Author Topic: New Player Experience  (Read 27967 times)

Chenier

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Re: New Player Experience
« Reply #60: September 01, 2017, 02:04:42 AM »
A few places in the game link to the wiki, maybe we should make references to the wiki more common? That way it'd be harder to be oblivious to its existence.

The wiki has its advantages, though, such as record-keeping. You can go look at the history of pages, and that can be interesting in itself. Also no one person can forever erase the great texts of predecessors.

The point you make about regions is valid (though many of them I think still lack descriptions, many that do have a mediocre one at best), regions are at least permanent. Realms, characters, armies, guilds, newspapers, these kinds of things are not, and the game tends to erase unused data. We could add more stuff in game for those, but we have to remember that it wouldn't be as enduring.

I'll concede that it's not particularly tempting to multiply the references to the wiki, though, when one considers how it's mostly increasingly obsolete (information not getting updated).
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Wimpie

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Re: New Player Experience
« Reply #61: September 01, 2017, 09:21:12 AM »
Comments on things that I don't particularly agree with:

- We don't want anyone else besides the Lord to build stuff in the region. Priests can't build temples, Knights can't build guildhouses (even with the approval of the lord).
- Mini-message groups go against what we want, realm wide conversations. I believe there are more than enough channels already.
- I think the building of smiths or farms in own estate are a bit far fetched and will more complicate the game. Estates are mostly temporary, since knights should strive to become lord one day anyway.
- Descriptions for armies already exist, but probably barely used. Recording medals and such on there as I am doing in Vix on a wiki page for example will be very difficult. We don't have the extended markup text options in these description boxes as we have on wiki.

Things I like and could possible be investigated more:

A. Autonotification if realm does not have realm description set
B. Improve realm joining page to explain more the different options & guide the player better. Should only be visible for first character ever for this player.
C. Newspaper option could be detailed out. I like the idea of having something that we can use and see in game, but not sure how it should be run. If completely up to the players, I'm afraid we'll be having a newspaper per realm with just plain propaganda.
D. A character description/stats page for better flavour and RP sounds nice as well. To be discussed.
E. I like the idea of linking Information tab directly to wiki page of realm, for example, but unsure about the technical capabilities of Wiki to be viewed inline. It will probably look like a mess though. Wiki simply has huge advantages.
F. Keep a chronological history of realm's rulers sounds like something that would add to realm's flavour history. Don't think we can capture it from the past though. This in combination with the more detailed realm description (in combination with E?)

API exists, as far as I know, to create pages from external source (like some event in BM triggers the creation of a page with certain content). Not sure about updating an existing page through API.
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Chenier

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Re: New Player Experience
« Reply #62: September 01, 2017, 01:20:00 PM »
Comments on things that I don't particularly agree with:

- We don't want anyone else besides the Lord to build stuff in the region. Priests can't build temples, Knights can't build guildhouses (even with the approval of the lord).
- Mini-message groups go against what we want, realm wide conversations. I believe there are more than enough channels already.
- I think the building of smiths or farms in own estate are a bit far fetched and will more complicate the game. Estates are mostly temporary, since knights should strive to become lord one day anyway.
- Descriptions for armies already exist, but probably barely used. Recording medals and such on there as I am doing in Vix on a wiki page for example will be very difficult. We don't have the extended markup text options in these description boxes as we have on wiki.

Things I like and could possible be investigated more:

A. Autonotification if realm does not have realm description set
B. Improve realm joining page to explain more the different options & guide the player better. Should only be visible for first character ever for this player.
C. Newspaper option could be detailed out. I like the idea of having something that we can use and see in game, but not sure how it should be run. If completely up to the players, I'm afraid we'll be having a newspaper per realm with just plain propaganda.
D. A character description/stats page for better flavour and RP sounds nice as well. To be discussed.
E. I like the idea of linking Information tab directly to wiki page of realm, for example, but unsure about the technical capabilities of Wiki to be viewed inline. It will probably look like a mess though. Wiki simply has huge advantages.
F. Keep a chronological history of realm's rulers sounds like something that would add to realm's flavour history. Don't think we can capture it from the past though. This in combination with the more detailed realm description (in combination with E?)

