Noobs and Information

Many games have large noob populations, and they suck. Dealing with noobs is a pain. They don't know what they're doing, they don't know what to ask, and they're asking all the wrong people in the wrong places.

I think the same thing happens in many domains, not just in online games.

The problem is that the noobs have no information. Games with strong documentation and community features reduce their noob load; games where information is spread out among third-party sources and where game mechanics are not explained by the developer have much higher noob loads.

Warcraft has extensive online documentation, but they still have a high noob load. 'Preventing' noobs requires addressing the needs of the noobs, not the needs of the marketing department. Keeping players interested, getting them to come back, giving them something to look forward to -- these are all great. But it's not what noobs need.

Travian has crappy documentation. There's a lot of different info sites, but many of them are paltry. They focus on a few of the major concepts in the game, and although often broad and deep, are broad and deep in the wrong places.

Single-player games tend to not have noobs. Single-player games tend to require that they explain themselves to new players or else players just stop playing. I've played a number of 'innovative' single-player console and PC games that just didn't make sense. Although these games hint at depth and complexity and something fun, they hide it. And if I can't find it, the game gets returned and I don't recommend it. And I expect they get bad reviews, too.

What noobs need is direction. They need to know how the game scores them. They want to know the roles that they are expected to take. They want to know the consquences of their actions, before they take them. They want a place to go for this information, plus a forum lively enough where they can ask obscure questions.

Direction

Single-player games tend to have scores or mission directives that communicate to players what it is that they're trying to accomplish. Warcraft is fairly open, yet there are a few major goals: get to the level cap (80), accumulate gear, and work through the hardest dungeons. A more subtle point is the things that they should look out for along the way; some guidance on which goals are worthwhile. Many mid-level players worry about gear, spending hours and days getting just the right piece. Then they out-level it a few days later.

Travian takes pride in its opaqueness, supposedly because it gives players 'freedom' to choose their own path. Yet there are a few paths that are extremely useful to the over-arching goal of winning the game. Winning the game is something that's done by an alliance, not by a solo player, or one player that happens to be in an alliance with some friends. It requires the cooperation of dozens, if not hundreds, of players. There are a few strong roles that players can take, as well as some rules for how to be most effective. Yet the publishers don't do any of that; they leave it up to players to discover all of that on their own.

The discovery process can be fun, but there's two important concepts that limit where a game designer should put discovery: consequence (see below) and direction. If a player first has to figure out where he's going, then he's not discovering the game world, or developing strategy; he's figuring out what the user manual would look like, if the user manual had something more constructive than a simple list of all the units in the game and their cost.

Roles

Role is related to Direction. Whereas Direction shows the player what they have to do to win (what obstacles they have to overcome), Role is the set of tools that the player has available to do it.

A Priest in World of Warcraft knows about the spells that he can cast, but a good role is a bit more than "cast these three spells over and over." In a raid, a healer can stay focused on one target, heal several targets, look over a whole bunch of people and top them off -- or stick to some of the utility spells that they have.

Over a career levelling a priest, that player might go Holy (and heal in groups), Shadow (and focus on damage and mana generation), or Discipline (for... PvP?). Ignoring the accuracy of those descriptions, these are ways of telling new players: if you choose this class, you will have these roles that you fit into.

In Travian, roles could be as a Defender, Hammer, or Feeder; one might work solo or in a group. There's an infinite variety of combinations, obviously -- yet there are no general guidelines. Travian noobs wonder what they should be focused on. They try to do all things, without picking a role. They want to be offensive, but don't know how that plays out over a year. It's very frustrating to spend a lot of time on a game building a character (as in WoW) or a bunch of villages (as in Travian) to find out that you made fundamental mistakes early on, and that your current effectiveness is gimped because of it.

Giving new players guidance on the Role that they'll play can help players get started on the road to contributing during a game, rather than observing. Links to discussions will help them understand how other players feel about that role, letting new players find their sweet spot that much faster.

Score

Score defines direction. Score tells players how they win. It gives them feedback, and it's through feedback that players learn to play better. I don't like mashing buttons; winning for random reasons is not an achievement. Score tells me if I mashed the right buttons, so that I can see patterns in the game, start developing a strategy, start discovering the game world, meeting new people, and then killing them.

Open games sometimes have visible 'score' charts that measure inconsequential things. Statistics can be fun to browse; some people like that. I often do. But if you give everybody a useless metric (but one easy to manipulate), many will shoot to maximize that metric, even if it is a detriment to their play experience. If you put up a score-board but that score-board only applies to some players, or is completely irrelevant to the rest, you misdirect your players.

Travian shows village population for all the players. This is the major score rank in the game, since it's something that everyone has and it's relatively easy to see. Yet it, ultimately, isn't a strong measure of performance. But that's a problem with team games; how do you measure 'performance' when so much of the contribution one makes is building social networks, establishing trust, etc?

For vague, open games like travian, maybe the best way to communicate 'score' to players is to give them an overview of previous rounds. Show them the target, and how they measure progress, and then what last round's measuring stick looked like. They might choose a different metric, but at least with this kind of guidance they can make an informed assessment about how well they are proceeding.

Consquences

This was one big problem in many MMORPGs: players were 'free' to destroy their characters, spending hundreds of hours building a character that was sub-par. I remember putting points into Charisma in Dark Age of Camelot. As a Cleric. It did nothing for my character; they were wasted points. The 'freedom' to distribute points as I felt wasn't backed with enough information to make a good choice (unless I had been playing the game through to the end-game already, which didn't even exist when the game first shipped). Further, my choice was hard-locked; it could never be changed. This was a combination of asking players to make choices without sufficient information and then penalizing them, for the rest of their online career, for the wrong choices.