that article was freakin HILARIOUS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
it reminded me of my mom, a friend at her job tried to get her into wow. she had been playing this old mmo called Nexus. and had been playing for 5 to 6 years. so she asked me to help her, i installed it for her, helped her set up her trial account.
and she started the game, barely was able to make her character without getting confused. she played for about 15 mins. of course she picked human warrior. tried to figure out how to play but was baffled at it being 3d, said it looked to real and was scary and quit.
-------------------------------------- Peace is a lie, there is only passion. Through passion, I gain strength. Through strength, I gain power. Through power, I gain victory. Through victory, my chains are broken. The force shall free me. -the Sith code
Yet the subject had windows appear telling her what to do, and she just closed them.... Say all you want about a good tutorial, even the inexperienced will skip it.
Writer / Musician / Game Designer
Now Playing: Skyrim, Wurm Online, Tropico 4 Waiting On: GW2, TSW, Archeage, The Rapture
It's not just MMOs though, it's games in general. Anyone remember how alien the concept of "special moves" were in Street Fighter II? Joysticks were just for moving around, not many people realized moving them in a specific direction with a button press would cause an unique move to pop out. If its completely new to you you'll be more like Jeannie than you think.
I've never done that kind of an experiment with a friend, though I am responsible for getting several people to play their first MMO. The last case was my friend, we'll call him 'R' - he had never played an MMO and he saw me playing Warhammer about six months ago. He started playing and in all honesty, the only way I was able to get him through the newbie zones was that I was sitting in a chair next to him and coaching him.
My other friend, who just started playing the STO beta was also not an MMO player. He is quite computer savvy, however, and while he didn't have too much of a problem figuring things out, he was still mostly clueless about how to do basic things. Like change graphics options, etc - in Cryptic's open beta there is no instruction manual, and if you've never played an MMO before, the "new player experience" really doesn't teach you a LOT of basic things. Like... how to quit the game. (Seriously. Why would you know slash commands if you never played an MMO?) - Or how to change graphics options. Or video settings. Or audio settings. Or... well, a thousand things I take for granted. I started playing the beta and immediately I locate the buttons for game options, etc., etc - but this isn't because I'm an intelligent guy; it's because I've done something similar in dozens of MMOs before.
I wonder how many new players of MMOs jump in feet first with no help except the tutorial and how many have friends get them into the genre to begin with.
I've seen a lot of comments on how can the game makers make it easier to help new players. How about the players helping themselves. Have Jennie read the manual that came with the game. Nobody reads anymore.
OK, let's say you're a merchant with a product to sell. You want to sell as many widgets as possible, because that's how you make money.
What's better for you as a merchant - a widget that's so easy to use that you don't need a manual, or a widget that is complex and requires a manual?
I suppose some basic instruction is good, but I think most everyone's first MMO experience was the result of a friend inviting them to play it, who then teaches them the ropes. The community plays the biggest role in that learning process, and even with a really in depth tutorial for complete noobs, if the community sucks and is not helpful, they probably won't continue playing. My first MMO was EQ1 in 2000, and I did ok. That game was insanely more difficult than any thing like WoW for a new player, but the people playing were great and helped noobs figure the game out.
Agreed. My first MMO was also EQ1, and friends taught me the MMO conventions. I believe a lot of us started that way.
Also, this article was hilarious, especially your droll comments about Jeannie's cluelessness. I could never have just sat there and let her struggle, I would have had to help the poor woman. Even if it was an experiment. I also agree it would be fun to read a few more of these with different newbies and different games. Whose tutorial reigns supreme?
Well done and funny and her comments made sense. Standing in the fire did not lol.
Well i agree on the Mouse thing so many new people use the mouse 99% and keyboard 1% as its easier.
I use to train older people to use computers and the mouse was the hardest thing to learn (usually took a few hours on Solitaire to get used to it). Anyway loved her comments should send that to Blizzard haha.