API exists, as far as I know, to create pages from external source (like some event in BM triggers the creation of a page with certain content). Not sure about updating an existing page through API.

I mostly agree.

Autonitifications sounds like a fair idea, keeping in mind to avoid it being spam. Completely legitimate to spam the realm for not having a description at all yet, or an empty bulletin. A bit less so for banners, which often take dev approval. Not a great idea for outdated bulletins and such though (which I know you didn't mention, I am), unless we want to lose relics of the past like Outer Tilog's (or code in an exception for that one). Forcing meaningless changes would not really be productive though.

Armies have descriptions? Where the hell can we read them? Maybe I'm just clueless because the armies I can see had none set.

I completely agree with giving players more information at character creation, always have. I've made relevant suggestions in the past, at least some of which are now live. Activity meters and chattyness meters have been suggested a few times, though the concern is always promoting spamming. Perhaps a breakdown of average messages per day, broken down by message type and by sender could help give a better idea. One could therefore see if "this realm has an average of 5 messages per day! but an average of 1 person writing per day... maybe I'll pick the other with the average of 4 messages per day sent by 2.5 people per day instead."

More record keeping would be nice. In the past many would do this on the wiki, but often only for rulership, mostly in non-elected realms, and only for as long as the record keeper was around. The list of past government members, how they got there (election, appointment, rebellion), how they got out (resigned, election, protests, died, wound), would be nice. Even if it only starts keeping records now.

Giving more things to do to knights is always a double-edged sword, though. This game is built on the premises of masses of knights blindly following orders into warfare. The game's culture has evolved much since, and so have demographics, with the reality of things being closer to equal masses of knights and lords sometimes following orders into the occasional war, but still. If the new things we give to knights remove from their ability to follow orders and go to war, then we are further handicapping realms' capacity to go to war, which is already at a historical low.

Knights having nothing to do in peace is somewhat problematic, but really, no one has anything to do in peace. Lord have more buttons to click, sure, but most of them you never touch. One doesn't change the tax rate every day, nor build new recruitment centers, and so on. Once a region is set, it's auto-pilot, you mostly forget it, at which point it's really only a vanity title (of decreasing value as the number of knights:lords wanes). The ruler might be in on some continental regal private club chat, but that rarely extends to all lords when it does not also extend to everyone.

Two things come to mind, though. First is to increase incentives to go to war and for what knights can do in war. The most prominent of which is looting. Make it more desirable (without making it cripple the victims for ages). Both by the ones at the top and lower down. For example, you could increase the gold and food reward going to all looting actions, without taking it out of the region's treasury (stealing goods directly from the locals). Add the option to knights to specifically target heathens, not just temples. For peace time, consider Civ-like quests. "This city-state wants you to go clear that barbarian camp nearby" kind of thing, but at the knight level (or both knight and realm level?). "You meet an aristocratic refugee offers you a reward for coming to clear the bandits in his region", which can be in foreign lands. Doesn't even need to be something external like actual monsters, could just be a link that appears only to the player once he gets there. Rewards can be gold and h/p. "Your subjects seek spiritual guidance from your part", "your subjects would like you to import food good from far away", "your subjects would want you to come deal out justice", and so on. Ideally these things shouldn't trigger too much during wars, if at all, though, to avoid dissuading knights from participating in what is the core of the game. Because let's remember that the only way knights are getting lordships, outside of war, is through player decay, and that's not something we should be aiming for.
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Wimpie

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Re: New Player Experience
« Reply #63: September 01, 2017, 01:39:02 PM »
Army description:
Go to information & your army. There's an extra field there 'Description'. It's been there for quite some time: http://bugs.battlemaster.org/view.php?id=8582 .

Sponsors can set description on their army sponsorship specific page.
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Antonine

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Re: New Player Experience
« Reply #64: September 01, 2017, 01:45:01 PM »
Comments on things that I don't particularly agree with:

- We don't want anyone else besides the Lord to build stuff in the region. Priests can't build temples, Knights can't build guildhouses (even with the approval of the lord).
- Mini-message groups go against what we want, realm wide conversations. I believe there are more than enough channels already.
- I think the building of smiths or farms in own estate are a bit far fetched and will more complicate the game. Estates are mostly temporary, since knights should strive to become lord one day anyway.
- Descriptions for armies already exist, but probably barely used. Recording medals and such on there as I am doing in Vix on a wiki page for example will be very difficult. We don't have the extended markup text options in these description boxes as we have on wiki.

