Casual players like me

MEGA THING INBOUND!

I am a fairly casual player of strategy games. Not casual in the sense that I only play Tower Defense style games, or will only play a few matches before getting bored and moving on to another game, but more in the sense that I have very little interest in competing at a high ranking. I simply don’t have the time or interest to do the things that hardcore gamers do: practicing build orders, memorizing all the hotkeys, researching and calculating the absolute optimal strategies, and heck, I don’t even know what else they do to get so good.

But I still want to have fun playing multiplayer – which usually means winning. And this is where a lot of strategy games fail to get my loyalty – I’ll use Starcraft 2 as a particularly flustering example. After doing a bit of practice against bots, I think I played about 10 ranked games (that’s 5 hours total!) in multiplayer, getting obliterated every single time (except for that one time that a guy disconnected), before finally going back to the singleplayer campaign.

My plea is that casuals be kept in mind in the design of PA – this game has an amazing concept and there’s going to be a lot of people like who just want to blow up planets. There’s a few ways to keep it friendly without dumbing down the gameplay.

The easiest thing that casuals ask for is a good matchmaking system. The theory is that if newbies are paired with newbies, then they can proceed to beat each other up instead of all of them getting wiped out by pro players. In my limited experience, Starcraft 2’s matchingmaking was not quite there. It should have realized after a few matches that I was an utter noob, but it kept matching me against players way beyond my abilities and as a result, I kept losing and feeling helpless to stop it.

With a good matchmaking system, you can more or less guarantee newbies an eventual 50-50 win/lose ratio. That’s fair, but in practice not quite fun – it’s really when you're winning more often than you're losing that it starts being fun. In a fair matchmaking system, there's only one way to do this: get better at the game.

And this is where it gets tricky. RTS games are notoriously hard to get better at without devoting a lot of time and effort into doing the aforementioned hardcore gamer things. But PA is already a revolutionary game. Why let the designs of past strategy titles stop us?

The important thing in encouraging players to learn the game is to clearly communicate what they’re doing wrong. Casual players in particular are apt to blame the game rather than themselves for repeated failure, but rather than shunning them from the community for this fallacy, let’s help them – help the people like me. Here are the questions I typically have while playing multiplayer RTS games that go unanswered, which lead to frustration more than anything else:

How did he get such a huge army? – This is a huge one. The quintessential newbie RTS experience is painstakingly setting up your base, fumbling around a bit with the interface but otherwise getting a small army out the door – only to be massacred by legions of tanks from the other player.

This is almost always a failure in macro, so the game’s interface should make good macroing intuitive.

The Total Annihilation spiritual succession (except for SupCom2) has a challenging economic system to make accessible, but I’m impressed so far by what I’ve seen from Uber on this.

There’s really two main ways to fail at macro in PA: Stalling your economy and wasting resources. Stalling your economy should obviously give a lot of feedback that you’re doing something way wrong. The warning lights are all on and you can’t build anything with any reasonable speed. The next question is “what can I do to fix it”, which usually means temporarily pausing some production and/or reclaiming some things – these things should also be clear from the interface, and it should help the player determine what to pause in order to recover their economy.

Wasting resources is a much more subtle issue. Most newbies have a tendency to hoard resources, which doesn’t work in a flow economy. They think that running a deficit at any time is bad – after all, it’s a big red negative number on your screen, right? In reality, though, having a net income all the time (that’d be a big, happy, green number preceded by a “+” sign), is what’s bad because mass just falls off your storage. See why we get confused and frustrated? An intuitive interpretation of the interface actually leads us to the wrong strategies. PA’s economy display interface should be rethought compared to SupCom1’s to more effectively communicate what’s good and bad.

The other common macro failure is to lose too many units in the early game, but I’m not sure if that can be effectively communicated. It’s definitely clear that losing units is bad, but the late-game implications might not be immediately obvious. Discuss?

Why are all my units dying? – Casual players and newbies like me also get frustrated when we send our army against our opponent’s, and it appears to be of equal strength, yet our army is defeated spectacularly.

