Casual players like me

Indeed. The interesting part of design is deciding how you can tell them that. As a last resort, you can encourage them to engage with the community. Since most players won't do that, though (look at the statistics), and because it's inconvenient to run crying to the forums every time one gets obliterated for no discernable reason, it's preferable to communicate as much as possible within the game interface.

Think about it like this: Tech support people know that the answer to a question like "why won't my computer turn on?" is usually "is it plugged in?". Newbie RTS mistakes are usually like that - there's one obvious thing they're doing wrong and need to improve at. If the game can detect that mistake and point them in the right direction, that saves everybody's time, effort, and sanity. (except for the game developers - but they get more money so it all evens out)

Map awareness, you'd think would be fairly intuitive. After all, if my stuff dies and I'm not watching, the logical conclusion is that I should watch more stuff. But for some reason, newbies love tunnel-vision. I wonder what can be done to give them that kick-in-the-pants they need?

Economic failure, in theory, could be pretty easily communicated with the post-game stats screen, but in practice I've not known those to be helpful except to tell me what I already know: that the other guy had a way better economy than I did.

Streaming economies and queuing factories are actually fairly intuitive once you understand that wasting is bad, so the problems I outlined in the OP (where big green happy numbers appear when you're wasting resources) are really all that needs to be addressed in this area.

That's interesting. I've actually never reached that level of play, so you're probably right. It's kind of depressing if you think about it... every match you go into, you are more likely to lose than to win. No wonder match-making strategy games are so frustrating to casual players!

In this case, then, the only thing that can be done is to make it fun to lose. This means that:

• It should be an even match - getting crushed is no fun, but losing in an epic massive robot war? I'll take it.
• Late game cheese needs to be as rare as possible. This is just a matter of balance and careful design.
• Games should finish climatically. A game of Starcraft ends when your opponent takes down your last building, no matter how insignificant. (unless you "gg" and leave when it's clear you've lost, but... meh. I'm a completionist.) A game of SupCom ends with one important unit's death, followed by a nuclear explosion. Thus, to me, SupCom is more fun to lose. Given that we're talking about a game where many matches will end in one freaking planet crashing into another freaking planet... I think we're OK here.

You're exactly right - once a player has learned the basic mechanics and how to not make noob mistakes, there's nothing more that the game can do for them, no matter how intuitive the interface. This is where experimentation and community involvement come in, and this is where it could be fairly fun to do so because you know the lingo and are thinking about different ways to win rather than any way not to lose.

Actually, with a good unit browser and well-designed informative tooltips, the game can help, but it becomes more about giving the player information to make strategic decisions rather than telling them how to make decisions. At that point, you can use the basic "did I win?" check to determine if you came up with a good strategy.

Edit: I just had a thought that might help explain both of our points.

For the purposes of this discussion, players can be sorted into three categories:

• Newbies: They have no idea what they're doing and don't yet understand the mechanics of the game. In a match between newbies, whoever makes the fewest stupid mistakes will win.
• Competent: They mostly understand how the game works. They can easily beat a newbie because they know what they're doing when they go into a match and don't make beginner mistakes. In a match between competent players, the player with the most effective strategy will win.
• Skilled: They can formulate, adapt, and counter strategies on the fly. They understand most of the nuances of the game. In a match between skilled players, execution once again becomes as much of a factor as strategy, and you'll often see players seamlessly change strategies during a match.

Every player goes through these three phases, unless they stop playing before they reach one.

There are, however, two main personalities of player:

Competitive - I don't know exactly what makes hardcore gamers tick, but it seems that they consider the top of the ladder to be not only an an obtainable goal, but the ultimate goal. Right off the bat, they'll dive into external resources like the community and wiki - some will even study the game files to see exact unit stats. They don't stay in Newbie phase for long because they already understand many of the mechanics before they play a match. They will loiter in the Competent phase for a while until the mechanics and stats of the game go from academic to intuitive knowledge, and then will compete for the top of the Skilled ladder. However, if they find that the game is unbalanced and that some strategies are unfairly effective, they won't invest any more time until it is patched.

