Re: [Wesnoth-dev] Extensive and useful feedback from a Wesnoth newbia
Rusty Russell [EMAIL PROTECTED]: We could offer an optional part 3 where small fights occur in the forest -- There are many dangerous creatures on the edge of these woods: if you wish we can stay and practice on them... Aha. I think that offers us a way forward, with the advantages of both a short and a longer tutorial. I like it. 2) Transition to campaign play could be smoother This I agree with, and I think is the answer to our dilemma. The tutorial was designed to get you to HttT (Easy). As this is no longer the norm, but we should explicitly craft a first campaign which handles these issues as beautifully at HttT does: I think TB with more tutorial content at Easy level might do for this. I don't suppose you measured how long the tutorial took her? Alas, no. I think about 20 minutes, but I'm not sure. -- a href=http://www.catb.org/~esr/;Eric S. Raymond/a ___ Wesnoth-dev mailing list Wesnoth-dev@gna.org https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/wesnoth-dev
Re: [Wesnoth-dev] Extensive and useful feedback from a Wesnoth newbia
8) Flavor text and mechanics should be distinguishable or separated in help. Bug: Flavor text is nice but experienced players refreshing their knowledge of the game often want to just pick out mechanics. Fix: Organize like Civilopedia, where mechanics cones first and flavor follows. Or, highlight the mechanics text so it's visually distinctive. Rating: Annoying. Actually, I'm well in support of this - for one, I'd like to make it such that we have space for full-body portraits in the help pages; which we certainly don't, now. We also could use slightly more capable layout to make better use of space - an equivalent to the css float, applied to our portraits, would be a godsend. Having the portrait, the descriptions, and, potentially, things we don't currently include, on one page, and having all the stats on another, would be grand. 15) Where are the female leads in campaigns? Because I haven't been writing campaigns. 16) Unit types topping out at level 2 makes them bad investments It's worth noting that for flavor reasons, Dave did not want the poacher/trapper line (which are effectively self-trained hillbillies), to be able to reasonably equal the elves (or trained human soldiers) in ranged combat (or any combat for that matter). I'd have opted for different, much more radical ways of achieving the same end (like bumping the entire elven race up a level), but this gives you the general gist of why this was done. ___ Wesnoth-dev mailing list Wesnoth-dev@gna.org https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/wesnoth-dev
Re: [Wesnoth-dev] Extensive and useful feedback from a Wesnoth newbia
16) Unit types topping out at level 2 makes them bad investments Bug: I'd actually heard this one in my one previous extended conversation wiith a Wesnoth newbie. Fade, when I explained the advancement tree while she was complaining about bug 6, concurred. Why toss kills to a unit that isn't going to advance to the power level of L3? And thus, why build it at all? Fix: L3 everything. Outlaws, ghosts, everything. Rating: For her, Annoying. (I think it qualifies as Serious.) I want to answer that particular item because I'm deeply against it... I think the problem is in the way your player has looked at wesnoth, not in wesnoth itself. wesnoth is not about having the best units, it's about having the best army. LVL3 unit should be killable, they should die on a regular basis, they are not uber-units like you encounter in most ___ Wesnoth-dev mailing list Wesnoth-dev@gna.org https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/wesnoth-dev
Re: [Wesnoth-dev] Extensive and useful feedback from a Wesnoth newbia
On Mon, Jun 04, 2007 at 16:49:54 -0400, Eric S. Raymond [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 12) Visibility for unit types in help is too limited. Bug: This is the first thing that got Fade really steamed. She *hated* the you-can't-see-help-on-it-until-you've-encountered it rule, because it keeps her from (a) making intelligent decisions about which of her own units to concentrate on levelling up. and (b) making intelligent decisions about which of her opponents' units must be *kept* from leveling up. It bugged me too when I was starting. Fix: Fade wants every unit in the advancement tree of a unit encountered to be accessible in help. On IRC some objected that this would injure the present RPG-like feel where discovering the world is part of the fun. Mordante suggested a good compromise -- *next advances* of every encountered unit should always be visible. I also think seeing the whole tree makes sense. How are you supposed to make intelligent decisions about your play when you don't know what things upgrade to. I think in practise, most of the surprise element comes from meeting new unit types, not having them upgrade unexpectedly. If you want that, perhaps a player should see the whole tree of units they control and just the units they meet, that they don't control. Another reasoned mentioned for doing things this way was not to overwhelm new players by seeing lots of different units, that they mostly wouldn't encounter right away. Providing a way to see units grouped together by various categories was another wya to work around this. I played with this a bit a while back, but didn't get a great system for doing it. ___ Wesnoth-dev mailing list Wesnoth-dev@gna.org https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/wesnoth-dev
Re: [Wesnoth-dev] Extensive and useful feedback from a Wesnoth newbia
Bruno Wolff III [EMAIL PROTECTED]: There is an argument, that the fun of the game might be helped by having all branches have 3 levels. But AMLA is supposed to deal with some of that. Also are you proposing dropping the existing L4 creatures? No. But they really are rare exceptions. -- a href=http://www.catb.org/~esr/;Eric S. Raymond/a ___ Wesnoth-dev mailing list Wesnoth-dev@gna.org https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/wesnoth-dev