I think it depends on the individual. Some folks are more curious than others and don't settle for the "first successful answer". What I mean by that is she settled and was comfortable with the mouse movement. She never had the thought of could she achieve movement with the keyboard. She also seemed to never entertain the thought that the waypoint she couldn't find may be under ground.
I know plenty of folks who would make those guesses and at least ask the question. If they couldn't ask me, like in this situation, they'd see the chat window and ask in chat. If they didn't know how to use chat, they at least click around and figure it out. They'd even look for a "help" feature or something to give more information.
The player is responsible for "doing something" or some level of proactive information searching in my opinion. Going into a game having never played an MMO you'd think the person realizes they don't know what they're doing and thus would try to seek out some information on how to do things and what things you can possibly do (i.e., ninja clicking away the spells and abilities pop-up). Heh, evidence that pop-up, the devs try to put things in to give you some guidance but they aren't responsible if the players don't read them.
As for the guy above who played STO for 3 days before realizing it had a map. Man, I dunno. Maps are one of the first things I look for in a new game and I click everything (even defaulting to hitting the "M" key as a staple) as a map of some kind has been a part of every MMO I've played.
The game can't play itself for you. You have to mash or click some buttons and find things out, heh. Kind of like a Fighter Pilot pre flight check. Click on every button on the UI before going anywhere once in game to see what they do or where they lead to.
"Many nights, my friend... Many nights I've put a blade to your throat while you were sleeping. Glad I never killed you, Steve. You're alright..."
Unfortunately, hand-holding tutorials are not hardcore . Good article, I enjoyed it. Especially the part where she got lost in the abbey - I did too! I never even found the drunken wine monk in the bell spire until my second or third human character.
I'd say my first solid mmo experience was with AC.
First time in the game, during beta, I just started pressing buttons associated with other games control schemes to figure out which was correct. Thankfully my first attempt and assumption at it moving similar to a shooter was right.
I also immediately noted the symbols and cues on the UI elements to signify what my attack and abilities were bound to, in addition to seeing how the combat system worked given it's UI elements.
From there I went through my different character tabs and menus, seeing which buttons they were bound to and promptly went out rabbit hunting, cooking, drudge stabbing, and flirting.
The time it took for me to understand the basic mechanics of the game and how to play it effectively, somewhere around ten minutes of idle tinkering on my own. Would have been quicker if I felt in any sort of a rush, but it was a weekend and I was just relaxing.
Can't say I ever really had a problem understanding a games controls, even in the case of hopping into some asian market mmos, having a short wtf moment, then realizing recognizing the button mapping a moment later. Learned a long time ago most people ain't smart enough to realize something that easily operates off intuition, reason, and a relatively standard set of controls with minimal variance.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
Interesting article, but I think poor Jeannie was using her existing "browser game" skills thinking they would apply to an MMO, & to some extent they did, so that may in fact have been working against her, interesting to note that pop-up boxes of text were being ignored, that's a common problem & it happens in a lot of games, only for the offender to later be spamming chat channels with requests for exactly that info they ignored earlier....
The choices of character & class based purely on looks shows some indication of what this user was primarily engaged by, character creation needs to appeal to that & the offering up of several "starter outfits" of varying styles might be something games dev's could take from that.
I think the results of this experiment shoud be looked at by dev's, it poses a few interesting problems, but the earlier suggestion of a "smart" tutorial program that monitors your first few hours of gameplay & prompts you with useful stuff or reminders of things you are either doing wrong, or not using at all, would benefit both new & older users, the experienced users would be bugged less, the newer users would be helped more, something I think ANY game could benefit from & potentially hook players earlier on rather than lose them to frustration, first impressions count.
Haha, My first two MMOs was Ultima Online and Dark Ages of Camelot. UO wasn't that hard for me to pick up its mechanics are fairly simple. However, I did almost the same thing as Jeannie did when it came to Dark Ages of Camelot.