Casual - Really closer to semi-casual (truly casual players will stick to AI if they want to play at all), they don't really have a goal, just that they want to get good at the game. Like all players, they will start in the Newbie phase. Most reasonable casuals will understand that they'll lose their first few games, but they will become frustrated after repeated losses, especially if all they know is that the other player is better than them. Some will come to the forums for help, but most will simply keep trying on their own, trying different, but equally ineffective, tactics. If they can't learn the mechanics and get their first win, at a certain point they will stop playing, at least PvP. Once they reach the Competent phase, they'll start having fun. They may eventually progress to Skilled, and might even morph into a Competitive player.

In summary, the "Newbie" phase is no fun at all, but Casual-type players tend to get stuck there. They don't have the goal-driven dedication that Competitive players do, so they need more encouragement and hand-holding to reach the Competent phase where they can start having a good time. Once they're there, you can pretty much set them loose.

By the way, the preceding was totally based on my opinions and guesses and not based on any studies at all. I'm probably totally wrong about competitive gamers (and probably casuals too) so I'd be interested to hear first-hand how they think.

It's not luck. That's sort of the whole point.

If you lose, you try and figure out what you did wrong, and fix it. If you are playing against an appropriately skilled opponent, once you have successfully identified and fixed the problem, you should win. Iterating this process as quickly as possible is how you get strong.

The casual player you describe is actually a competitive player. A real casual is actually just playing to mess around with the game, to see planets explode or fight with robots or whatever. They like explosions and gimmicks, and tend not to analyze the game much. A desire to become strong at the game automatically graduates you to a hardcore player.

I think you are generally right about the "newbie phase" and other progression. In fact there are some very distinct mindset differences between these phases. A scrub will blame the game for their loss, and may actually create "house rules" to fix what they deem to be "unfair" plays. "No Rush 20 Min" for example, is a paradigm example of scrub players who A) don't know what they're doing, and B) don't want to adapt their play.

You do make the important observation that serious players may conclude that, strategically speaking, a game is boring. This isn't the same as saying a strategy is "unfair" which is a very scrub attitude. Rather, solving a game essentially kills all strategy and decision-making, rendering the game utterly predictable, and not really worth playing anymore.

A game's design may be such that there is a single very obvious dominant strategy which, once discovered, renders the entire game somewhat trivial. Solved. The game is no longer interesting after this discovery (without a patch) for the same reason Tic-Tac-Toe is a boring game. In Tic-Tac-Toe, there is a dominant play; whoever goes first can always win with exactly the same sequence. Imagine if the Peewee in TA had had an Annihilator "blue laser of death" weapon, for the same 53 metal. Peewee rush obviously becomes dominant; Peewee rush into commander snipe becomes an obvious dominant strategy. Game solved.

Once the game is solved, there is no counterplay anymore, you always play a very specific way to absolutely optimally maximize your chance of winning, and there is nothing you can do to improve your likelihood of winning beyond playing exactly according to the game's solution. There is no variability in play, no variation in game states, no possibility for counterplay. It's all been figured out. Solved games are boring. And if this happens in an RTS game, it needs a patch STAT to un-solve it. Good strategy games are too complex for the human brain to solve. And Chess is actually getting dangerously close to being completely solved, at which point it will no longer be an interesting game unless you are unaware of the solution.

This reminds me, considering the game will be supporting multiple windows, there should be an option to insert an "alarm window" that is generally black unless something important happens, in which case it zooms to that.

Most games have a "you are under attack" warning with the option to move your only viewport to that location or ignore it. But since there'll be multiple viewports, we no longer need to give the player that option; we can simply show both.

That should do wonders for map awareness.

I dont like the new OP
it sounds like, you want to get better without effort.
That would mean the game should be easier and less skill dependend wich i dont like.

+1

His criticisms aren't about being a weak player, he is accepting that he is a weak player and looking for a way to still be able to enjoy the game without spending large amounts of time on homework.