That's fair enough, though I do at least thing it would be nice if you could a) write a description for your estate (which would be displayed on the region page) and b) spend gold to build a purely flavour Building which would be displayed on the region page in the same way as monuments are.

It wouldn't change gameplay at all but it would give knights something to do with their estates and give them a way to contribute fluff to the game as well as perhaps making them more emotionally attached to their region. I know that the goal of a knight should be to become a lord but the fact is that lots of realms have long-established region lords so vacancies are few and far between - a new player in particular might have to wait a while to become a region lord and at least having several actions available to a knight character immediately would give them something to do even in a quiet realm.

In terms of armies it may well be that you should just have a link to an automatically generated wiki page with a section for recording medals and what-not. The key thing should be that the flavour is automatically put in front of players in-game so that they at least have a reason to know it exists without relying on another player to point it out to them.

Things I like and could possible be investigated more:

A. Autonotification if realm does not have realm description set
B. Improve realm joining page to explain more the different options & guide the player better. Should only be visible for first character ever for this player.
C. Newspaper option could be detailed out. I like the idea of having something that we can use and see in game, but not sure how it should be run. If completely up to the players, I'm afraid we'll be having a newspaper per realm with just plain propaganda.
D. A character description/stats page for better flavour and RP sounds nice as well. To be discussed.
E. I like the idea of linking Information tab directly to wiki page of realm, for example, but unsure about the technical capabilities of Wiki to be viewed inline. It will probably look like a mess though. Wiki simply has huge advantages.
F. Keep a chronological history of realm's rulers sounds like something that would add to realm's flavour history. Don't think we can capture it from the past though. This in combination with the more detailed realm description (in combination with E?)

A. It should also periodically remind everyone in the realm of what it actually says - otherwise someone could write one, it gets forgotten about and then becomes massively out of date and misleading a year later.

B. I think one of the key metrics put in front of players here and massively highlighted should be activity, especially for new players. More than anything else, an active realm is the key factor in making sure you have fun in the first realm you end up in. But the most important thing is that new players should be given realistic expectations of what will happen in their first few days of the game and the things they'll be able to do. If you're expecting hectic action and then find yourself unable to do much more than travel and waiting hours to get a reply to your welcome message then you'll give up but if you're given a realistic idea of what the game will be like and what you should do to begin with then you'll be less likely to be unhappy with the gameplay.

C. I remember back when newspapers were a thing. Pretty much every realm had its own newspaper and they were full of propaganda. It was great! You had your realm's version of the truth and your enemy's version with the truth somewhere in between. You had wars of words and realms without newspapers would be motivated to set up their own to counter the propaganda of their enemy. And you had some which deliberately tried to be impartial and cross-realm instead. It was a whole mess of activity that made the game feel really alive and if we saw that happening again then I'd be just as happy about it as if we only got a couple of staid, impartial, collaborative, continent-wide newspapers.

E. I can easily imagine that viewing the wiki inline might be impractical. So perhaps the easiest workaround, as you say, is to have auto-generated pages on the wiki for the Realm Description and Realm History which are then linked to from the Information screen (and the Realm List).

F. If this could be done then perhaps it could be used by the semantic wiki to help auto-populate the Realm History via a template?

Finally, I know that the above are all likely to take a significant amount of time and effort to implement. If it helps, I'd be happy to assist on some of the simpler tasks since I'm a lot more experienced as a dev now than I was the first time I tried to assist with BM development :)

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Re: New Player Experience
« Reply #65: September 01, 2017, 01:53:49 PM »
P.S. Is there anywhere I could go to look at the wiki API at all please?

Wimpie

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Re: New Player Experience
« Reply #66: September 01, 2017, 02:02:59 PM »
P.S. Is there anywhere I could go to look at the wiki API at all please?