The failure here is one of two things: micro or unit weaknesses. Fortunately, PA already seems to be light on micro. I have one suggestion in this area, though: if any part of micro ever turns out to be necessary (in other words, there is only one micro action in a given scenario that any good player will take, and any player that does not take it will be at a disadvantage), offload it onto the AI.

An example would be artillery dodging from SupCom2: if you don’t zigzag your army, your tanks will all get slaughtered by mobile artillery units. This not only forces you to babysit your forces whenever going against artillery, but new players will have no idea that it’s necessary at all! I didn’t until someone actually told me and taught me how to do it. It would have been a better design if artillery-dodging had simply been integrated into the already advanced pathfinding. Imagine a whole tank-blob charging at the enemy, spreading out automatically so artillery shells hit empty ground – but as the army grows larger, it becomes impractical to dodge them and tanks start getting hit. Wouldn’t that be an emergent sight to see?

As far as unit weaknesses go, the TA-style game doesn’t tend to do the rock-paper-scissors thing you see in games like Starcraft, but there are some relationships that a player has to be aware of: anti-air against air (you don't say), mobile missile launchers against turrets (slightly less obvious), subs against naval (easy enough to figure out, but unfortunately you’ll lose a lot of air before you do). A simple tooltip like Starcraft’s (i.e. “Weak Against:” followed by a handful of unit icons) would go a long way toward helping casuals play effectively.

When did that happen? – It’s very frustrating when something important happens and you weren’t watching. This is less of a metagame concern and more about in-game frustration .When playing SupCom, 1 or 2, I had to teach my friends to either zoom out or keep a minimap open, because so much can happen when you’re focusing on something else. I’ve learned to pretty much play Icon Wars, being in strategic zoom most of the time, but even then I still miss important things (like the destruction of my navy or a few mass extractors). Your only warning is usually “Commander under attack”.

Because PA takes place on multiple round planets, the potential for things happening without your knowledge is even greater – unlike SupCom, it’s physically impossible to watch the entire battlefield at once.

So how do you make sure players don’t miss any of the action? Starcraft has a nice system where the interface will alert you to any battle happening off-screen, but Starcraft is a very different game – because every unit is explicitly queued, it’s a much bigger deal if one of them dies. If PA (or even SupCom) had a system like this, your screen would be overrun with alerts at all times.

This is the biggest challenge for the PA designers, and it doesn’t just affect casual gamers, so I won’t presume to offer any specific suggestions. It is an interesting discussion, though.

Conclusion (tl;dr) – As a semi-casual gamer, I want to be able to play against people of my skill level right away, and the basic strategies of the game should be intuitive to learn just by playing more. While things like studying replays and build orders should improve my play, they should be optional activities for when I’m ready to reach that next level.

One more thing (and I’m probably about to lose all my credibility here): I really like Supreme Commander 2. *dodges tomato* Sure, it lacks the strategic depth of the original and FA, but it’s easy to learn, and more importantly, easy for my friends to learn. When they watched me play, they saw a fun, accessible game with lots of explosions, and once they bought it, they were able to pick it the basic strategies pretty quickly and even beat me a few times (although they still prefer to play co-op, lol). That’s what I want PA to be like, without sacrificing gameplay.

Note: The preceding post, as of 2013/03/05, has been completely rewritten from the original. The original, which, while I don’t disagree with the points I make, is inelegantly worded and inflammatory, but I’ve preserved it below so we can all learn from my mistakes:

There arn't many of us SupCom2 fans here.

But how are you at TA?

If you are the kind of player who can go and build a small army at the beginning of the game on a non-metal map and begin harassing or attacking the enemy rather then sitting back and going for the artillery pieces (In supcom 2 terms, someone who is on even terms with say, a hard AI and can beat them on the battlefield with an army rather then artillery and nukes), Then you should be fine, because this is the type of game that is all about the higher strategic level then the nitty gritty level of playing.

As long as you have an expansionist type play-style, fighting for resources, killing your enemy's and eventually are able to out build and out fight your enemy with more tanks, then generally you should be decent at these types of games, even if you are somewhat casual.

I of a similar opinion as you, but I'm sure a bunch will be upset because OMG NOOB SUPCOM2 WAS TRASH YOU IDIOT ALHSADJSAFJHFAFJL:KFAD

*ahem*

You make a good point, and that sort of thing is exactly why I want to see experimentals. They are cool and fun, and leaving them out because the hardcore min-maxing half robot strategists (no offense =p) don't like what it could potentially do to the game is a step towards a gaffe as big as alienating said hardcore fanbase.