The major grip he had was that, as an example, to play starcraft he would be forced to spend at least 10 games losing. If he was a terrible player he could be looking at twice that before he has a chance of winning. People can say "well yeah if you want to be competitive that's what you HAVE to do". Well he doesn't want to be competitive, he wants to be able to play against people of his casual skill level.

What sort of pitch is: its a great game that's lots of fun but you'll have to spend the better part of a day getting your *** handed to you before you can have a chance of fighting a beatable opponent in multiplayer.

He there have been some suggested solutions to this problem, the first is increasing automated feedback so the game is a little more noob friendly, which isn't about making him better for no effort, its covering the most glaring holes in common gameplay (for example: the nuclear launch detected sound in FA is an example of this). The second is to have a more efficient match making system (because 10 games of PA could very easily be 15 hours or longer).

I believe he explicitly states that he DOESN'T want to be able to beat people better than him. He just doesn't want to be forced to fight people he has no hope of beating.

@ledarsi

The terminology can definitely be a bit confusing. Let's actually call myself and players like me Casual-Competitive players, as opposed to Hardcore-Competitive - the desire to compete obviously graduates any player to Competitive, but there's still a difference in mindset and dedication in that Casual-Competitives have no desires or dreams of reaching the top levels of play and thus have no motivation to put a lot of effort into learning the game - some effort, of course, just not a lot.

(Scrubs would be a subset of Casual-Competitives who always consider their losses to be the fault of the game design and will put no effort into learning the game. There's probably not much hope for them, but maybe if their mistakes are clear enough, they can graduate past that phase)

There's also a lot of confusion in terminology between Casual-Competitives and Hardcore-Competitives. Most interestingly in this topic is that when a Casual-Competitive says they want to "get better" at the game, they want to learn how to stop making rookie mistakes. When a Hardcore-Competitive says they want to "get better", they're talking about a time-intensive process of finding, applying, and mastering the best strategies.

And the biggest problem is that most of them (on either side) really don't understand that the other definition exists. When I posted this topic, learning strategy wasn't even on my mind; I was worried about getting past the rookie phase because there's only a handful of games where I ever have (and most of them aren't strategy games). Similarly, you and other Hardcore-Competitives took offense to the idea that "getting better should be easier" because to you, "getting better" is a process that should be hard, and if made easy, the game would cease to be fun.

It occurs to me that though we've been debating for several pages, I have no idea what point you're actually trying to make. Are you against the idea of an intuitive interface that helps newbies see their own mistakes? Are you against the idea that "getting better" (Hardcore style) should be easy? (I agree with that, but didn't communicate that very well) Or do you just feel compelled to disagree with every point I make because I come across as a whiny scrub? If the latter, I accept full responsibility for being obnoxious.

1. If you are far under average, every system WILL take a while to get you there, if you know that u should just leave games at start(maybe a feedback syste, for the first 5 games could help, where you can vote how much the skill level matches).
2. wait wut? 15 hours for 10 games :O, i really wont want to play an game mode, wich takes more than 40 mins average/ an game mode wich needs more than 1hour in >10% of the games, thats just impossible to ladder. If i just want to play one game, but it could take more than an hour, its sometimes really hard.

making learning easier doesn't necessarily reduce the overall complexity of a game.
Just because there are good and bad books to learn physics, doesn't mean the laws of physics change.

Some of the suggestions in this thread have shown, that there are good ideas to enhance the learning possibilities without changing the game complexity itself.
I for one liked the tutor mode suggested by pawz or the combined post game statistics+replay idea by pluisjen (see).
Both are in-game support concepts, which offer options for the beginner in the post "standard" tutorial stage.
I prefer at least a minimum amount of player support within the game itself. While in principle "playing online" also includes "informing yourself online", some help is easier done when having game data at hand, in particular for a beginner it might be part of the problem to describe his problem in an understandable or recognizable way. Sure, more in depth analysis or strategy discussions are more a case for offline discussions (also because they often enough are based more on principle/theoretical situations than a beginners problem).