You should probably poke Ethan Lee Vita for that.
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Chenier

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Re: New Player Experience
« Reply #67: September 01, 2017, 02:25:26 PM »
That's fair enough, though I do at least thing it would be nice if you could a) write a description for your estate (which would be displayed on the region page) and b) spend gold to build a purely flavour Building which would be displayed on the region page in the same way as monuments are.

It wouldn't change gameplay at all but it would give knights something to do with their estates and give them a way to contribute fluff to the game as well as perhaps making them more emotionally attached to their region. I know that the goal of a knight should be to become a lord but the fact is that lots of realms have long-established region lords so vacancies are few and far between - a new player in particular might have to wait a while to become a region lord and at least having several actions available to a knight character immediately would give them something to do even in a quiet realm.

In terms of armies it may well be that you should just have a link to an automatically generated wiki page with a section for recording medals and what-not. The key thing should be that the flavour is automatically put in front of players in-game so that they at least have a reason to know it exists without relying on another player to point it out to them.

A. It should also periodically remind everyone in the realm of what it actually says - otherwise someone could write one, it gets forgotten about and then becomes massively out of date and misleading a year later.

B. I think one of the key metrics put in front of players here and massively highlighted should be activity, especially for new players. More than anything else, an active realm is the key factor in making sure you have fun in the first realm you end up in. But the most important thing is that new players should be given realistic expectations of what will happen in their first few days of the game and the things they'll be able to do. If you're expecting hectic action and then find yourself unable to do much more than travel and waiting hours to get a reply to your welcome message then you'll give up but if you're given a realistic idea of what the game will be like and what you should do to begin with then you'll be less likely to be unhappy with the gameplay.

C. I remember back when newspapers were a thing. Pretty much every realm had its own newspaper and they were full of propaganda. It was great! You had your realm's version of the truth and your enemy's version with the truth somewhere in between. You had wars of words and realms without newspapers would be motivated to set up their own to counter the propaganda of their enemy. And you had some which deliberately tried to be impartial and cross-realm instead. It was a whole mess of activity that made the game feel really alive and if we saw that happening again then I'd be just as happy about it as if we only got a couple of staid, impartial, collaborative, continent-wide newspapers.

E. I can easily imagine that viewing the wiki inline might be impractical. So perhaps the easiest workaround, as you say, is to have auto-generated pages on the wiki for the Realm Description and Realm History which are then linked to from the Information screen (and the Realm List).

F. If this could be done then perhaps it could be used by the semantic wiki to help auto-populate the Realm History via a template?

Finally, I know that the above are all likely to take a significant amount of time and effort to implement. If it helps, I'd be happy to assist on some of the simpler tasks since I'm a lot more experienced as a dev now than I was the first time I tried to assist with BM development :)

Giving knights the ability to flavor estates sounds fair, though keep in mind they are all reset when a region is lost, and that lords can and more or less regularly open and close them.

Newspapers were propaganda, that's what they were about. If someone just wanted to write to one's own realm mates, one already can pretty easily. The purpose was also to reach out to foreigners. Made them interesting to read, too, for the most part. They could be handled in game, though, in the information tab perhaps, and every entry could be pushed automatically to the wiki by the game itself. A notice could be sent out to the continent every time a new article appears, and everyone would have the option to mute notices from specific newspapers. Some restrictions should be had, though, to avoid people using it as a means to quickly relay information to the whole continent (15k CS of Bobistan in Smallville!) as a lazy means to target just a subgroup of it. Perhaps delays in publication. Not sure how much work such a thing would require though.

Periodic updates to everyone seems fine. Every 4 months, perhaps, everyone gets an update "the X bulletin was last updated Y months ago", with a link to it. Most bulletins take quite a while to "expire" though.
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Re: New Player Experience
« Reply #68: September 01, 2017, 02:33:37 PM »
I REALLY like the idea of the Civ-like quests, it should definitely help.

Chenier, if you want I'll chuck it in a feature request.
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Chenier

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Re: New Player Experience
« Reply #69: September 01, 2017, 02:42:31 PM »
Go ahead.  8)
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Antonine

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Re: New Player Experience
« Reply #70: September 01, 2017, 02:43:54 PM »
Giving knights the ability to flavor estates sounds fair, though keep in mind they are all reset when a region is lost, and that lords can and more or less regularly open and close them.

