About a button...

„So here is a bothersome question.

In order of importance for a button on the screen how do you rate...

The design of the button
The position of the button on the screen
The action that button will do
Feedback that the button is available
Feedback that the button has been activated
Feedback on cooldown (assume it has a cooldown)

It's been bothering me for a while.“ - P. Barnett, creative director of EAMythic.

Not very bothersome imho. They are all equally and utterly important. Let me explain why, from an MMO design standpoint of view.

The design of the button
Very important for players that are new to the game and thus tremendously important for the game. They have not yet figured out how the controls are working. They still need to learn when to use which ability to play efficiently,... The design of the button is the safe anchor: it tells them by art design what the ability generally does („Hm, a sword with guts on it – it's probably a close-combat damage ability!“). After a while, they'll have learned the buttons use and the action which is activated by it – and will mostly only use it's visual design to rearrange their individual keybinding-defined hotbar.

The position of the button on the screen
Again, very important for players that are new to the game and thus tremendously important for the game. If they can't klick on it as fast as other buttons, they will probably use it less often because they think it is not important. In general, you have to differentiate between standard attacks (e.g. fireball) and situational attacks (e.g. a counter-attack after parrying). The standard attacks should be arranged close together, due to tradition and 'WoW standard' preferably at the bottom of the screen. Situational attacks should pop up close to the character model when available to give feedback of „You did X, now do something cool out of it!“ and to provide easy attainable and instant gratification. Later in the game, they won't care too much about the (standard attack) button positions anymore since they'll mostly be using their keyboard for activation.

The action that button will do
The available actions define your character. They provide meaningful choices and reward correct decisions in a way that can decide between victory or defeat. Every single action should have a significant impact on the situation that causes its activation. Utterly important.

Feedback that the button is available
The player will require standard attacks to be accessible at all times and that situational attack buttons pop up and textually & visually notify the player as soon as they are available. If that's not the case, it's bad feedback design. A design flaw that should immediately be taken care of. Tu sum up: it's more than important – it's a gameplay requirement.

Feedback that the button has been activated
There are two kinds of feedback: the button feedback (e.g. it greys out until the cooldown is finished) and the screen feedback (e.g. a special attack animation that is being performed by the character). A button has to react immediately upon activation. Everything else will confuse the player, cause unintentioned double-activation and thus frustration due to unwillingly performed actions. Again: more than important – it's a gameplay requirement.

Feedback on cooldown (assume it has a cooldown)
Another gameplay requirement, this time for the opportunity to strategically plan in advance. Which ability do I want to activate next? Are there cooldown-related dependancies („When I slow him now I could fire my ranged ability a second time to finish him off.“)?

sneak preview: PotBS

Pirates of the Burning Sea preview - sounds awesome.

However, I don't see where the acclaimed 'next generation' is. It rather sounds like a thoughtful combination of many nice and interesting game / MMO features. In a good way. Even though the game was delayed several times, now being five years in development.

That's probably the advantage of boing funded by multi-millionaires, not being dependant on a solely profit-oriented new economy investor.

thoughts on Tabula Rasa

Well, the NDA on Tabula Rasa is lifted. So... what is TR? TR is a sci-fi based MMO-shooter. The setting: an alien race, the Bane, almost extinguished mankind - and several other races on other planets. The humans main allies are the somewhat shamanistic Eloh who teach the survivors the use of logos, some sort of language which letters (logos) you can find spread around the different planets. Futuristic human and Bane (an alien race that almost terminated humanity and several other planets / races, the main enemy) structures, weapons, dropships etc.

With the combination of firearms and logo abilities, you fight the Bane, the animals corrupted by the Bane, and other enemies in mostly medium-sized quest-driven (instanced) zones and small very story-driven instances.

Your main source of damage are your firearms. There are three basic weapons (pistols, rifles, shotguns) and one specific firearm per career tree option (however, most of those career tree weapons use way to much ammo to be efficient). You have to target your enemy FPS style. However, it's not completely FPS-style, you rather get a bonus on your hit chance and I think also damage when you correctly aim at your target. The upside: it's different. The downside: it's kinda hard to control what you are shooting at because the interface displays all health/armor bars of the direction you are looking at.