I didn't mash the battle thinking that attacked I was familier with UOs auto attack function. However, I was totally baffled by the idea of trainers or skills. For the first 15 levels I auto attacked everything. Thats when My sister asked 'Why don't you ever use any special abilities?' I was like ??? she opened up my skill tab and I didn't have any but I had 225 points to spend on abilities.
After I got my first few abilities I was kill stuff in 3 or 4 whacks. Since then I never had any problems but it was one of my fonder memories of my MMO time.
Not taking a pot shot at Jeannie here, but this just shows how easy MMO’s are. She had no advice, no pre-experience, and just used a non-power click attack. MMO’s are designed for morons who barely know what a mouse and keyboard are.
I know it is the starter area, I know it is meant to lead you in gently. Go out at level cap, find a equal level mob and see how easily your auto attack takes it down.
I am certainly not pointing the finger at WoW here, I don’t know a MMO that is not using easy mode. They are made for the Lowest Common Denominator, and it shows!
There are indeed to many assumptions being made when an MMO goes live. So far I have only seen ONE game that did the starting guide perfectly:
Aion.
Aion comes with a fully intergrated ingame video tutorial. Including mouse / keyboard usage and a full explanation of all the items on your screen.
Everytime you reach a point where a new item/skill/option becomes available, a yellow question mark pops up above your actionbar. Once you click it you get a nice video (Fullly narated!) telling you more about the specific feature.
This youtube movie is a collection of the ingame videos that you get to see:
OMG, lol! I do not think I could have watched her play. I would have had the urge to say, "Girl! Right click that trainer and learn those skills!" and when she got lost, "Get up and let me do it!" Of course under my breath I would have said, ".....n00b....."
The writer is way more patient than I am, hehe. I would have loved to seen Jeannie 10 years ago as a newbie on a game like EverQuest 1 when EQ was all we really had then.
But thats not the point of the article. The point is as someone who has never played MMO's before, no help, no guidance.... And many points she brought up are valid. GAMES are for FUN - WoW has one of the most mind-numbingly boring intros and starter quests of any game I have seen.
Was merely stating that I couldn't have done that. No patience in watching that. Great article though. Never seen an MMO virgin get started before. Was very funny hehe.
Great article and kudos Justin. I either laughed or had a smile on my face through the whole article as I could picture myself sitting there watching things as they transpired. Having done that zone all too many times, I remember every bit of it, vividly.
Also, I'm assuming that you were sitting there jotting down notes while looking over her shoulder as she played, as you never really specified in your article. I can imagine that must have been a bit nerve-racking for Jeannie while trying to learn something new, for obvious reasons. Alternatively, she could have been taking those notes herself, which most likely would have been even more of a pain then having you do so. She would then constantly be subjected to the possibility of losing her present train of thought in-game while rehashing her experience.
In any regard, judging from your friend Jeannie's reactions, she sounds like an authentic and fun person in which may have made this experiment a lot more pleasant. I must say that you may want to keep that in mind in the future. I've tried something similar with my ex (who is not a very genuine person) and although it was quite obvious she was enjoying herself, she had this disingenuous part of her that almost seemed to keep reminding her that computer games were for nerds and geeks and thus were not cool nor enjoyable.
Finally, as others have stated, I would like to see more of these in the future. However, as a tip to assist your readers, I would advise that you list the time of each note in a 00:00 format rather than the 0.00 that was used for this article, as the former is a bit more obvious as to your intentions than the latter.
BUT I have to question the premise that there are real lessons for mmo devs here. A few others have made similar comments. Some one wrote about the viral nature of WoW. Absolutely spot on. There is a world of difference between the kinds of people who trial an MMO by free choice, without friends showing them the ropes, and Jeannie.
Comments
that article was freakin HILARIOUS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
it reminded me of my mom, a friend at her job tried to get her into wow. she had been playing this old mmo called Nexus. and had been playing for 5 to 6 years. so she asked me to help her, i installed it for her, helped her set up her trial account.
and she started the game, barely was able to make her character without getting confused. she played for about 15 mins. of course she picked human warrior. tried to figure out how to play but was baffled at it being 3d, said it looked to real and was scary and quit.