Newspapers were propaganda, that's what they were about. If someone just wanted to write to one's own realm mates, one already can pretty easily. The purpose was also to reach out to foreigners. Made them interesting to read, too, for the most part. They could be handled in game, though, in the information tab perhaps, and every entry could be pushed automatically to the wiki by the game itself. A notice could be sent out to the continent every time a new article appears, and everyone would have the option to mute notices from specific newspapers. Some restrictions should be had, though, to avoid people using it as a means to quickly relay information to the whole continent (15k CS of Bobistan in Smallville!) as a lazy means to target just a subgroup of it. Perhaps delays in publication. Not sure how much work such a thing would require though.

Periodic updates to everyone seems fine. Every 4 months, perhaps, everyone gets an update "the X bulletin was last updated Y months ago", with a link to it. Most bulletins take quite a while to "expire" though.

I think lords being able to open, close, delete, etc. estates is completely fair and realistic but if a region is lost then perhaps estates shouldn't just get wiped? They could become vacant instead (and if the region is rogue then obviously no one should be able to take up an estate) so it's then up to the new region owner to decide if they want to keep/modify the existing estates or not. I mean it's already the case that one region lord can just wipe the description given to it by their predecessor but I don't think fluff should be wiped unless a player action causes it to happen.

In terms of updates about the bulletins perhaps they could just be a six-monthly reminder of what the bulletin currently says. E.g. "Reminder: The Ruler Bulletin currently says X (and was last updated Y months ago)." That way you don't feel pressured to update it just for the sake of doing so but people will notice if it's become outdated.

In terms of newspapers I think that preventing sharing of detailed information could just be a matter of a strongly worded warning at the top of the newspaper article writing window. But equally, if someone wants to write a newspaper article saying "Our glorious army marched from the capital of Kepler today to attack the vile enemy stronghold of Butterville" or post a summary of a battle that's happened then I don't think that should be a problem - besides, if you're foolish enough to rely on your enemy's propaganda to keep track of what they're doing then you're just asking to be fed deliberate misinformation ;)

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Re: New Player Experience
« Reply #71: September 01, 2017, 02:50:35 PM »
Anyone may feel free to put the other topics into feature requests as well  ;D
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Re: New Player Experience
« Reply #72: September 04, 2017, 02:46:13 PM »
Update on this: still haven't had time to put these into feature requests but it turns out the wiki does have the API installed which would allow the game to directly edit pages on the wiki.

And there's also an extension available which, if installed, could pull a page from the wiki as HTML to allow it to be viewed in game.

So perhaps this would be a solution to the database storage issue if more descriptions and fluff end up being added to the game. The description storage could be handled in the wiki but it could be created, edited and viewed in game via the API.

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Re: New Player Experience
« Reply #73: September 06, 2017, 03:20:19 PM »
. . .

So, instead of doing a bunch of stuff in the game's database and teaching it how to track events, you all want to teach the game how to edit the wiki so the wiki's database can track events?

What?

Actually, I have an image for how little sense this is making to me:


Anyways, I did talk to Anaris about newspapers being moved in game on IRC, and it sounds like it's approved as a CONCEPT for them to be moved in game assuming someone is willing to do the work to add them. Which lines up nicely, because I'm going to start reworking M&F's own publications system soon, and I'm not a fan of re-inventing wheels.

In regards to database storage issues, it's not so much that you can't add things to the game, it's that you need to add them in a way that keeps them from just taking up extra space.

Say you added newspapers or books, or just in general: publications, right? How do you add them in such a way that they take up the least amount of space for the least amount of time.

That same principle applies to the game as well. Storing things in the game, will take up less space.

Let me give you an example. Say you edit the realm page of Perdan (they're still a realm, right?) with a new description. The wiki will log who edited, what they changed, and the new page, all to it's database. If you want to edit the realm description in game, the game will just track new description, and not care about the old one or log who did it.

The advantage of in-game content is also that it's IN the game. Players are more likely to interact with it, and it automatically makes it IC info.
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Chenier

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Re: New Player Experience
« Reply #74: September 07, 2017, 02:28:25 AM »
Viewing old versions of wiki pages is nice sometimes though.  ::)
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