Additionally, you can use logo abilities that you can learn and improve by spending training points. Speaking of character advancement: all players start with the same class. At lv5, you can choose b/w soldier (damage-oriented) or specialist (support-oriented). There are other career choices at lv15 and lv30. Each lv-up, you get 2 training points for skills and 3 attribute points. Increasing a skill by one rank costs previous rank +1 training points. So to skill up to rank 5, you have to spend 1+2+3+4+5=15 of 100 available training points. That means you can max out not more than six abilities of which two or three are passive and not active-use.

The problem (currently?) is: there are some skills that are way superior compared to other choices, e.g. 'firearms' greatly increases damage of all three basic weapons (pistols, shotguns, rifles) vs. an armor type that increases your run speed by up to 5%. So differentiation b/w characters actually starts at lv15 or so, from lv1-14 they somewhat all feel the same because of certain "must-have" skills (lv5 firearms, lv3 tools for medi-kits + rez / lv3-5 rage, lv3-5 lightning --> 15+6+6=30 of 100 training points are somewhat pre-defined).

Due to the lack of character difference in early levels, there are also no different roles or something like 'control of the enemy'. When you group, there are (almost) no synergies, instead of one player it's several players shooting at (many) health bars. That enhances egoistic behavior, plus you can just overrun enemies with your combined firepower without the use of any tactical planning. So you basically see a lot of comparably large bars. Quite confusing. Because of that, it's also quite hard to control or focus or assist mobs / enemies, instead of "I control the situation" you rather have the impression of shooting at bars until there are none to shoot at any more.

Only at lv15, the basic archetypes / roles start to flesh out: commandos = heavily armored brutes, rangers = stealthed damage dealers, sappers = use of mechanical and explosive support, biotechnichian = healer. I playtested a biotechnichian and it was pretty senseless: the most effective tool for healing were still the armor repair and heal discs I already acquired as a specialist. At lv30, those archetypes flesh out even more - I hope in a better and more unique way... However, you don't get the impression of making meaningful choices in the early levels which makes it quite hard to delve into the TR world in the beginning due to the lack of personification / identification b/w the player and the character.

The crafting also doesn't contribute to character individualization: you can loot crafting recipes to enhance your weapons / armor, craft colors to customize your character appearance or tools like medikits and ammunition. However, as soon as you use one of those recipes, it's gone forever - you don't learn it, you have to find a new one to craft it again. Not very achiever-friendly and rather tedious. Plus, the weapon enhancements are quite costly and it's way easier to find new and better weapons then improve your current one for tons of credits / gold.

In short: there are some new and nice elements / ideas (FPS style fighting, logo language, career choices), but they could have executed them a lot better / more appealing. Destination Games has one more month to fix those issues. If they don't, I'd guess TR aka Destination Games will have the destination of being Sigil'ed: famous person + crappy game design = epic failure.

Collecting tester feedback

While scanning through the Tabula Rasa closed beta test forums today, I kinda noticed that approx. 97% of player feedback is absolutely useless.

Beta test means: the key elements are implemented in the game and the testers are now asked to provide feedback about those elements, find bugs, and come up with suggestions and ideas of how those key elements should be combined to make the game fun and appealing. This process is iterative, meaning the developers continuously add more features like more races, more classes, secondary features, and improved key features. However, the key features are not and just cannot be subject to change since they define the core gameplay aspects of the game. Or, to say it frankly: devs will probably ignore (maybe even cry about) suggestions that would cause shipment delay of several months to implement. Really, they are just not interested in things that would require implementation or even extinction of the key elements that are already in the game because all those key elements are connected in many different ways. Well, I think you got the point. The question is: how to get qualitative and valuable tester feedback?

There's even one more challenge to keep in mind: only a very very small part of the beta testers participates in official testing-related feedback mechanisms (e.g. beta forums) at all.

Many games seem to use basic empiric and mandatory evaluations to collect feedback, e.g. whenever you complete a quest or level up, you have to answer a few questions like „did you like that quest?“ or „do you think your current equipment if ok for your level?“. This method may provide general gameplay happiness feedback, but won't really help in collecting broad qualitative feedback about the different key elements of the game.

Preselection of beta testers? Nigh impossible if you have 50k+ beta signups. And the applicants might've just copied well-written texts from somewhere else. Game exterior feedback collection? Only a small percentage of beta testers will even use it. So basically you need ingame-collected qualitative feedback. How do you get that? Well, I'd say by making your QA employees secretly interview the beta testers ingame. Tell them to found guilds and continuously form groups and then chat / talk to them about the game – within the game / current build without ever revealing their actual position within the company. [This of course would only work for multiplayer games.]