But that's how you are supposed to learn how to win. If you don't know anything about the game you are playing you will be bad.

So I suggest you look for others like you. If there are enough players in ranked you should find them there, since it gives you opponents on your own level after a while.

If you are below the default-start-rating you will need to lose a few games before you get opponents on your level. Just don't give up so fast.

You will get better at the game if you don't stop playing after 10 games.

Oh yes I sure do remember such games. Those moments will always happen, even if you are playing at a rather high level. Watch the replay, it usually shows why your opponent had that army. Ofc this requires that you know how macro in SC2 works. Look at it from the bright side: In PA there will only be one faction, if your opponent totally overruns you, you can just watch the replay and copy what he was doing.

If you make a mistake you need to be punished for it. That's just how it goes, it is needed to differentiate between good and bad players.

Replays -again- can help to realize the problem. Starcraft2 for example has a quite excellent balancing help for each unit, that tells you that unit x is good against unit y and bad against unit z.

A replay will tell you this. In general you just need to be fast enough, that's just how it is in RTS. You might want to try turn-based games. At least for me notifications usually go by unnoticed. I just fail to hear or see them xD It's better to zoom out and watch myself.

You have that chance, just don't give up. And read a few tutorials that will be posted by high-rating players in no time. Reading them might cost an hour or two, but will improve you tremendously.

I agree that a good RTS needs to be easy to learn and -let me add- hard to master. SupCom and Starcraft are pretty good at this for the most part imho. But in any game a newbie will get a hard time in his first (dozen) matches. The only way to make it a bit easier is to set up something like a newbie-search that lets you play against other total newbies.

Regrettably, I haven't played TA. I've played Forged Alliance a bit, though, and I definitely developed the aggressive, expansion play-style you described. (Unfortunately, that has become my dominant strategy in every RTS, which gets me into trouble in games where turtling is more common)

That made me think, though: most newbies default to a strategy where they chill out in their base while building up an army before attacking. Is there anything more that could be added to the UI or gameplay to encourage expansion, or is that the place where you have to draw the line between "casual" and "moron"?

The line-by-line breakdown was unnecessary since you disagree with my main point (that the game should be intuitive enough to gain competency simply through experience). I would have liked to see more reasoning as to why you disagree. Right now it seems your opinion is along the lines of "that's just the way it is and no improvements can be made".

The problem with your reasoning is that we have different objectives: you want to reach the top level of gameplay, and yes, you'll need to scour over replays and wikis and guides to do so, but I just want to be competent enough to beat some other casual players, and I think that a compromise could be reached where you could gain skill up to a certain point simply by playing the game more.

The key to casuals having fun, as you mentioned, is matching them against other casuals, and the trick to that is keeping casual players from getting frustrated and not playing, which is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem - so the game has to aim to give casual players feedback as to what they did wrong in many different, hopefully subtle, forms. As a casual player, I can definitely tell you that a loss is significantly more frustrating when you either don't know why you lost or just feel outmatched, as if you can't click fast enough to win.

I think you're onto something with the replays. Replays give you a ton of information as to what happened during a match, so much that any person of reasonable intelligence could figure out why they lost. You can't expect casual players to download replays of pro-level matches, but you can definitely encourage them via the UI (i.e. in the post-game screen) to watch their own replay and see the game from the other player's perspective.
This is a huge flaw of SupCom2: you can only replay the game as a spectator and you can't see the economy or FOW of a given player. Fortunately, I don't think Uber has or ever has had any plans of repeating this crime.

I found that when I was learning TA I would fall into 3 extremes:
1) I overflowed on resources big time.
I don't think players will have much trouble overcoming this. If you have extra money, build more factories and use more engineers. Overflowing on metal is definitely an emergency, and it should be treated like one. Overflowing on energy is a problem, but it's not that bad. You learn to manage it better with time.

2) I overspent metal big time.
In TotalA, spending too much metal wasn't a big deal. It was very obvious that you were spending too much and everything slowed down. The biggest challenge was that you didn't know how much metal a construction project would need. That's being fixed in PA.