Reading this thread makes me want to pull my own teeth out. It would be less painful than what's happening here.

A game's goals should be simple, and the game itself should guide the player to that goal. The game's own internal logic should be consistent and follow its own guiding principles(even if it's totally nuts). Anything that a player needs to know should be carefully explained (when it's needed) and made as clearly understood as possible.

That's it. That's how you make a game work for a casual audience. In fact that's pretty much how you make any decent game at all. Even the old adventure games made sense once you realized they were trying to troll you as hard as possible.

Only if the game assumes that you are average. If the game assumes you're at or near the bottom of the ladder right from the start, you can only move up, preventing early-career frustration, but this might not work in practice as pro players will also start at the bottom and will proceed to slaughter their way to the top - disrupting the newbies in their already-frustrating world of not knowing what's going on. In fact, if I understand the math right, the "bottom" of the ladder might just become the new average. Oops.

Or, the matching system could consider the start of a career (and, to an extent, the start of a long streak of not playing, because you're likely to get "rusty") to be a special case where every match has a much larger than usual impact on your ranking. A newbie would lose their first game, possibly their second, third, or fourth, and quickly be ranked where they need to be.

Asking newbies to forfeit games in order to more quickly descend the ladder is unintuitive if done wrong and insulting if done right. There are much better ways to ensure they're matched well, and self-rating and quick adjustment have been suggested by many people in this topic.

The Glicko rating system pretty much does this. It's similar to elo, except that it uses a continuous uncertainty (rather than a few pre-set k-factors) to determine score variation on wins/losses. This uncertainty is at maximum (suggested to be 350) when starting and after long periods of inactivity (how long this is is set by the system implementation).

This is very similar to TrueSkill, though I believe that has a couple other background elements, but from what I've found it is mostly Glicko.

It'd probably go a long way to put the player through a few tests ("build the biggest army in 10 minutes", "defeat this equal sized army with as few losses as possible", stuff like that) and judge their initial ranking on that. It'd take maybe half an hour tops and will give you a basic idea for a starting location.

I think we were getting lost in details. Bobucles has come in to save the day with a bird's eye view which I agree with.

Dallonf, I have not been articulating a positive framework/theory of my own because it would be a large amount of text only tangentially related, and I have been writing quite a lot to respond to your well-written posts. Going off on a ramble would be beside the point.

But I think now is a good time to do so, since you are correct I haven't really been making a positive proposal so much as responding to yours. I don't think you're a "whiny scrub" but I do think that you are a player that believes you should win more than perhaps you do. I think you are a competitive player at heart, but are likely busy and don't have the time to sit down and practice for hours. That is understandable. However it also means you are going to have a difficult time becoming very skilled, which is the natural order. Mastery should be a difficult, valuable achievement, like becoming a chess master or becoming skilled at any difficult art- it shouldn't come easy.

I think that a good game is simple, and deep. Easy to learn the rules, and difficult (or even humanly impossible) to master. Good games have a high ratio of strategic depth to surface complexity.


Game Rules

The first requirement is that the rules of the game are clear to all. As bobucles said, the rules of the game and the properties of pieces, etc. should always be very clear to the player. This is simply explaining the rules to the player, possibly using tooltips, indicators, a guide, tutorial, or any other method to communicate the rules of the game. Hidden rules, or hidden features or aspects which detract from a player's effectiveness without their knowledge are very bad. Players with asymmetric rule knowledge are in incredibly unfair positions. All rules, game mechanics, unit properties, etc. need to be clearly communicated to all players in order for them to play fairly. This is very important, and it is something we all agree upon.

I also think past RTS games meet this need quite satisfactorily; if you disagree then perhaps the rules of the game might be communicated better still. Nonetheless, new players should obviously expect to be at a huge disadvantage for their first few games as they are learning the game's rules. For very complex systems, this might be quite a few games.