--------------------------------------
Peace is a lie, there is only passion.
Through passion, I gain strength.
Through strength, I gain power.
Through power, I gain victory.
Through victory, my chains are broken.
The force shall free me.
-the Sith code
Yet the subject had windows appear telling her what to do, and she just closed them.... Say all you want about a good tutorial, even the inexperienced will skip it.
Writer / Musician / Game Designer
Now Playing: Skyrim, Wurm Online, Tropico 4
Waiting On: GW2, TSW, Archeage, The Rapture
It's not just MMOs though, it's games in general. Anyone remember how alien the concept of "special moves" were in Street Fighter II? Joysticks were just for moving around, not many people realized moving them in a specific direction with a button press would cause an unique move to pop out. If its completely new to you you'll be more like Jeannie than you think.
Very interesting!
I've never done that kind of an experiment with a friend, though I am responsible for getting several people to play their first MMO. The last case was my friend, we'll call him 'R' - he had never played an MMO and he saw me playing Warhammer about six months ago. He started playing and in all honesty, the only way I was able to get him through the newbie zones was that I was sitting in a chair next to him and coaching him.
My other friend, who just started playing the STO beta was also not an MMO player. He is quite computer savvy, however, and while he didn't have too much of a problem figuring things out, he was still mostly clueless about how to do basic things. Like change graphics options, etc - in Cryptic's open beta there is no instruction manual, and if you've never played an MMO before, the "new player experience" really doesn't teach you a LOT of basic things. Like... how to quit the game. (Seriously. Why would you know slash commands if you never played an MMO?) - Or how to change graphics options. Or video settings. Or audio settings. Or... well, a thousand things I take for granted. I started playing the beta and immediately I locate the buttons for game options, etc., etc - but this isn't because I'm an intelligent guy; it's because I've done something similar in dozens of MMOs before.
I wonder how many new players of MMOs jump in feet first with no help except the tutorial and how many have friends get them into the genre to begin with.
OK, let's say you're a merchant with a product to sell. You want to sell as many widgets as possible, because that's how you make money.
What's better for you as a merchant - a widget that's so easy to use that you don't need a manual, or a widget that is complex and requires a manual?
Which do you think will get you more sales?
Agreed. My first MMO was also EQ1, and friends taught me the MMO conventions. I believe a lot of us started that way.
Also, this article was hilarious, especially your droll comments about Jeannie's cluelessness. I could never have just sat there and let her struggle, I would have had to help the poor woman. Even if it was an experiment. I also agree it would be fun to read a few more of these with different newbies and different games. Whose tutorial reigns supreme?
Well written.
Well done and funny and her comments made sense. Standing in the fire did not lol.
Well i agree on the Mouse thing so many new people use the mouse 99% and keyboard 1% as its easier.
I use to train older people to use computers and the mouse was the hardest thing to learn (usually took a few hours on Solitaire to get used to it). Anyway loved her comments should send that to Blizzard haha.
I think it depends on the individual. Some folks are more curious than others and don't settle for the "first successful answer". What I mean by that is she settled and was comfortable with the mouse movement. She never had the thought of could she achieve movement with the keyboard. She also seemed to never entertain the thought that the waypoint she couldn't find may be under ground.
I know plenty of folks who would make those guesses and at least ask the question. If they couldn't ask me, like in this situation, they'd see the chat window and ask in chat. If they didn't know how to use chat, they at least click around and figure it out. They'd even look for a "help" feature or something to give more information.
The player is responsible for "doing something" or some level of proactive information searching in my opinion. Going into a game having never played an MMO you'd think the person realizes they don't know what they're doing and thus would try to seek out some information on how to do things and what things you can possibly do (i.e., ninja clicking away the spells and abilities pop-up). Heh, evidence that pop-up, the devs try to put things in to give you some guidance but they aren't responsible if the players don't read them.