Supcom had a similar problem with unknown spending rates. During FA's peak, overspending metal was also fatal due to a game breaking bug with upgrading extractors. If you quit FA due to running out of mass and being stuck, it was entirely the fault the upgrading extractor bug. Even the "fix" doesn't really fix the problem that you're always losing money during an upgrade. Doing too many at once, or taking too long with them would still kill you.

3) I overspent energy big time. Overspending energy is where bad things happen.

In TotalA it wasn't too bad. The biggest problem is that you lost metal, which was damaging and even crippling, but could be mitigated with some diligence. Energy priority and wide spread energy production meant that you always had a decent supply, even when solar panels and fusion plants were being destroyed. Metal makers were an extra safety net that can be turned off during a crisis (you DID hotkey your metal makers, right?).

In Supcom, all sorts of devices will malfunction and draw energy while your economy was simultaneously burning to the ground. What in the bloody hell. When Supcom energy ran out, you were screwed. The only way out was to ragequit.

What a flawed premise. The game should be always be guiding players towards improving their play. This can be with tooltips, with positive feedback systems (flashing error messages, warnings, etc), and by simplifying the more complex and brutal aspects of the game.

That's just my preferred way of working through big posts like yours, so I'll be continuing like this

Lets try:

When I started SupCom I was a total noob. I got bashed like 7 times in a row and it took me dozens of games to reach a 50%+ win-rate. I watched replays only when I really got killed hard and I wanted to now why, apart from that I just played a lot and got better slowly while raging hard sometimes. At some point just playing was no longer enough and I started to analyze the game in every way possible, but at that time I was already somehow competent with the game and it was definitely fun to play.
So I disagree that it is totally impossible to just play the game and get better, watching a few replays and playing a lot of games DOES work until you reach a certain point.
However...

While it definitely is possible to get better just by mostly playing it is definitely not fun all the time. So the problem is not that people cannot learn the game by playing 90% and watching replays 10%, but rather that it can be frustrating like hell to lose a ton of games to players who play just way better.
To make this as easy as possible we need a good ladder-system that quickly gets an idea of how good or bad somebody is.

Just because I am playing to be competitive doesn't mean I have experienced such losses myself, I know very well how freaking annoying it can be to just randomly lose my army. That happened to me in Starcraft 2 so many times. xD

Yeah Uber seems to be taking care of a good-replay system, which is really important. The game really should offer to watch the replay of a lost game with very few clicks to encourage players to check up what exactly their opponent did so much better than they.
I think a good way to show newbies how to play good would be to have a public replay vault that automatically offers a high-level replay of a given match-setup after you lost a game. Assuming that PA will use a fixed set of maps for ranked this would mean that after losing on some map you would see a list of high-level replays of that map right in the "You-lost"-summary screen after the game and you could check out those games to see what is considered "good".

I agree that the game should guide the players, but it can only provide basic information. It cannot describe typical pitfalls that people fall into, because they will probably change with the meta-game. It also cannot analyze your game for you.

Well UI improvements that allow a player to more easily manage engineers going out into the map and setting up the metal extractors you need, and with templates (SupCom:fa templates allowed a player to copy the layout and build order of a selected set of buildings into a quick and easy to place structure cluster) Should allow you to very, very quickly que up very complex orders for the construction of resources and forward bases, giving you more time to analyse the battlefield and command your troops.

Thinking and reacting is the hardest and best part, but it doesn't help when new players aren't sure of the new units and send a lot of time queuing up trivial stuff that more experienced players can do without thinking.

A set of pre-made templates and the ability to add new ones, and remove the defult ones will give new players access to the basic sets of building layouts that they will need to be building that they don't really have time to be analysing too much.

Freeing up your time to properly play the game, maximising your chances of victory even with little experience in perhaps a more refined way of commanding these orders.

Sure it can. Typical pitfalls include using the wrong units, using them incorrectly, or screwing up the economy. All of those issues can be addressed with tooltips and proper warnings. More complex issues can be fixed behind the scenes by denying access to the problem in the first place.