Re: [Wesnoth-dev] Extensive and useful feedback from a Wesnoth newbia
Quoting Eric S. Raymond [EMAIL PROTECTED]: I have recently had the experience of watching as my friend FadeTheCat, an experianced MMORPG gamer from the Windows and Macintosh worlds, learned Battle For Wesnoth. She was kind enough to provide me with running commentary on her impressions and reactions as she was learning the interface, going through the tutorial, and playing Two Brothers. Cool. It is always nice to get feedback, and even nicer to get feedback as insightful and detailed as this. :) Fade's conclusion is that she quite likes BfW and would even like to do campaign design for it. This is an offer to take seriously; she has done game design for Steve Jackson Games and was in fact the author of the rather successful Space Pirate Amazon Ninja Catgirls game. I judge she has the potential to become an extremely effective BfW campaign designer, offering a perspective and approach quite different from those we have now. Well, as with most Open Source projects, all she needs to do is start contributing. :) 1) It's too short. She'd like the tutorial to include more scenarios. 2) Transition to campaign play could be smoother 3) Significance of the turn counter and time running out is not emphasized enough in the tutorial. 4) Icons in the status line aren't explained well in the tutorial 5) Tutorial should include an example of a loyal unit, and explain loyalty 6) Tutorial should include a neutral keep. 7) Tutorial should at least touch on damage types. 8) Flavor text and mechanics should be distinguishable or separated in help. 9) The right-click menu on terrain and villages should offer an option to go to the help for that terrain., and 'd' should work there too. 10) There should be a word-search function for the help 11) The mouseover texts for the top-line status areas are uninformative. I can agree with all these. I think it'd be cool if we added some code to make it possible for certain areas of the interface to be highlighted during the tutorial. For instance, a red rectangle could surround each area as it is explained. 12) Visibility for unit types in help is too limited. This has been controversial for a long time. I think the best thing to do would be to allow access to all unit types but make some filters that can easily be set, to avoid overwhelming people with a large number of unit types. Enough people have complained about it that I can accept it is a problem though. 13) Press 't' to continue is misleading Agree. 14) Why is there a time-left panel at all in campaign mode? I made a change which shows a real-world clock in its place in campaign mode. Personally I think this works well. 15) Where are the female leads in campaigns? I agree. I would like to point out that the original campaign, Heir to the Throne has a male 'main' character, but has a very important female character who (spoiler) ends up being the true heir to the throne. Few campaigns have female main characters though. :( It would be good if there were more. And importantly, they should be done in a sensible and mature way. 16) Unit types topping out at level 2 makes them bad investments This is by design, and I disagree. It's a conscious strategic choice a player has to make between the long-term and short-term. Units that max out at level 2 should be easier to obtain or more powerful than counterparts that have a 3rd level. What I would like to see is more units that have a possible fourth level, to extend the strategic choice. Not that I'm excluding the possibility of some cases where extending to a third level makes some sense. 17) The way names are handled is confusing. I think personal names for everyone works best. Mac-specific glitches: I can't really comment on any of these, since I haven't used Wesnoth on Mac. David ___ Wesnoth-dev mailing list Wesnoth-dev@gna.org https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/wesnoth-dev
Re: [Wesnoth-dev] Extensive and useful feedback from a Wesnoth newbia
On Mon, 2007-06-04 at 20:06 -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Quoting Eric S. Raymond [EMAIL PROTECTED]: 1) It's too short. She'd like the tutorial to include more scenarios. I tested on newbies *without* experience in comparable games, so the tutorial was shaped by those experiences. They point in the opposite direction from this: the tutorial is too long and risks overwhelming with detail 8( We could offer an optional part 3 where small fights occur in the forest -- There are many dangerous creatures on the edge of these woods: if you wish we can stay and practice on them... 2) Transition to campaign play could be smoother This I agree with, and I think is the answer to our dilemma. The tutorial was designed to get you to HttT (Easy). As this is no longer the norm, but we should explicitly craft a first campaign which handles these issues as beautifully at HttT does: 3) Significance of the turn counter and time running out is not emphasized enough in the tutorial. 5) Tutorial should include an example of a loyal unit, and explain loyalty 6) Tutorial should include a neutral keep. 7) Tutorial should at least touch on damage types. The tutorial units don't really demonstrate this well so it's abstract knowledge. I think it's an excellent thing to do for the optional part 3. 4) Icons in the status line aren't explained well in the tutorial Yes, highlighting gui elements would be an excellent addition which wouldn't greatly add to the length of the tutorial. I balked at coding that up when I wrote the tutorial. I don't suppose you measured how long the tutorial took her? Thanks, Rusty. ___ Wesnoth-dev mailing list Wesnoth-dev@gna.org https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/wesnoth-dev