As for the guy above who played STO for 3 days before realizing it had a map. Man, I dunno. Maps are one of the first things I look for in a new game and I click everything (even defaulting to hitting the "M" key as a staple) as a map of some kind has been a part of every MMO I've played.
The game can't play itself for you. You have to mash or click some buttons and find things out, heh. Kind of like a Fighter Pilot pre flight check. Click on every button on the UI before going anywhere once in game to see what they do or where they lead to.
"Many nights, my friend... Many nights I've put a blade to your throat while you were sleeping. Glad I never killed you, Steve. You're alright..."
Chavez y Chavez
Unfortunately, hand-holding tutorials are not hardcore
. Good article, I enjoyed it. Especially the part where she got lost in the abbey - I did too! I never even found the drunken wine monk in the bell spire until my second or third human character.
First MMO experience.
I bought Dark Age of Camelot and I was probably 14?
I never even realized it was a MMO or what that was.
I remember making atleast 10 diff characters becuase I did not realize what a server was.
But then I finally realized to stay on one server and I just killed stuff on my lil leprechaun character.
I realized i was an enchanter later on and my abilities and new if i gained levels i would get more spells which made me want to level more.
Then i realized wait this game is not free? So i asked my parents to pay...
They said no and never played again till years later.
And honestly that was the most fun i ever had with an MMO.
I'd say my first solid mmo experience was with AC.
First time in the game, during beta, I just started pressing buttons associated with other games control schemes to figure out which was correct. Thankfully my first attempt and assumption at it moving similar to a shooter was right.
I also immediately noted the symbols and cues on the UI elements to signify what my attack and abilities were bound to, in addition to seeing how the combat system worked given it's UI elements.
From there I went through my different character tabs and menus, seeing which buttons they were bound to and promptly went out rabbit hunting, cooking, drudge stabbing, and flirting.
The time it took for me to understand the basic mechanics of the game and how to play it effectively, somewhere around ten minutes of idle tinkering on my own. Would have been quicker if I felt in any sort of a rush, but it was a weekend and I was just relaxing.
Can't say I ever really had a problem understanding a games controls, even in the case of hopping into some asian market mmos, having a short wtf moment, then realizing recognizing the button mapping a moment later. Learned a long time ago most people ain't smart enough to realize something that easily operates off intuition, reason, and a relatively standard set of controls with minimal variance.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
Awesome read. I loved it. It would be awesome if you could repeat it with some more people.
Interesting article, but I think poor Jeannie was using her existing "browser game" skills thinking they would apply to an MMO, & to some extent they did, so that may in fact have been working against her, interesting to note that pop-up boxes of text were being ignored, that's a common problem & it happens in a lot of games, only for the offender to later be spamming chat channels with requests for exactly that info they ignored earlier....
The choices of character & class based purely on looks shows some indication of what this user was primarily engaged by, character creation needs to appeal to that & the offering up of several "starter outfits" of varying styles might be something games dev's could take from that.
I think the results of this experiment shoud be looked at by dev's, it poses a few interesting problems, but the earlier suggestion of a "smart" tutorial program that monitors your first few hours of gameplay & prompts you with useful stuff or reminders of things you are either doing wrong, or not using at all, would benefit both new & older users, the experienced users would be bugged less, the newer users would be helped more, something I think ANY game could benefit from & potentially hook players earlier on rather than lose them to frustration, first impressions count.
Haha, My first two MMOs was Ultima Online and Dark Ages of Camelot. UO wasn't that hard for me to pick up its mechanics are fairly simple. However, I did almost the same thing as Jeannie did when it came to Dark Ages of Camelot.
I didn't mash the battle thinking that attacked I was familier with UOs auto attack function. However, I was totally baffled by the idea of trainers or skills. For the first 15 levels I auto attacked everything. Thats when My sister asked 'Why don't you ever use any special abilities?' I was like ??? she opened up my skill tab and I didn't have any but I had 225 points to spend on abilities.