You can't really teach a player how to think or analyze their game. That part only comes with true experience, from oneself or someone else.

Regarding the problem of the casual players getting beaten up, I would say it's up to the community to handle this problem and Uber can only support us.

How can we help newbies? I'd agree that there should be some kind of data base giving you the basic hints on the game, so to understand the basic mechanics of the game. If we can set up a basic tutorial regarding playing in Multiplayer it might be more helpful than the basic tutorial for any skirmish match. (@Cola: Since you're one of the first time players of PA, you might restart the streams we did in FA and become a teacher )

How could Uber help? If Uber would allow for the ability to add comments into the replays this would be awesome, since it would allow players to understand certain actions of the players without the need for a caster or so teaching the new guys the game.

there are several ways to get good, but all include quite a lot of time to invest in the game.

find a clan or at least some players you can play with on a regular base, best if its in your native language. Also would be good if some of them would have higher skill than you. Let them teach you. Some will be patient, some wont. You need to find the right guys.

play really a lot, eventually you will become better. If you really "only play" without watching the replay and thinking about why exactly you lost, you will probably take 1000 games and still only be medium xD

I for myself am no replay-watcher either. Its just to boring, most of the time (there are some exceptional games, but regularly I find it not very interesting to watch games). Maybe if the replay system is better than in FA it might get interesting. (see the players perspective is a must)
But if I lost a 1v1 in FA really hard, I would go through my replay (with game speed +5) but I would find a hint, why I lost. (most likely it is something within the first 10 minutes, a raid I didnt stop, or a raid I didnt do, or energy or mass missing or something like that)
Without some reflecting on the strategy, gameplay, and what you did wrong, how do you want to get better? I dont think it will be easy to have an automatic script tell you what you did wrong.

But if you want to get good, you have to train. RTS need learning, and not only playing. You need to know unit data, eco flow mechanics, even path finding issues and bugs xD and even more.

I think fa forever did a decent job at letting casual players have a go. most of the custom games were labeled <1000 which combined with the ability to see an individuals specific rating led to you knowing pretty much what you where in for. sure i saw w few bad eggs so to speak but overall it let casual players but heads with each other instead or getting curb stomped.

Because at the endnof the day the ideal solution to being a casual player isnt changing the game. it is letting you fight an equal. in fact thats not just something for casuals thats something for everyone.

The question is should you start with a rating a the bottom or in the middle.

Reading your OP was somewhat painful, because it really sounds like you just aren't interested in being good at strategy games, but still for some reason believe that you are entitled to win.

You really do need to watch the replays of games which confuse you- all the information is right there. "How did his army get so big" is simply a matter of looking at the replay and watching him build each one. As said before, there are wiki's, guides, forums, replay archives, etc. etc. which you really should investigate. Especially for Starcraft 2, you really have no excuse for not looking at TeamLiquid.net or a huge variety of other places for the basics of macro and strategy. You can watch Day9 Dailies, which are funny and interesting quite aside from Starcraft. You can watch pro tournament VODs, which are often awesome, exciting, and tense games with a lengthy backstory to each of the players.

Strategy games are as difficult as your opponents are skilled. That is precisely why they are so good- there is a huge ceiling for skill and player expression. This means you really need to find suitable opponents, and modern RTS games are figuring this system out quite well. The matchmaking system in SC2 really is excellent- play more games and it will only match you with players of your level. However the MMR system is going to need more than 10 games to figure out your skill level, and if you actually gave up after only 10 losses, maybe Starcraft or other RTS games aren't for you. Even when you are playing against opponents of a suitable skill level you should only win about 50% of the time, and they should be pretty tense games where your mistakes will cause you to lose. RPG's are often constructed so players are constantly rewarded, maybe they are more your style.

It just sounds like you want to win without actually doing any of the things that make players good. You are literally asking for a trivial game to play so you can beat anyone. Those games exist, but nobody plays them because they are awful.

You should not be able to just pick up a game and be beating strong players, because if you can then that game has a stupidly low skill ceiling that can be achieved 20 minutes after learning the rules. This is the difference between Chess and Connect Four- one of them is a deep game that requires skill, the other is a children's game that can be solved by a middle schooler in an hour or two.