Mechanics

In addition, there is a certain level of mechanical ability that players need to be able to perform. The game needs to make clear what is expected of the player, but does not necessarily have to communicate to the player the exact methodology. In Chess, the mechanics of using your hand to physically move pieces is obviously necessary in order to play. In an untimed game, this is a trivial task. However if you've ever played Blitz Chess, you are aware that the mechanical ability of being able to very quickly and precisely make your move, and then the clock, is actually a skill that requires some practice, which the player is expected to be able to perform. In an RTS game, the mechanical ability to build units, manage their economy, maintain awareness of the map, etc. etc. are basic skills that the player just needs to be able to do in order to play. Being deficient in these skills is a tremendous disadvantage, much like taking an excessive amount of time to move pieces in speed chess. There's really nothing else to tell players except; "if you want to win, you must learn to do this."

A certain degree of mechanical skill is also mandatory in an RTS game. Mechanics are the method by which the player communicates their decisions. More decisions obviously means the player will have to give more input into the game. Making two decisions will require at least two distinct actions. Making a hundred will require a hundred actions. Having a large scale game with a large, detailed, well-textured board will make map awareness more difficult. Shrinking the map, shrinking the number of things the player has to pay attention to, or the number of decisions the player has to make, will make the game smaller, and less interesting.

I am 100% in favor of completely eliminating needless micromanagement. But the reason I am in favor of this is it liberates the player to manage a much larger game, while still being taxed to the limit of their ability.


Strategy

Then, after the player has learned the rules of the game, and acquired the basic mechanics needed to perform actions effectively within the game, and only then does strategy become a factor. You could be the greatest strategic mastermind who ever lived, but if you don't know the rules of the game, or if you are unable to execute your strategy, all your strategic brilliance is useless in that game.

All strategy depends on a player having an understanding of the rules, and being able to execute their decision. As I said before, strategic decision making is extremely fuzzy, complex, and difficult, and even choices that appear highly suboptimal may have circumstances where they are good, or even ideal. Being perceptive and clever and making good, innovative decisions is an art, not a science. It is very difficult to "help" players make these kinds of choices. It is the goal of the RTS designers to make these decisions as interesting, tense, and difficult as possible. Making them easier, or designing the game so there is a more obvious choice, necessarily makes the game less deep.

There are three "layers" at issue here which I don't think you were even aware of in your OP. Rules, mechanics, and then strategy, each building upon the last. So when you complain about the enemy appearing with a huge army, without specifying if this army was because you lacked the mechanical ability to do the same, or if you weren't aware of the importance of economy and had simply not constructed enough economy. Essentially choosing a strategy which was defeated by an economic strategy. I at first assumed that you were a weak player that lacked mechanical ability, and told you to just learn to manage an economy so you could do the same. Later on, I changed my evaluation that perhaps you were aware of a deficiency of mechanical ability, and were ignoring it for the sake of argument. In that case, your decision (possibly made with limited knowledge) to pursue a less economical strategy eventually resulted in your opponent having an economic advantage, and a larger army. Their strategy worked, basically, and you lost as a result.


Conclusion

In conclusion, in my opinion RTS games today actually do an excellent job communicating the rules of the game. Including TA and SupCom. The information is available. Likewise, it should be obvious to players that things like better economic management skills and better map awareness confer an advantage, and that learning basic mechanics should be beneficial. Perhaps newer players need to be explicitly told this, but that is a fairly small point since they hear it nonstop from better players anyway, and seldom pay attention. There are so many players who, no matter what you tell them, simply haven't got the right mindset, or have no time or desire to improve. That's fine- but these players are not entitled to win just because it makes them feel good. And the game should not be designed to make these weak players feel good about themselves.

The game should be designed to be as interesting as possible, and weak players then get to experience the pleasure of gradually becoming a force of nature. Strategic thinking, understanding, and skill should confer a tremendous advantage, making the more skilled player extremely likely to win. Skill should be such a large determinant that a skilled palyer can beat 15 scrubs simultaneously through skill and strategy. Or such that the stronger competitive player can consistently win an extended series against another very strong player. The game should not be simplified and casualized to the point that a weak player can take games off a strong player.

