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Old 01-13-2008, 04:01 PM   #18
DurNominator
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Join Date: Sep 2007
Home MUD: Carrion Fields
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Re: Can "Not Newbie-Friendly" be a Selling Point?

Newbie friendly is a good, providing that you don't have to sacrifice how you want your game to be like. My beef with your game was that it wasn't possible to combo the commands and it didn't have enough helpfiles that would have made learning the system easy. The game did tell me what comboes I can do, but not what those comboes did or that I would have to do the comboes one wiggle at a time. Also, I wanted to make a dragon, but it told me that I had to get a black belt first from the tutorial. I failed to defeat the green-belted fellow. I found the system to be somewhat unwieldy because of having to remember so much and having to react so quick after typing in one command in combat.

Few ideas that could make Godwars II more newbie friendly:

-Allow comboes like 'rcsss' instead of forcing it to be 'rc' 'rs' 'rs' 'rs'. Perhaps also allow them to name the combo for easy later use with some kind of skill command. For example, the system could work like 'skill rcsss "uppercut"', which would make a user-specific rcsss uppercut command (or you could make easy to remember names for commands in similar fashion as alternative way of doing things instead of dumbing the system down to some restricted version of kill command). This would make the system closer to that of other MUDs without effectively sacrificing any versatility from your own system.

-Have helpfiles for skills and spells available. Maybe the name of the spell could be revealed after you first cast that combo (that way people could remember what it does)? After that, reading the helpfile for that particular spell would be easy by typing the spell name.

The commentary on Gods wars II is based on few hours of being newbie there, so take it with a grain of salt.


To stay on topic, my answer to the original poster is no, not newbie friendly isn't a good advertising card. There are plenty of negative factors that can make the game not newbie friendly (such as lacking helpfiles, poor design etc.), so you are better off advertising with the positive factor that makes your game not newbie friendly (if such exists) than with the game being not newbie friendly.
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