Look at it from the other perspective- if you are a strong player, and any scrub who barely knows the rules of the game can come along and beat you with reasonable odds. It's not a strategy game anymore, and skill, understanding, and forethought don't make you win.

The problem I found with starcraft 2 matching making is that 10 games to gauge my skill is just too much, at around half an hour a game a few days later i was only on my 8th game and I was disheartened with 100% losses. What I would like to see is the ability to tell the system how good you think you are so those first tens games aren't so frustrating then it can push you up our down the match making system.

What i think OP means in casual gamer is that you'll only play 1 game or two games at a push in one sitting so it can take a week or two before you get matched up properly and it's easy to lose interest if everyday you make no progress.

Obviously you'll still get trolled by pros who say they are noobs for their first few games but still I think it would work to assign yourself a skill level to have your skill level gauged at.

Especialy in pa where games will be considerably longer

When did I ever say I wanted to beat players far beyond my skill level? I want to win, it's basic human nature, but I should definitely lose to better players. It's only fair.

So, given that I should lose to better players than me, there are only a couple things that need to be done to help me win:
- Don't match me against players I can't hope to win against. This might involve tweaking the matchmaking system to figure out that I'm a noob as quickly as possible, or simply assuming that I'm a noob right when I start. Many matchmaking systems assume that I'm at least somewhat competent and that's a frustrating experience.
- When I lose, make it obvious what mistakes I made. Ideally, I would know my mistake while I was playing or shortly after. I should almost always know why I messed up after watching the replay. As a last resort, I should be able to find a beginners' guide on the forums or ask the community to watch and review my replay.

A lot of the pointing out of mistakes is hard to do automaticaly however i still remeber that in fa forever there was the odd training game where people would teach noobs the basic do's and donts as well as some anotated replays.

There is always the possibility of creating a training leauge where good players can team up with noobs to teach them basics.

Depending on monitisation scheme you could even reward such community service.

It sounds like a good matchmaking system would solve quite a few of the gripes here. The problem with Starcraft 2 I found was the fact that eventually most casual players leave or never play multiplayer, without ever having fought another casual player.

This is a lack of understanding of the basics of the game on your part. Mistakes are almost always very obvious. The most common being you simply didn't build enough economy, and then got steamrolled by someone who has more of literally everything. From your OP I would say this mistake occurs in every single one of your matches in every single game, in Starcraft, SupCom, and other RTS games.

It doesn't take long to learn the basics. Commit yourself to spending one hour learning about a game of your choice, and it will put you 100 hours ahead in terms of blind trial and error learning. It took a LONG time for players to figure out the fundamental strategic principles of RTS, and it takes a long time to apply them efficiently to each new game. As a casual player there is no need to reinvent the wheel- go look it up.

Go find a YouTube video guide on the basics, and learn a normal opening in the game of your choice. Learn what a normal midgame looks like, and it will become obvious to you what you are missing. There are endless resources for learning Starcraft, and refusing to look at them is silly. It takes very little time, and your play will almost immediately improve by a factor of 100. You can post replays on TL.net for players to watch and critique (although I recommend you learn a thing or two first or your response will just be "macro better"). Essentially you are asking for things like forums, guides, and getting replays critiqued when these things already exist, and have existed for decades.

I would like to add to this that casual players should really enjoy professional vods. In my opinion pro esports is vastly more interesting and entertaining than watching professional sports like football. These days esports has exploded, and at any given time there are many streams and live events to choose from. The elite cups like the GSL, Dreamhack, and MLG also have their entire archives available to view, and you can find even more on YouTube, as well as a huge variety of casting personalities finding pro ladder replays, showmatches, and satellite tournament matches to cast.

Watching pros play and trying to copy them is a very obvious way to get extremely good, extremely fast. Trying to figure the entire game out completely on your own is a Quixotic exercise in futility. You are asking to lose to players who spent 5 minutes reading a very efficient early build and killing you in 5 minutes.

What about team games? Wouldn't working as a team be the best way to start learning the ropes and getting better at it?

It may even be helpful to show to the noob player that he is behind his teammate in various critical stats (available build power, economy, combat units etc) while he is playing so the noob has a bit of a target to work towards even if he's not in direct combat against the enemy.