awesome stories from games like Minecraft or Starcraft or whatever else has DF references in it and expect to find a nice game that has a typical learning curve, and you can hit the World 1 slot and be in your stone castle after a few hours.

Then when they can't even figure out how to dig after 20 minutes, and their first few fortresses get thrashed by a forgotten beast and they get that feeling of no control when some stupid dwarf tantrums instead of building the wall that keeping the troglodytes out they get frustrated and complain on the forums.

The problem I see is that Dwarf Fortress is unique in that you don't directly control any character, and unlike many other games with a similar concept (RTS's), the dwarfs can refuse to do what you want. The typical player coming from Starcraft or flash castle-building games will be very confused when the tell a dwarf "Go dig there" and the dwarf gives them the middle finger and gets some booze with the fisherdwarf and expedition leader instead. In fact, eating, sleeping and drinking are non-existent in most strategy games. Then they finally get that dwarf to dig out the entrance hall and find 20 different types of stone, ores and gems and they don't realize that they all do the same thing with a few exceptions... DF gets confusing, quickly. For instance:

Typical strategy game:
Worker states: Working, idle
Building materials: Stone, wood
Buildings: Base, mine, sawmill, windmill, castle, barracks
Valuables: Gold, gem
Power: Build windmill next to building

Dwarf Fortress:
Worker states: Working, idle, sleeping, eating, drinking, partying, on break, tantruming, recovering in hospital, doing something else, dead
Building materials: Marble, olivine, orthoclase, micrcocline, etc. etc. Maple, mahogany, featherwood, tower-cap, nether-cap, goblin-cap, etc. etc. etc. Copper, bronze, steel, bismuth-bronze, tin, adamantine, etc. etc. etc. Forgotten beast soap, crocodile fat, kitten bones, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.
Buildings: Armor stand, table, chair, butchery, masonry, carpenters workshop, alchemy workshop, farmers workshop, jeweler's workshop, still, farm, floodgate, door, lever, gear assembly, windmill, waterwheel, horizontal axle, vertical axle, etc. etc. etc.
Valuables: Gold, silver, XxBloody Pigtail SockxX, really anything has a value and can be sold.
Power: Build a windmill (make sure you have wind in your embark! Oh wait, you didn't check immediately after embarking? Sucks for you), or build a waterwheel in flowing water (make sure it's flowing, not still! How do you tell? Go check the wiki or something!), then build axles out from it's gear assembly, remembering that each axle eats 1 power and each assembly eats 5, then get it to the pump.

So yeah, DF is much more in depth than most other strategy games, and while some of that depth is surface only (most all rocks are the same), some is not (what the hell are my dwarves doing!? Build that wall, stop partying! How do I make them stop partying?!? Oh, the goblins got in you dumbasses! Party in hell!)

Of course, if there were more DF 2010 tutorials ( a lot of newbies don't use the old ones simply because they say that they're from 40d, even though the basics haven't changed) the situation would be better, but until someone just makes a comprehensive 31_xx tutorial we just have to point newbies towards the wiki, old tutorials and gameplay questions sections.

EDIT: Stop posting so fast!
The farming deserves it own tutorial at this point, pretty much. I've never realized why some people get so hung up about it. All you really need is a farming room, a cistern which is a little bigger than the area of the farming room/7, a door between the water source and the cistern linked to a lever, and a door between the farming room and the cistern linked to a separate lever. Fill cistern to 7/7, close that door, open door to farming room, make mud, close that door, refill cistern, use for wells. Grand total of 2 doors+6 mechanisms, or 8 rocks. But whatever.

[Noble Digger]

Have you ever considered that some of us genuinely don't want or welcome lazy, unskilled, unmotivated new players into this board? Many of those players show up and within their first 10 posts, proceed to start complaining that DF is horrible and too complex and too difficult and demanding that it be dumbed down and changed to suit their particular skill and maturity level. As far as I'm concerned they can all just go away. DF is what it is, and I like what it is. Where's the sense in droves of people who don't like the game crowding up this forum with threads about how bad it is, when they can simply leave and play something else whilst leaving the thousands who enjoy DF to enjoy it?

There are enough resources available in this community for anyone to become fluent in DF with a little reading, a little question-asking, a little experimentation. It's the people wanting to skip that process by changing DF into a fundamentally different game that I wish would just get lost. :> DF's convoluted difficulty and randomness made it what it is, for me, you want to get rid of that so you can lampoon your RL friends into playing this game which is most likely not their type of game. DF is not an out of the box friendly game, even though the lazy newb pack exists, this is a game for people who aren't afraid to get their hands dirty. If your friends aren't willing to play it, leave them to do what they like...

[breadbocks]

Honestly, I suspect the OP was talking about me, and honestly, I don't care. But don't go all "I wanted to, but I won't". Anyways, I once read a post replying to a post commenting about how confusing the forums were saying "The DF forums should have a learning curve equal to that of DF itself". I myself wholly support that, and as such, I frown rather deeply when people don't get into the spirit of things.

Oh?  What did you say?  I'd like to know where this has its roots.

Mostly, I'm seeing plenty of flak from the almost continuous stream of "I hate farming" threads that have been cropping up like weeds lately, so I figured I was the savage barbarian at the gates, although the second Shurhaian post seems more like it's about a Gameplay Questions thread.

See [ur=http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=63932.0l]here[/url].

Anyways, I agree with the rest of the topic. Newbs: Get off your lazy ass AND READ THE WIKI. If you can't handle the level of Sadism and Complication that this game is prone to, GET. OFF. MY. LAWN! The game fills a niche in the ecosystem, and gives us forumite a chance to show the dark side of our humor. Where else would you find a 20 page topic on how to trap and optimize the (lucrative) mermaid murdering business?