I feel like you guys are reading far too much into this.

I have long suspected it, but I now crown bobucles Master Subtle Troll of the PA forums. Posting links to TV Tropes wastes more people's’ time than a thousand Habbo raids.

*applause* I think at long last, we're on the same page. I only disagree with you on the idea that most RTS games are perfectly fine in this area, but it's really a matter of opinion and experience. I'm assuming you've played many more strategy games than I have, so you understand the "language" of the game intuitively, whereas I and other newbies have to read into it a bit more.

Forged Alliance, for example, does a decent job of explaining how to play, but some things could be improved, like the vague unit tooltips and the economic display that encourages waste. (on my FA experience: I had just barely started winning ranked matches of FA before I switched to SupCom2 [don't judge], and I never played the campaign because the vanilla game's sound didn't work on my computer and FA's campaign was too intense from the first level. I'm thinking of jumping into FAF if PA takes too long to come out)

Starcraft does an amazing job of telling you what's going on, but its mechanics don't afford you enough time to think about what you want to build, and you can't zoom out by any significant factor, which makes map awareness a chore.

Isn't 10 pages of debate about a game that's still in development perfectly normal?

Use the minimap bro. You can basicly see everything your units see on it. It is hard at the beginning, but the zoom makes sence since the game is quite micro reliant(macro is more important tho)

PS: can anyone gimme a good source for SC or TA game videos?

Guess what happens when weak players can never win, or even deal damage against a strong player? They quit.

Penny arcade correctly points out that you need success at the low level, or the game becomes inaccessible. Street fighter was no doubt fun for the players who loved to play E-Honda/Chun Li/Blanka. Easy strategies mean easy victories, which feels good and gets people hooked. After a player is invested in the game, they will care more about the greater strategy and subtleties that can defeat their easy strats.

The idea of a 2-tier tech system plays a huge part into this. Tech 1 units were depicted as being simple, easy to use, and very efficient for a broad range of use. T2 units go into the more nuanced levels of strategy and gameplay. You have an easy system, followed by a hard system that can potentially beat the easy system. Sounds good to me!

Well, you are assuming weak players only have really strong opponents to play against. In practice they will likely be playing against other more suitable opponents. Playing any game when you are tremendously outclassed gets old fast. The weaker player might get frustrated of playing that one other player, but unless there are no other options it shouldn't put them off the game itself wholesale.

Basically, good matchmaking and team games both solve this problem in different ways. Although team game strategies usually leverage their multiple-player nature, so getting too familiar with team games can create bad habits that are hard to unlearn in a real game. Practicing vs the AI is even worse from a practice standpoint, since the AI behaves very differently, and may even be playing by different rules (frequently even hidden changed rules), which horribly distorts the game's strategic picture.

I do want to comment that getting destroyed by a very strong player isn't "fun" but it will make you a much stronger player in a BIG hurry if you pay attention and learn from your mistakes, even if you're still losing to that player afterwards.

I am going to invoke the infamous Strategy Godwin's Law of cheese here. Quick, easy, one-dimensional strategies are always going to appear, no matter how you design the game. There is literally no way to avoid creating cheese-like strategies for any game design. If a player thinks a one-dimensional cheesy play is likely to win, such as playing against an opponent unable to counter it, then they will try it.

The key is that every strategy, every type of play that might be made, must be mitigable. There must be opportunity for play and counterplay, back and forth. This means there will be interaction for all strategies, including cheesy ones. Cheese must be mitigable (or else it's very obviously dominant- if it wins and there's nothing the other player can do about it). Easy plays can certainly be effective and fair at the same time.

Weaker players will likely gravitate to cheesy plays because they are easy to execute, and typically harder to stop than they are to perform. This means wins at low levels. Players who get frustrated with opponents using "easy" plays like cheese must either start cheesing themselves, or get good enough to defend against specific one-dimensional cheesy plays.

You don't even have to intentionally create cheeses- don't even worry about it, players will find them.