After I got my first few abilities I was kill stuff in 3 or 4 whacks. Since then I never had any problems but it was one of my fonder memories of my MMO time.
Not taking a pot shot at Jeannie here, but this just shows how easy MMO’s are. She had no advice, no pre-experience, and just used a non-power click attack. MMO’s are designed for morons who barely know what a mouse and keyboard are.
I know it is the starter area, I know it is meant to lead you in gently. Go out at level cap, find a equal level mob and see how easily your auto attack takes it down.
I am certainly not pointing the finger at WoW here, I don’t know a MMO that is not using easy mode. They are made for the Lowest Common Denominator, and it shows!
Now that was a very entertaining read.
There are indeed to many assumptions being made when an MMO goes live. So far I have only seen ONE game that did the starting guide perfectly:
Aion.
Aion comes with a fully intergrated ingame video tutorial. Including mouse / keyboard usage and a full explanation of all the items on your screen.
Everytime you reach a point where a new item/skill/option becomes available, a yellow question mark pops up above your actionbar. Once you click it you get a nice video (Fullly narated!) telling you more about the specific feature.
This youtube movie is a collection of the ingame videos that you get to see:
www.youtube.com/watch
OMG, lol! I do not think I could have watched her play. I would have had the urge to say, "Girl! Right click that trainer and learn those skills!" and when she got lost, "Get up and let me do it!" Of course under my breath I would have said, ".....n00b....."
The writer is way more patient than I am, hehe. I would have loved to seen Jeannie 10 years ago as a newbie on a game like EverQuest 1 when EQ was all we really had then.
But thats not the point of the article.
The point is as someone who has never played MMO's before, no help, no guidance....
And many points she brought up are valid.
GAMES are for FUN - WoW has one of the most mind-numbingly boring intros and starter quests of any game I have seen.
I play all ghame
Was merely stating that I couldn't have done that. No patience in watching that. Great article though. Never seen an MMO virgin get started before. Was very funny hehe.
Great article and kudos Justin. I either laughed or had a smile on my face through the whole article as I could picture myself sitting there watching things as they transpired. Having done that zone all too many times, I remember every bit of it, vividly.
Also, I'm assuming that you were sitting there jotting down notes while looking over her shoulder as she played, as you never really specified in your article. I can imagine that must have been a bit nerve-racking for Jeannie while trying to learn something new, for obvious reasons. Alternatively, she could have been taking those notes herself, which most likely would have been even more of a pain then having you do so. She would then constantly be subjected to the possibility of losing her present train of thought in-game while rehashing her experience.
In any regard, judging from your friend Jeannie's reactions, she sounds like an authentic and fun person in which may have made this experiment a lot more pleasant. I must say that you may want to keep that in mind in the future. I've tried something similar with my ex (who is not a very genuine person) and although it was quite obvious she was enjoying herself, she had this disingenuous part of her that almost seemed to keep reminding her that computer games were for nerds and geeks and thus were not cool nor enjoyable.
Finally, as others have stated, I would like to see more of these in the future. However, as a tip to assist your readers, I would advise that you list the time of each note in a 00:00 format rather than the 0.00 that was used for this article, as the former is a bit more obvious as to your intentions than the latter.
Your fail comment, failed.
Good read. Funny and interesting. I'd love to see more of these.
I want to see this Jeannie play EVE, Darkfall or TurboTax 09'.
Writer / Musician / Game Designer
Now Playing: Skyrim, Wurm Online, Tropico 4
Waiting On: GW2, TSW, Archeage, The Rapture
Very entertaining article.
BUT I have to question the premise that there are real lessons for mmo devs here. A few others have made similar comments. Some one wrote about the viral nature of WoW. Absolutely spot on. There is a world of difference between the kinds of people who trial an MMO by free choice, without friends showing them the ropes, and Jeannie.
Before I played my first mmorpg I read the manual. Shocking, I know.
--
Delanor