[NW_Kohaku]

Rotten, I have to ask... what's a "typical strategy game"?

If you mean RTS, then we're talking about something from an entirely different genre than the sorts of games that I associate with DF, which are games like the Sierra Citybuilder series (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_Building_Series), which blow DF straight out of the water in terms of complexity. 

Games like Emperor require you to manage walkers over whom your only control is the layout of your streets, and the knowledge that they always take the path they didn't take the last time they came to in a fork in the road, as well as an arbitrary distance limit.  Everything you did in the game was based upon being able to manage your traffic flow so that everything had access to all the services they needed, on top of the challenge of the several times more complex industries and interdependencies that the game had.  Much of the challenge is in just being able to cram everything you need into the space you have - most of my later-game cities wound up with literally every tile being occupied by something.

In DF, all you need to worry about is building traps and a farm, and you're done.

This is why the game needs more complexity, and more interdependency of its systems, and why we need, say, farms that are not a "free stuff button", or more complex societies to manage so that there's actually something for the player to DO in this game besides wait for more goblins or FBs to show up.

[Noble Digger]

Agreed with Kohaku... All my advanced forts, I'm just trying to pass years so my population will go up, or so some real attacks will happen. Even mass dumping stone after clearing out 4-6 mineral veins only takes 1\3 of a season nowadays. :X I'm just about ready for DF to become 3 shades harder, at this point.

[Shurhaian]

No, breadbocks, it wasn't your post that I had seen. I'm not going to point fingers beyond that - I saw a post that I thought was over-the-top, I reported it as such, and that was that. Maybe it will be allowed to stand; I don't know. You had a grievance(which is one I sympathize with in that case) - you were acerbic in your response, but you weren't just calling the OP names for happening to not agree with your play style. I might not have gone as far as you did in that post, myself, but it's not what I'm talking about.

There are plenty of things newcomers can do that aren't suitable for the forum either - true. DF is about as far from a "casual game" as you can get, beyond others in anything that might be called a similar genre - true. My personal stance is that the complexity of DF is incredible, and leads in turn to some incredible things, but that throughout, it should remain a game and not work. Where that threshold lies is, of course, different for different people. I personally don't mind people who want to bring metallurgy even more in line with the real world, for instance, and will myself sometimes use mods that do this - but I wouldn't have wanted to be met with the full complexity of it while also still learning how the game worked.

The game is already plenty complex. Within that complexity are some things that don't quite behave as they might be expected to in the real world. If someone suggests something that would give miners a sense for the rock around them, I don't think that's unreasonable - skilled miners and prospectors will necessarily learn something about the structure of the stone they're digging in - and I certainly don't think it's call to attack the suggester for being too weak or too stupid to play DF.

I don't expect the forum to turn into kid-friendly Happy Sunshine Daisy Land. I'll say this again - a little ribbing here and there isn't at all what I'm on about. If someone comes in and starts being rude, well, I'm not too likely to personally join in on any reciprocal rudeness(not intentionally, anyway), but I'm not going to be weepy about that fate, either.

But if someone is trying, is making an effort to learn the game but thinks one particular thing could use a tweak, in a manner that doesn't entirely break the feel of the game, to be a bit more forgiving - I don't see why that's cause for name-calling. Some people will want to see DF become more detailed, a more accurate simulation of reality. That's valid. Some people will want to see it become more playable - not at the expense of all that detail, not even very much of it(annoying though they are, I do think that the loss of all the immigrant nobles was regrettable, for instance, and hope to see their function back and improved in not too long), but perhaps blunting the cutting edge a little here and there in the interests of expediency, both in development and in play. That's valid too.

Both camps seem to have an unfortunate tendency to forget that the other side has merit, at times, and that's when the insults come out.

I personally think this community is at its best when it helps people who are struggling, but willing to work at it, to get into the game(and to parse the great volume of information that is the wiki). Turning it into a clique where only those who have no problems with the game as-is are welcome would be pretty much the opposite of that - and while it's certainly not there yet, it feels closer to it than it did, say, two years ago.

I'm trying to keep a civil tone myself, to not assume that things that might seem like it are deliberate attempts to bait me, and to keep my head even if they are. If I don't reply to something here, it may be because someone else has already addressed it, or it may be that I doubt my own ability to do so calmly and rationally. (There is of course the third option, of e.g. Toady or ThreeToe telling me to STFU, but I'm hoping that I'm not being obnoxious enough to warrant that...)

[Noble Digger]

It's definitely worth avoiding insults, particularly when someone is trying to learn. We have the DF Gameplay Questions board, and in there I won't really give anyone crap jokingly, because they are prostrating themselves to ask for help from the experienced forum-goers. Particularly though, I have a problem with new users who want to act like they're perfect and any problem they have with the game is the game's fault. When directed to the wiki, they will ignore the post or say something snide back about us being elitists... What?

[Shurhaian]

Oh, indeed. There are some people out there who just refuse to be helped.

Probably doesn't make things any better for those who need to ask but are honestly willing to try.

[Timst]

Well, I don't think the difficulty of getting into the game is the same difficulty (or lack thereof) that older players complains about.

The difficulty for a new player is to understand the game interface, how to tell dwarves to do X or Y, how to master the basic features (farming, stockpiles etc.)

The difficulty that older player want is - most of the time - at the end of the game : harder siege, stronger HFS, less productive farming, and so on. Few of these things become relevant before the fort has reached a good size (80ish dwarves), so they don't concern new players : by the time they have a fort this big, most of them have a pretty frim grasp on how to play.